Story

I live in San Francisco and work on various tech projects in ML, developer tools, LLM apps, productivity, and EEG.

I'm fortunate to have

If any of this clicks with you, send me an email. Happy to connect!

Life's journey

First Entrepreneurship Experience (2001)When I was 12 years old, my older brother Andrey bought a new CD burner for his college project. I was instantly fascinated by the idea of creating my own CDs.
First Software Experience (2004)Back in the day, software development wasn't something you could imagine doing yourself.

It was mostly perceived as something big companies did, like Microsoft, Google, or Yandex in Russia. Luckily, my school
First job (2006)This might sound counterintuitive, but my first job was actually at McDonald's. And it wasn't by accident.

I remember that day very clearly when I came back from summer vacation, having just turned 16.
Another big lesson learned (2007)The next two jobs followed the same logic. I wanted to develop my communication skills, so where did I go?
First legit company. First software product (2008)It all started with a random project. Our friend Pavel approached us with an opportunity to work on
Consulting experience (2010-2015)Consulting was probably the most
All the way through Exit (2017)It was an incredible journey. I had saved up $150k before I left my comfortable job at Accenture and
Rent automation (2017-2018)After having the successful small exit experience, I felt so pumped. I thought I was a genius and could do anything. I started a new project in the real estate industry, building a platform to automate the rental process.

Oh, I wish I had been a quicker learner. The idea of rent automation is by all means a tar pit idea. It looks so plausible on the surface, right? Go and automate the archaic rental process of apartments, creating an Uber-like experience on Craigslist.

But the reality is that the rental process is very human-centric. It's not about the technology; it's about the people. And the people are not ready to change their habits.

Also, since it's a people-centered business, it's primarily driven by trust and not logic. And trust is not something you can build with technology. It's a long-term relationship. Nobody cares if you can make an extra 10% in rental income unless you build the credibility that you are a legitimate business.

Well, anyway, it was a great experience, with lots of lessons learned. I'm glad I didn't lose too much time on this project.

It wasn't an outright failure. We had close to 300 paying customers, $1.3 million in GMV, $300k in ARR at peak, and an 80% margin. The company is still active.
ARINAFirst legitimate experience in the AI/ML space. I'm deeply grateful to MESI University for introducing me to neural networks.

Inspired by AI breakthroughs like DeepMind's AlphaGo defeating Go champion Lee Sedol, I
US journey (2022-Present)Oh, how I wished for a smooth transition to the US, but reality had other plans.

Gratitude

Marina Diakonov

Yury Diakonov

Irina Victorovna

Valentina Alekseevna

Andrey Talalaev

Alex Boldyrev

Elizaveta Litvinova

Max Irisov

Raffaella Campagnoli

William Durst

Alex Reshetnikov

Alex Kravcov

Yury Kudryakov

Veronika Aksenova

Ilya Mehedkin

Nolan Holden

Kate

Bruce Dockter

Recent Projects

screenpipe Technical deep dive: screen recording, OCR & STT, local db, AI

Shadcn for AI Customizable open source react components, LLM to generate UI content to adapt to user experience

AI Sales Assistant An assistant that helps users find products. Rendering a React carousel through function calls for an e-commerce product catalog. The product search is multi-modal, allowing for context-based image searches

GPT Auto Debugger Coding assistant that actually test runs the code in a safe sandbox environment.

Gemini 4 Docs Search and chat with any documentation inside your terminal.

Realtime Sora Gamified immersive image generation. Control prompts with keyboard shortcuts. SD Lightning, 15 frames/sec.

County Law RAG Legal agent updating a vector database across all local county government websites, including materials published in PDF documents.

GPT vs. Gemini An easy way to compare outputs from different models. One message - two answers.

SEMA: arXiv Search Agent Research the latest academic papers using RAG, CoT, Crawler.

YouTube GPT Summarizes any video into chapters with clickable timestamp links.

Semantic Chunking Hierarchical chunking with LLMs allows for dynamic adjustment of chunk size based on semantic meaning.

Docs2CLI Search any documentation online without leaving your VS Code.

Holodeck AI tool that converts user analytics heatmaps into code improvements for your website. Run your A/B tests on autopilot.

Reddit -> LinkedIn Reposting Tool Crawls predefined subreddits and reposts top-performing content.

We've made (with Vadims Casecnikovs) a Reddit -> Linkedin reposting tool in 3 days and it worked! I've started gaining 10 followers a day without putting in any effort. Here's how it works: 1. Our script goes to predefined list of top subReddits 2. It then forwards top posts to our telegram bot 3. I then choose which post to repost in Telegram and forward it my reposting Telegram bot 4. It triggers a script to publish the post on my Linkedin page🕺 Next steps: - Happy to give a beta access to anyone interested - Tweak the post title and content with chatGPT - Create a RAG based on my Linkedin profile content - Tweak new posts considering my profile / personality

Virtual Try-On Uses AI to put clothes on models, making a merchant's life easier.

Image Gen Tool 1 million visitors in 3 months, 25k MAU, $10k MRR.

Feliciti Matching platform for residents and co-living houses.

GetQ Cloud compute. Templates for your frontend and backend.

Betzy Bet on your good habits with friends.

TimeTree Time tracker for personal productivity.

Newcomers Matchmaking among newcomers and locals for mutual help.

Faq

HOW TECHNICAL ARE YOU?

I'm a CS grad, but I've never worked as a SWE. However, I do ship code every day nowadays. I'm very comfortable getting into the weeds of any tech stack: playing with chunking, embeddings, quantization, fine-tuning, changing layers in foundational models, deploying things, building frontend, backend, and middleware. Although I'm not a pro in any of this, when there is a big enough business case, I'll figure it out quickly.

DO YOU HAVE BUSINESS EXPERIENCE?

Starting a company from scratch, finding the first customers/users, building a team, raising money, and scaling a company are all things I've done before. I've also worked with large companies such as PepsiCo, Mondelez, Etihad, AB InBev, and PMI as part of Accenture consulting projects, and I have a good understanding of how they operate.

WHAT IS YOUR MAIN WEAKNESS?

Socially inept, and natural languages are harder for me than technical ones.

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A TEAM/COFOUNDER

Yes, but I strongly believe that fewer people on the team is better. I think every new team addition should raise the average. So, I guess I'm looking for someone way better than myself.

WHY ARE YOU DOING STARTUPS?

I think that's the best way I can do something meaningful.

WHY DO YOU LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO?

My observation is that the better the people around you, the better person you become. SF has the most diverse culture, with great people from all walks of life, including arts, psychology, tech, sports, and spiritual paths. Also, the ocean, bay, forests, climate, and city landscape are amazing. And the prices well represent it, paying $2k for a room, haha.

Matthew Diakonov

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