Philipp Gross Kochnov

I grew up in a family of artists on the edge of Moscow. Money was a rumor. I still remember the night the fridge held a single egg for the three of us, my mother, my father, and me. I decided, young, that I was not staying in that. I went the other way and I have not looked back since.

I did not start in tech. By my fourth year of university I was already running my own business. Ownership, management, building processes from nothing, that came years before code. Later I raised money and opened a taxi fleet in Moscow in partnership with Yandex. I have been an operator for over a decade. My resume only shows the IT half.

Then I spent six days in Georgia, just to see the country, and fell for it hard. I wanted to know what it feels like to live on a mountain, with the sun on you, surrounded by calm, happy people. I spent the next year selling everything I owned in Moscow, closing the business, and leaving to go feel the world. Tech became my way to never be tied to one place again.

What carried over was the one thing I already knew: take a system that runs on chaos and heroics and rebuild it so it runs on itself. People or AI agents, the discipline is the same. Only the executor changed.