‘When You Create a Startup, Your Main Motivation is Freedom from Corporate Slavery’
As reported in Forbes, DeckRobot attracted $1.5 million in seed round investments this fall. Solo founder of the project and HSE graduate Anton Urbanas, aka Tony Urban, promises to simplify life for office workers by automating PowerPoint: now AI will create the slides. In this interview with Success Builder, Mr Urbanas explained why mathematicians are in demand in the U.S. right now, what could save office staff from sleepless nights with PowerPoint, how a startup can survive ‘imposter syndrome,’ whether it is easy to be a solo founder and how to start converting ideas into money.
‘At Gett, I Get a Charge out of Feeling that I Influence Things. Business Is Definitely the Place for Me’
Dan Livshitz, who graduated from the ICEF programme with a Bachelor’s degree in 2014, began his career at 18. At 22, he was the youngest associate ever to work for McKinsey in Europe. Now a top manager with the Gett global technology platform, Mr. Livshitz explained how to make the transition from consulting to technology, the inner workings of Gett and what not to say in a job interview.
‘We Want to Make the Younger Generation Informed, Happy and Competitive’
With the transition online, basic education is experiencing a crisis even while specialised education is becoming more interesting and personalised. The Rebotica project has been successfully riding the digital wave with career guidance programmes for children that help students make independent choices about their future. Rebotica founder and HSE graduate Alexander Kiselev told Success Builder how the HSE incubator cultivates entrepreneurs, where to gather data on the education market, why Minecraft is useful in classes with schoolchildren and what you need to know to launch a startup.
'After ICEF, It’s Easy to Enter a Western University because You’ve Already Studied in an International Environment'
Dmitry Storcheus set out to become an economist, but then shifted gears abruptly and went into mathematics. With a Master’s degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, he now works as a software engineer for Google and continues to conduct research with his academic supervisor and work on his PhD thesis. Here, he tells Success Builder why ICEF Mathematics graduates are head and shoulders above their U.S. competitors, why Facebook and Google are opening departments at universities, what ‘self-learning neural networks’ are and whether they threaten to unleash a real-life ‘Terminator’ against humanity.
'You Can Only Create a Successful Business Based on Good Research'
When Roman Stupin decided to go back to school after a decade of teaching and working with innovative startups, he chose HSE. That path started with continuing education programmes, then a Master’s degree and now postgraduate studies. 'I can't deny myself the pleasure of studying,' Mr Stupin admits. Here, he tells Success Builder how robotics can change education, what occupies specialists in Russian think tanks and why it’s time to replace government officials with algorithms.
'Life Is One Way for a Psychologist to Put Their Knowledge into Practice'
Nowadays, psychology has a very specific application in the world of business, as not a single large company in the world is able to get by without a staff of professional psychologists. Ksenia Babat, Senior HR Manager at Puma, tells Success Builder what a business psychologist does, how to start building a strategy for professional success as a student, and why she holds coaching sessions on the weekends.
Deadline for applications to present academic reports - January 20, 2025