About
I’m Dima. I build companies, products, and experiments from zero to one.
I’m a venture builder with ten years across AI, enterprise technology, open source, venture, journalism, and events. I work from opportunity and first principles through product, launch, and early growth.
Product marketing and GTM are strengths inside that range, not the whole job. I use them to make technical value clear, reach ML engineers, AI researchers, and engineering leaders, and turn product pull into a system that can scale.
What I do
What is changing, what should exist because of it, and what is the fastest honest way to find out?
My work starts with those questions and moves through product shaping, building, launch, and the systems that help a venture learn and grow.
- Opportunity discovery across markets, technology, culture, and changing behaviour
- Customer research and fast validation before the product becomes expensive to change
- Product shaping: proposition, experience, business model, and first useful version
- Finding collaborators and connecting the capabilities needed to build
- Product marketing, positioning, and technical messaging that make the value legible
- Launches, partnerships, community, and distribution that create an initial market
- Growth experiments, outbound, CRM, and automation that turn pull into a system
Operating style
I am at my best when:
- There is a promising idea or market shift, but the product has not taken shape yet.
- A small team needs someone who can move between product, story, launch, and growth.
- The technology is strong, the buyer is technical, and credibility matters more than theatre.
- An early product has real pull and needs the systems, experiments, and narrative to scale it.
A few beliefs
Start with the tension
The best ventures begin with a change in technology, behaviour, or culture that creates a problem worth solving now.
Build to learn
The first version should make the important question answerable. Shipping is how a venture replaces assumptions with evidence.
Credible, not cosplaying
I can build with teams working on agents, evals, and infrastructure without pretending to be an ML researcher. Knowing where my expertise ends is part of the credibility.
The system is part of the product
A venture needs more than an object. The story, launch, partnerships, feedback loops, and growth system determine whether it can move.
Beyond the operating work
An editorial mind, applied to venture building.
I began my career as a journalist, and that training still shapes how I work. I research deeply, ask direct questions, find the human tension inside technical systems and make the important point clear.
That editorial instinct is now paired with product delivery, technical fluency and commercial judgment. It helps me translate between people who see the same problem from very different angles and turn that understanding into something useful.
I think in moving pictures. I make things with words and images, including essays, comics and videos.
I am also an avid reader and maintain a digital library of the ideas, systems, and stories informing my work. Reading is part of my product practice: it gives me a wider frame for recognising patterns, asking better questions, and seeing beyond the immediate brief.