In school I was one of the most unpopular kids — short, quiet, classic nerd who loved biology. I competed in olympiads and managed to enter the biology faculty of the top university in the country.
But during my studies everything changed by accident. I got into club event photography, and within a couple of years the shy student turned into a well-known figure in Moscow’s club scene. At 19 I was already heading the photo department of one of the main portals covering that industry.
After defending my microbiology diploma I never even picked it up — by that time I was fully focused on building a career in erotic photography. The next 10 years I lived as a free artist. Everything seemed to fall into my hands naturally.
In 2017 I caught an insane crypto wave and turned a small investment into 10000% profit. At the peak my portfolio exceeded $300,000. That completely broke my brain. I started seeing myself as some kind of genius — not just a photographer, but also a talented investor.
At the same time my Instagram grew to 600,000 followers and my YouTube channel reached 100,000. I was traveling, shooting models, making vlogs. It genuinely felt like the absolute prime of my life. In the moment it seemed this was only the beginning and bigger things were ahead.
I had money, status, attention, and a very strong belief that I was simply better than most people. That anything I tried would eventually work out because I was special.
Looking back now, that period gave me a very distorted self-image. Success came fast and felt easy. It created a dangerous narrative in my head: “I’m not like everyone else. I can quickly succeed in almost anything.”
This belief would later cause me a lot of pain when reality started catching up.
In the next part I will tell what happened after the peak — the painful falls, business failures, Instagram ban, and how I eventually ended up in programming school with zero experience and started building 42h App.
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