Resumé

Lecturer at the Graduate School of Business Administration (Moscow State University)

Author of Presentation Secrets

The New York Festivals finalist

Consultant for Mercator Group

6 years of experience in business consulting
TechInvestLab.ru, The Risk Advisory Group 

6 years of experience in international companies
The Risk Advisory Group, Citibank

Graduated from the Russian Economic University (magna cum laude), majored in finance

My story

You don’t grow up dreaming to become a “presentations guru”. My school graduation certificate was full of B’s (pun intended) with only 3 A’s: in compter science, in English and in history. Other subjects didn’t interest me at all. I wanted to continue studying English but then the Soviet Union collapsed and everybody suddenly decided to become economists and managers. And so did I. I majored in finance and went on to work at Citibank. It was a very nice job, probably one of the nicest in the late 90′s Russia. It had only one fatal problem: it was booooring. It took me 3 years to figure out that it’s not gonna be any better. So I decided to do something with my life and moved to consulting.

Consulting was much more exciting — but much more demanding at the same time. At first I was just writing reports but then I had to go and present my findings to the clients. My first presentation was a disaster and my boss, the firm’s partner, gave me an assignment to “figure out presentations”. It took me two years but after a while I did. Next I’d read Jim Collins’ book From Good to Great and decided to do for a living what I found I could do best—give presentations.

In 2008 I published a presentation called Death by PowerPoint which to my utter surprise went viral, having been viewed by more that 1 million people as of now. It was the greatest reassurance that the path that I’ve chosen is the right one. I’m currently teaching presentations at a one of the Russia’s best business schools, doing corporate workshops, practicing as a consultant, and occasionally working with Mercator, Russia’s leading producer of corporate films, business presentations, and infographics.