Pavel everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Pension - part 4 → INVEST 📈🎲🧠 Now, actual investing advice. Which is honestly poor taste, because most people either don't follow it at all, or follow only the half they like and forget the other half. ➡️ And it only works as a whole. 🤷‍♂️ But I'll risk it. A few golden rules. 👇 1️⃣Know yourself. Are you risk averse or risk seeking? ➡️ And more importantly: are you actually *investing*, or are you seeking the thrill of possibly winning a lot of money? 🎰 That second thing was very much my case for a while. Still is, with small depo. Be honest about which one you are, because everything else follows from it. 2️⃣ Never borrow to invest. Only your own capital. Money you earned and saved. ➡️ That includes trading margin. Don't touch margin. 🚫 3️⃣ Diversify properly. Everyone knows the eggs-and-baskets thing. But the real trick is putting money into baskets that are *not correlated with each other*, while still giving decent returns. 🧺 ↪️ Example: you can diversify all you want inside the Russian stock market and you'll never escape country risk, political risk, or the central bank's decisions driving most of your outcome. That's not diversification. That's one basket with many eggs painted different colors. One of them always green 🏦 4️⃣50/50, and no middle. I believe an average person should hold roughly 50% in low-risk assets. ➡️ Target around 6-8% net per annum there. Anything meaningfully above that is probably not actually low risk. 🏦 The other 50% goes high risk. VC, crypto, aggressive equities. And I personally believe in no middle. ➡️ Few or no assets in the medium-risk, medium-return zone. Either safe, or swinging. The middle tends to give you the worst of both. ⚫️⚫️ 5️⃣ Adjust by life stage. Early on, go heavy on high risk. Your first decade of investing, into your thirties, you can afford to put almost everything there. ➡️ You'll learn a lot about markets and even more about yourself. That's how I lost a lot of money. Expensive tuition. 📚 As time goes on and the pile grows, shift more into low risk. ➡️ So that even if every single high-risk bet goes to zero, you and your family still have something to live on. The theory being: if even 10% of your high-risk bets work out, you're well compensated. ✅ 6️⃣ High risk does NOT mean high return. This is where most people get destroyed. Low risk automatically means low return. That relationship holds. ➡️ But high risk does not automatically mean high return, or even the *possibility* of high return. ⚠️ If you drive your car off a cliff, that's an extremely high-risk activity. The possible upside is zero. Best case you wreck the car. Worst case you die. 🚗💥 A lot of investments are exactly like this. Way too much risk for the return that's even theoretically available. ➡️ Always check the risk/reward ratio, not just the excitement level. 7️⃣ Watch the commissions. They eat you alive. A huge share of financial products and advisors are inefficient purely because of fee structure. 💸 ↪️ Standard VC fund: "2 and 20." 2% fixed on assets under management annually, plus 20% of the return. Sometimes with a hurdle rate, so nothing below say 10%. Do the math. Fund makes 20% gross per year. Minus 2% fixed. Minus 20% of the return, which is another 4%. ➡️ You're left with about 14%. For an illiquid, decade-long, extremely risky asset class. ➡️ That barely justifies the risk you took. 🤨 So. 🔵Start small. 🔵Diversify into genuinely uncorrelated things. 🔵Check what you're paying. 🔵Know which bets can actually pay off and which ones just look exciting. Don't gamble, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Pension - part 3 → AVOID DEBT ex MORTGAGE 🩸🏠📈 Last time we covered saving. Now the other side of the same coin. Debt. Most people, instead of saving, are borrowing. 🔜 And I think that's almost always wrong for a private individual. 🚫 Leverage is a tool for businesses. It's how companies multiply returns on capital. Completely different story, completely different math. For a private person, the only borrowing that makes sense is a mortgage. 🏠 ↪️ A location and building expected to appreciate, or at least hold its value. Leveraged as much as possible (low downpayment). At the lowest rate possible. Longest term you can get. That is a genuine wealth-building instrument, and one of the very few available to a normal person. Everything else? ⚫️Credit cards ⚫️Consumer loans ⚫️Car loans ⚫️Buy now pay later (even if zero interest) ⚫️Trading margin (especially this one!) ↪️ Avoid. All of it. These are wealth destruction machines wearing a friendly interface 💸 And here's the part that surprises people: I think you should have savings AND a mortgage at the same time. ↪️ Keep putting at least a small percentage into retirement even while paying off the home. Both at once. Yes, the math looks slightly suboptimal on paper. No, it doesn't matter. 🔀 Why? Two words. Compounding and learning. And this is for the next time. Book of the week is The Richest Man In Babylon Get rich slow, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Pension - part 2 -> SAVE 💰📈🔄 So it's money. Great. But how do we actually do it? How do you 'make pension happen'? The essence of pension is brutally simple. ↪️ Take money away from today, put it to work, let it grow for the long term. There are very few ways around this. 🏦 And yet most people don't save. In my view, for three connected reasons. 👇 ❤️Money depreciates with inflation. Correct, by the way. Saving feels like watching your effort slowly melt. Especially in ex. USSR 🫠 ❤️They just want to spend. They never feel they have enough. What they earn seems barely adequate for a fairly basic standard of living, so taking a chunk away feels unfair to themselves 😤 ❤️They defer the whole question to their future self. "It's not time to worry about pension yet, I'm only [insert age: 25, 35, 45]. I'll earn much more later and build the nest egg then." ↪️ Which is kind of true. And kind of not. ⏳ It's true that: ⚫️money depreciates ⚫️saving young is hard ⚫️for a tiny number of people it may even be mathematically suboptimal. BUT. Psychologically and practically, from my own experience, I believe saving makes sense for absolutely everyone. ↪️ From your very first salary. Even when the salary is small. 💪 Because the real point isn't the amount. It's the habit. If you get used to saving a fixed percentage from day one, the pain disappears. It becomes automatic, invisible, normal. ↪️ 10% of your income is the floor. Nobody should be below it. Ideally you climb toward 20, 30, even 40-50% for some people, especially counting salary plus bonus. Most of the bonus should go straight to savings. 📊 Start young, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Pension - part 1 💰👴📈 Most people hate that word. Especially in the post-USSR space, since it's associated with extremely low pay after years and years of hard work. ↪️ It's actually interesting that the USSR, and later Russia, instilled two ideas about pension in its people. 👇 1️⃣ It is automatic. No action needed, or even possible, around it. 2️⃣ It is low. Totally inadequate relative to your salary and the economy. I think the "low" part is specific to Russia within the more or less developed world. ↪️ But the "automatic" part is quite universal outside the US. 🌍 The consequence: most people don't bother to think about pension at all. They treat it as something that will just happen to them regardless of their actions. ↪️And they don't believe they can do anything to improve it. Or that whatever they could do isn't worth the effort. 🤷‍♂️ WRONG.❗️ I believe that creating an amazing pension for yourself and your family is one of the greatest objectives a man can have in life. 🎯 People have solved this challenge differently throughout history. Until fairly recently, almost exclusively, the answer was children. ↪️ They were the pension fund. The only investment available to most people with a good return. 👶👶👶👶👶 But in 2026, and across most of the world since the early 1900s (and much earlier in parts of Europe, since the industrial revolution, which was also the financial one), kids are no longer the best pension fund. Kids are great, by the way. Have as many as possible. Just don't count on them for pension. 🙂 For over a century now, the best medium for a comfortable retirement has been… MONEY. 💵 To get the basics, read *Rich Dad, Poor Dad*. ↪️ It got me started on the save-and-invest journey 17 years ago. What a ride it's been. Especially read it if you're from the ex-USSR. 📖 Save early, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

3️⃣7️⃣🎂😎 Some birthday observations. It's getting harder to make myself do things I don't believe in. ➡️ And easier to do things I believe in. Even if hard things, may be especially. 💪 Figuring out one's beliefs and actually living by them every day is increasingly important. People in life are most important. How you treat them and how they treat you. ➡️ Life is a function of relationships. 🫂 Huge genuine gratitude for all the messages, calls, voice notes. A lot of work to go through them all, but feels great. ❤️ The day of birth is nothing special. This one took a while for me to realize. I am actually quite happy where I am in life. Perhaps first time ever. 🙏 Hope I can do a real big party in 3 years. Not sure which country yet. 🌍 Celebrate life, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

How to get anything done and achieve everything you ever dreamed of 🎯🔄💪 It's actually very simple. Most people never get anything done. Not because there's some secret knowledge. Not because of a conspiracy. ➡️ They just don't follow the steps. 🤷‍♂️ The steps: Assess. Learn. Plan. Do. Do. Do. Repeat. This applies to anything and every aspect of life. Sports. Relationships. Work. Friends. Even spirituality and religion. Let's take a concrete example: getting a better job. 👇 1️⃣ Assess. Honestly take stock of the starting position. Not only inside your own head. ➡️ Talk to people with expertise. Not just parents and spouse, but your ex-boss, a career coach, a mentor, that father of a friend who's a big shot in a large company. 🗣️Consolidate a coherent picture: your strengths, weaknesses, the environment. 2️⃣ Learn. Personally I tend to skip this step. And it's probably the second most important one. 😅 Before you start doing anything, learn as much as you can about the journey ahead with the time and resources you have. What career paths are open to you? Which companies fit you culturally? What skills does the dream job require? Who in your network can reach the people who hand out dream jobs? ➡️ AI can generate 100 relevant questions in a minute. They need to be formulated, researched, answered, cross-checked. Everything written down. 📝 3️⃣ Plan. There are two types of people in the world: those who plan and those who don't. ➡️ The first tend to over-plan and stick to a rotten plan long after reality changed. The second wing everything, get distracted, lose track of the goal and veer off path. Be in the middle. Always plan. Let go when things change. Say you realize you're missing skills for the dream job, don't know the right people, and don't have cash to sit unemployed. ➡️ Fine. While in the current job, plan how to acquire the skills. A side gig. Online courses. How many months for the skills, how many for applications. What happens if your current company finds out? What do you tell your family? How many applications until an offer? ➡️ Plan it. 🗓️ 4️⃣ Do. Do. Do. If you take only one thing out of this post, take this one. All things equal, it is much, much better to only DO than to assess, learn, plan and NOT do. ⚡ Most unsuccessful people I know simply don't do. I honestly don't know why. Maybe afraid. Maybe lazy. Maybe both. 🤔 Follow the plan. Deviate from the plan. Try things. Update the CV. Send resumes. Meet people. Tell everyone you know and don't know about your goal. Ask for help and advice. Attend networking events. Stalk company offices and nearby cafes. ➡️ Do. Do. Do. 🏃 5️⃣ Repeat. After some time doing, go back to step one. Assess again. Learn again. Plan again. ➡️ Look back at your original notions. Be proud of how far you've come. Don't give up. 🔄 I described a long, complex process. But the same loop applies to everything in life. Shopping. Throwing a party. Moving projects forward at work. Get shit done, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Another "most important thing" in life 🫂🌍❤️ Haha, yes. On top of variety and non-boredom. Or maybe related to it. People. ⭕️Quality people. ⭕️My people. ⭕️Deep connections over many years, across a variety of backgrounds. 🌍 I have lots of friends. Many more acquaintances. In many countries. Spending time with them, even on a WhatsApp chat, even on a call 📞, even rarely — once a quarter, once every few years — is super rewarding. ➡️ Probably the most rewarding thing after watching my daughter become a proper person. 👧 One of the things I wish I could do more is have more time for in-person interactions with the many friends I have worldwide. ➡️ The geography of my life is rich, but it spreads people thin. A friend in Moscow, a few in St Pete, a friend in London, a friend in Dubai, a friend in New Delhi. Deep connections, thin schedules. Some I have not seen in years. ✈️ You know this cliché approach to figuring out what matters — imagine your funeral, what would you want people to say? 🪦 I would just want there to be *many people*. All with whom I had a real, deep connection. ➡️That's it. That's the metric. Think far ahead, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞 P. S. Could you please recommend my channel to a friend, if you like it? Just forward this post, they can use the link above to find it and subscribe 💌

Claude in Slack and the office revolution that's actually just starting 🤖💬⚡ Something quietly important just happened in AI interfaces🤫 You can now add Claude directly into Slack. And the reflex reaction is "okay, so what, we had connectors before." ➡️ Stay with me, because this is bigger than it looks. Even Karpathy flagged this one, and if there's a person who knows what truly matters in AI, it's him. 🧠 Here's the arc of the dream we've all been chasing. 👇 1️⃣ The clone. For years the fantasy was a mini-me. A digital copy that does all the work, especially the boring work. ➡️ Honestly? Not happening soon. Let it go. 2️⃣ The tireless coworker / employee. Then the dream shifted. Not a copy of you, but an all-knowing, never-forgetting, never-tiring employee/colleague sitting next to you. ➡️ We kind of got this already. Claude Cowork gives you a version of it. The more open, agentic setups give you another. But one is mostly single-player, and the other is tough to set up and a bit risky for normal people. 🛠️ 3️⃣ The shared coworker / omnihanded Shiva-worker. And now the simple hack. Just drop Claude into a Slack channel where multiple people interact with it at once. ➡️Suddenly it's almost a persistent teammate. Shared context. Many humans, one tireless AI, all in the same room. Plus external tool integrations on top. Stupidly simple, hugely powerful. 🚀 The only piece still missing is the ability to spin up multiple Shivas - persistent instances, each dedicated to a function or project. ➡️ Imagine @claude_pm, @claude_product, @claude_fpa, each living in its own lane, each with its own memory and mandate, presence across relevant channels. 🧩 That's the version that changes everything. And it's clearly coming. Soon. Consumes many tokens. The office work revolution is only just getting started. ➡️ This is another crack in the tectonic plate, and most people are in denial. 🌋 Use AI wisely, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Riding the wave 🌊☕️😴 An observation I've sat on for a while, and now I'm fully conscious of it. We swing. ➡️ Excited, then calm. Excited, then calm. Up, then down. It's just the natural rhythm of being a human animal. 🔄 Certain events and chemicals lift us. ☕️ Other circumstances bring us back down. Some people run hot by nature, some run calm. Some are easily swayed, some are harder to move. ➡️ But everyone oscillates. The wave is universal. And the danger is always at the extremes. Getting stuck way up, or stuck way down. ▶️ The long-term, stuck version of this swing even has a clinical name when it goes pathological. Most of us live in the milder, healthier version of the same machinery. ⚙️ What I realized is that I personally have a very pronounced cycle. On multiple timescales. 👇 1️⃣ The daily wave. Calm overnight (not always). Wake up, deliberately excite myself — coffee, sport, then work, business, friends, family. Peak somewhere mid-afternoon. ▶️ Gradually wind down toward evening. Calm enough to sleep (hopefully). Repeat. During the work week it's sharp and clear. 2️⃣ The weekly wave. My week runs Sunday to Thursday in Saudi. I tend to overheat by Tuesday or Wednesday. 🔥 Thursday I start bringing it down. Friday is my countdown day — decompression, often with a faint hangover-like feeling from a week of being overstimulated. Friday and Saturday I get calmer and calmer. ▶️ Then Sunday the engine fires up again. 3️⃣ The long wave. If for whatever reason I can't or won't come down properly during the weekends, it accumulates. ▶️ And then it takes a couple of days of real vacation to fully reset. 🏖 So my honest baseline is this: my natural tendency is toward overexcitement. ▶️ And calming down is the thing I have to do consciously. Actively relax. Schedule the descent. Protect the downtime. It does not happen on its own. 🧘 Two things have helped enormously once I saw the pattern. 🔷First, stop resisting the cycles. ▶️ They're going to happen. Fighting the wave just exhausts you. Accept it, plan around it, ride it. 🔷Second, find something to enjoy even in the unpleasant parts. ▶️ The transition from overexcited to calm is genuinely uncomfortable for me. That first stretch where the stress starts draining out feels a lot like a hangover. 🥴 But once you recognize it as just part of the wave coming down, it stops being something to fear and becomes something almost interesting to observe and enjoy. No grand conclusion here. Just an observation that helped me a lot. ➡️ Know your cycles. Don't fight them. Build your life around them instead of pretending you're a flat line. Stay conscious, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Two parenting tips 👨‍👧🔖🧮 Nika is 9 now. Which means some of our parenting experiments have run long enough to be judged. ➡️ At least moderately successful. Here are two. 👇 1️⃣ No TV in the house. No devices. Books only. She has an iPad for school — locked down, serious screen time restrictions. Cartoons happen on planes and occasionally on weekends. We used to do 30 minutes a day on weekends. ➡️ She barely uses it anymore. Instead, she reads. 📖 She recently crossed her second million words read. Finished all of Harry Potter. All of Percy Jackson. Thick, proper books. Mostly in English. Russian is tougher, working on it. The mechanism is simple: get your kids extremely bored. 🥱 ➡️ When books are the only entertainment options available, kids read. And a kid who reads millions of words has a massive head start over peers who don't. Compounding works on children too. 📈 2️⃣ AI-powered math quizzes every weekend. This one is much easier to implement. No need to throw away your TV. We do math both days of the weekend. Some time ago we switched from textbook drills to web quizzes generated by Claude. ➡️ The workflow: ✅ Feed it info on what she studied at school that week ✅ It generates an interactive quiz — 30 to 100 questions, mix of multiple choice and open-ended ✅ She solves with live feedback, gets retries on mistakes ✅ Copy-paste the results back. It tracks what went well, what went wrong. No need for me to check anything ✅ Feed the statistics back next weekend. Go again. 🔄 If a topic is consistently weak, ask for a precise explanation, examples, then a targeted mini-test specifically on that. ➡️ Weak spot found, drilled, closed. And honestly, she finds it more exciting than the workbook. The variety of questions, instant feedback, the gamified feel of it. 🎮 AI learning is already here. It just isn't evenly practiced yet. Try it on your kids, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Strategy for life -> Optimize for a single thing 🎯⛵️🌊 One thing I've been doing fairly professionally since around 2011 is corporate strategy. ➡️ In-house. As a consultant. As a business owner. As a CEO. Across industries, geographies, situations. If there's one area of life where I'd say I understand things better than most, it's this. And the most important thing I've learned about strategy is quite counterintuitive. 👇 ❤️You cannot be good at everything. Most people implicitly believe that success comes from being great at every dimension. ❤️ Wrong. What you end up being is mediocre across the board. And mediocre is NEVER successful. 🥱 What actually wins is asymmetry. 1️⃣ Pick the one thing. Two max. The thing where you go all-in, allocate most of your resources, optimize ruthlessly. ➡️ This is your edge. Without it, you're just another participant. 2️⃣ Make sure you don't drown. Identify the table stakes — the things you need *just enough* of to stay in the game. Cash flow. Health. Relationships. ➡️ No gaping holes. You don't need to be great at these. You need to not die because of them. 🛟 I love the sailing yacht metaphor for this. ⛵️ You want to maximize the sail. ❤️That's where the speed comes from. But you also need the hull to stay afloat. ❤️Pumps working. Water out. Few holes. Otherwise you just sink, very fast, no matter how beautiful your sail is. Most people obsess over the hull and forget the sail. Some chase a magnificent sail and let the hull rot. ➡️ Both lose. Now here's what I've been thinking lately. I keep applying this framework to businesses, to portfolio companies, to clients. ➡️ Why not apply it to my own life with the same rigor? So I asked myself — what is the one thing I optimize for? And the honest answer surprised me a little. 🤔 It's variety and density. As a kid, I would wander around the house repeating "I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored." 😅 ➡️ And somehow I've built a life that is the opposite of boring. Full to the top. Overflowing. Dense. Varied. Sometimes too much. ➡️ But that's what I'm actually optimizing for, whether I admitted it to myself or not. And once you name it, decisions get clearer. Should I take this trip? Should I start this project? Should I add this person to my life? ➡️ Filter against your one thing. So — have you actually figured this out for yourself? Most people haven't. They live accidentally, by default, by inertia. And then wonder why their life feels off. The yacht is usually afloat, but not moving in any direction they chose. 🧭 Pick the one thing. Make sure you don't sink. Try not to burn down either. Optimize your life, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Hidden gems. Arab culture. 💎📚🧠 I love hidden gems. Not just in books, but across all areas of life. ➡️ Places. People. Games. Movies. Restaurants. ➡️ Things that are unique, underappreciated, undiscovered, but of high quality and highly relevant to whatever mission I am on at the moment. Latest find — 📖 Armies of Sand by Kenneth Pollack. 🏜 Unlikely read. A CIA analyst exploring why Arab armies have performed mostly poorly in combat from 1945 to 2017. I'm not particularly into military history. But what this book is actually teaching me has very little to do with tanks and a lot to do with how culture shapes organizational performance. ➡️ A gem found in the clubhouse library. 📖 Key insights I've been chewing on. 👇 1️⃣ Modern warfare is brutally complex, but reducible. A handful of key components matter: strategic command, tactical command, unit cohesion, logistics, repairs, intel, training. The same framework applies almost perfectly to any large organization incl a private business. 🏗 2️⃣ Success requires a minimum bar on all of these, and relative excellence on at least one. You need a real edge vs. foes somewhere, with no fatal weaknesses.⚔️ 3️⃣ Culture influences every single one of these components. Not in fluffy ways. In hard, measurable, life-and-death ways. How fast information flows, if at all. Whether a junior officer feels safe correcting a senior one or taking initiative. Whether failure is punished or studied or concealed. 🔜 Culture *is* operational performance. 4️⃣ Arab culture in the 20th century made certain things strong and others crippled. Unit cohesion: often excellent. Strategic command: often strong. Tactical command and battlefield improvisation: structurally weak in war after war. 🔜 Not because of individuals. Because of how authority, hierarchy, and information were culturally treated. 🪖 5️⃣ Why I care? - this applies directly onto building businesses in the region. Expect centralization of decisions at the very top. Expect strong loyalty within teams well-built. Expect reluctance to improvise or push back at the execution layer. 🔜 Build your organization knowing this, not fighting it. 🏢 Picking a book about wars in Sinai and Kuwait and walking away with an updated framework for managing a Saudi sales team. ➡️ That's a hidden gem. 💎 Dig for gems and share them with friends, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Update your operating system 🧠📼🔄 Funny thing about people. A lot of them obsessively follow the latest news, the latest trends, the latest tech. ➡️ But the deepest assumptions about how life actually works? Untouched since childhood. Imported wholesale from grandma. From Disney. From snake princess cartoons. 🐍👸 Some examples I keep running into. 👇 1️⃣ Money is evil. People with money are either bad, lucky, or stupid. Money corrupts. If you have a lot of it, something must be wrong with you. ➡️ Where does this come from? Soviet childhood. Religious upbringing. A teacher who never made any. Definitely not from observing reality. 2️⃣ Love just happens. Real love knocks on your door. If you have to work for the relationship, it's not the right one. Prince on a white horse, ideally before 25. 🐎 ➡️ Disney told you this when you were six. You're forty. Maybe revisit. 3️⃣ Negotiating is unseemly. Especially over small things. People are afraid to look greedy or materialistic, so they avoid practicing on small stakes — and then arrive at big negotiations with zero reps. 💸 And lose. 4️⃣ Money should come to you. Asking for it is shameful. Bargaining for it is shameful. Excess of it is suspicious. ➡️ The only "clean" money is the kind that arrives as a result of excessively hard work without you doing anything weird like, you know, asking. 5️⃣ Work hard and you'll be rewarded. No need to manage your career, advocate for yourself, position your work. Just keep your head down and someone important will notice eventually. 🤡 And the list goes on and on. These aren't small things. They are the operating system underneath every decision a person makes. Who they marry. What they pursue. How they negotiate. How they raise their kids. What they teach the next generation. ➡️ And most of it was installed before they were 10 and never debugged. 🪲 Here's the test. Take the three strongest beliefs you hold about money, love, or success. ➡️ Now ask yourself: - Where exactly did this come from? - What's the evidence? - Have you ever stress-tested it against reality, or is it just inherited furniture in your head? 🪑 Most won't do this. Too uncomfortable. Easier to scroll the news and feel informed. So if you still think Disney is a great representation of real life, and money can't make you happy, go do some research, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

The slow death of consulting 📉🧠⚰ A friend sent me an FT article today about McKinsey reworking how partners get paid. Less cash, more equity, capital cushion building. Codenamed Project Acorn. Two years of internal debate to land on... a small adjustment. 🌰 A tiny signal. But the melting iceberg under it is massive. Top-tier consulting is in convulsions. The industry is quietly terrified. Post-COVID boom is gone, overhiring hurts. Pie is shrinking. Economies worldwide are spinning wheels. AI is eating the bottom of the pyramid. Clients increasingly want outcome-based pricing because they've grown skeptical of the old "smart very young people in suits with pretty slides" model. ➡ The whole machine that worked beautifully for 50 years is now creaking. 🎩 I spent years at BCG. Love the people. Learned a lot. So this comes from a place of genuine reflection, not from gloating. Here's the thing. They had a chance. 🪟 Somewhere between the 90s and 2020, they could have transformed into an unstoppable force. Stopped being the pointers and become the doers. The builders. The owners. What they *could* have done in my own personal subjective view: 1⃣Taken equity stakes in clients in addition to cash fees. Even small ones. Especially startups. Compounded over 30 years across thousands of engagements? Insanity. They could have owned a meaningful slice of the global economy by now. 💰 2⃣ Bought distressed companies and turned them around with their own playbooks and the same smart young people. The skill was there. The networks were there. The capital was findable. 3⃣ Built real digital factories. Not "AI partnerships" with announcement press releases. ➡ Actually owned the technology, the IP, the products. Spun them out as standalone businesses. 4⃣ Invested seriously in their alumni networks. The McKinsey, BCG, Bain alumni roster is one of the most powerful business networks in the world. ➡ Barely monetized. Barely held together. Imagine a fund seeded by partners & alumni, deploying into alumni-led companies. Imagine the deal flow. The information edge. They never built it. 🤷‍♂ BCG X aka Digital Ventures -> directionally right. But never enough 'balls' behind it. Always a side bet, never the main bet. And here's the cultural reason. The same thing that built consulting into greatness is what doomed it. The "insecure overachiever" culture. 🎯 Brilliant ambitious people, all conflict-averse, all consensus-driven. Too comfortable with their good salaries. Too smart to do anything truly bold. A large group of senior partners making decisions at the top. ➡ A committee can optimize. A committee cannot transform. Transformation requires one person willing to bet the firm, take the heat, and look stupid for 3-5 years until it works, then get paid exuberantly for it. That person never gets to the top of a partnership. By design. The structure filters them out at every promotion cycle and it isn't a pyramid all the way up, the top is flat. 🪜 And so, the inertial scenario is unfolding now. Project Oak became Project Acorn (this is beyond funny...). The bolder version got watered down. Small compromise. Slow drift. ➡ Painful, gradual decline into a Big-4-style commodity. Boutique industry. Eventually forgotten. Consultants have always been famously bad at having their own strategy right. The irony is delicious and tragic at the same time. 🍷 Is there still a way out? Maybe. One I see. The alumni network is the last great asset. ➡ Cashing it in requires generosity, creativity, and giving back to alumni in ways the firms have *never* done. Genuine support. Real money on the line. Long-term thinking. ➡ Everything the partnership structure is constitutionally incapable of. So they'll probably miss this chance too. And in 15 years, my daughter will ask me what a "management consultant" was. And I'll tell her, they were really smart, usually young people who built an empire telling everyone else how to be brave. Until they didn't. 🪦 Bet on yourself and be brave, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Unexpected is the only norm 🏢🇸🇦😑 A friend texted me this week. He's the founder of a logistics company here in Riyadh. Second office deal in a row gone sideways for no good reason. Gist of it 👇 --- We agreed during construction with the landlord — four rooms, open plan, partitions where we need them. Came by today. Walls up. Suspended ceilings in. Floor tiles done. His original layout. Completely wrong ❌. Asked them to redo it — he agreed, at our expense. ✅ Everything was in writing weeks ago. 🖊️Gave him the floor plan. Every day — "don't worry, we're just registering the property on Ejar, takes time." Today I show up and it's fully finished. Just... not for us. And this is the second one. The first — building stood empty for a year. Finally leased the ground floor. Second floor, owner wanted to rent it whole. 500 sqm on the outskirts. Nobody wants that. Asked for 180 sqm. Got refused. Two months later they call back. "Come, let's talk." They've chopped the 500 into 15-20 sqm blocks. Half without windows. Asking 2,200 riyals per sqm. When asked if they remembered which neighborhood this was. They got offended. 🤨Still empty. --- And that's the thing. 🤷‍♂️ It's not about real estate. This is just how everything works. Hiring. Banking. Permits. Schools. Healthcare. Logistics. Negotiations that were "final" two weeks ago. Suppliers who confirm timelines and then quietly do something else — no profit motive, no ill faith, just because. Government portals that are world-class one day and broken the next. ➡️ ❤️Everything is strange. ❤️Everything is unexpected. ❤️Everything is different from what you assumed when you stepped off the plane. 🐪 The only constant: the unexpected *is* the expected. 🌀 He's still looking for the office. No magic, just a regular one. Inshallah it exists. 🕌 Stay patient out there, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

"This can't be." 🇸🇦🤯 How many times have I heard this. From people unfamiliar with Saudi. And sometimes from people who know the country well — but haven't yet hit *this particular* thing. ⭐️"You need 25 million SAR 💰 in share capital just to set up a trading company." This can't be. ➡️ It is. ⭐️"Most trading businesses in Saudi are de facto owned by foreigners operating through local nominees." This can't be. ➡️ It is. ⭐️"There are almost no quality Saudi lawyers who actually practice Sharia commercial law." This can't be. ➡️ It is. And when you find one — budget $20k+ a month. Fixed. ⭐️"There are no local product managers. Not Saudi nor foreign. The talent just doesn't exist." This can't be. ➡️ It is. ⭐️"You can transfer the right to drive your registered vehicle to someone else in 30 seconds, fully online." This can't be. ➡️ Also is. Genuinely impressive. 👏 ⭐️"Your visiting friend with no local ID can't drive your car. At all. No workaround." This can't be. ➡️ Is. No exceptions. The country works. Just in very mysterious ways. 🐪 And here's the broader point — this isn't really about Saudi. Every country is like this. Every market, every city, every culture has its own version of "this can't be." Things that seem impossible from the outside and completely normal from the inside. Things that work in ways you'd never guess without living it. If you think you're open-minded. If you think you've seen enough of the world to know how things work. ➡️ Come to Saudi. I guarantee within the first week you'll collect a dozen moments — good and bad — that will genuinely surprise you. 😎 Before you say "this can't be" — pause. ✅Talk to someone who knows. ✅Stay curious. ✅Stay local in your thinking. Keep your mind open, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Camping with the boys 🏕️⛺🌙 Last week — desert overnight with the crew. 🌵Closing the season the right way. I have this tent. Got it as a New Year's gift from family a while back — a 4-person REI piece, genuinely a work of art. Every time I unpack it I'm slightly amazed. Maybe 5kg in the bag. Fits in your arms. 🔜 And out of that comes something four adults can comfortably sleep in, protected from wind, rain, sun, insects — pitched in under 10 minutes, broken down in under 10. 🤯 It gets me every time. And lying there in the desert, I started thinking about why this thing works so well. Because it's not magic. It's brains applied at the right moments. 🧠 1️⃣ At the design stage. Right materials. Right geometry. Every component has a purpose. And good design doesn't need unlimited resources — it needs ingenuity. Prop this, stretch that. 🔜A handful of poles and fabric becomes a home. Astounding what careful thought produces. 2️⃣ At the execution stage. Correct poles in correct holes. Level ground. Rainfly fastened properly — especially in wind. Dozens of small details that separately seem trivial and together make all the difference. And this is obviously not just about tents. Life works exactly the same way. Bad design and you're sleeping under a structurally hopeless pile of sticks — no amount of execution saves you. 🪨 Good design, bad execution — same result, different reason. Wet and cold either way. But get both right? The difference isn't 10% better. It's not even 2x. ➡️ It's the difference between a heap of fabric on the ground and a shelter that protects four people through a desert night. That's not a linear improvement. That's a different universe. 👁 📍A little clear thinking at the design stage. 📍A little discipline at the execution stage. Easier said than done — but also easier to see from outside than inside. Ask a friend. Pitch your tent properly, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

Solim Mimo — Winner of the Week 🏆🍝🚀 Good news to share. This week is a special edition. Solim Mimo — one of our portfolio companies at DIG Group — just won the Small Business Foundation competition by Alfa-Bank. 🎉 For those who don't know what we've been building. Pasta snacks. Fusilli with natural ingredients, 100% natural, no preservatives, half the calories of regular chips — great branding, Italian soul, manufactured in Russia, our own factory, built from scratch. 🇮🇹 Sounds simple. In reality — we built a plant from zero, carved out a new niche in the dry food category, and got onto the shelves of VkusVill, Yandex Lavka, Samokat, Globus and METRO. Rating on Ozon — 4.8 out of 5. With almost zero marketing spend. In two years. 💪 Now we're in active negotiations with federal retail chains at the scale of Magnit and Perekrestok. 25+ SKUs in the pipeline. Demand validated. The pilot is done — time to go industrial. 🏭 Proud of my partners Alexey and Andrey 🏆for pioneering this category and doing the hard thing — actually building a real product, a real factory, real sales. Recognition is starting to come. About time. 🙌 ⏰ ➡️ We are currently raising. If you're interested in joining starting from $50k USD — reach out directly. Happy to share the deck. Do the hard thing, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

AI-assisted thinking 🧠🤖💬 Just migrated from ChatGPT ➡️ to Claude. Maybe a little late - but "late" these days is measured in weeks, not years. The switch and the subsequent use spike got me thinking about something bigger. For most of human history, there were basically two modes of thinking: 🧠 Subconscious — gut feelings, background processing, stuff that surfaces at 3am 💭 Conscious / rational — deliberate reasoning, analysis, decisions But there's always been a 3️⃣third, underrated one: assisted thinking — thinking with the help of another person. A mentor. A close friend. A therapist. 🫂 This third mode has always been wildly unequal. Good therapy, a trusted advisor, someone who asks you the right question at the right moment — expensive, rare, and not available to most. 💸 Until now. 🚀 $20/month. And suddenly you have something that structures your worries, surfaces your assumptions, stress-tests your reasoning, and occasionally touches something that was sitting in your subconscious without you even knowing it. 🤯 I've been doing a lot of this lately. Thinking out loud with an AI about real decisions. It's genuinely useful. ⭐️ And honestly - if a major decision these days is made without any AI assistance, it's probably an inferior decision. You're leaving the most powerful thinking partner in history sitting idle. 💡 Have a real conversation with an AI about something you're actually wrestling with. You might find out a thing or two about yourself in the process. Go talk to your phone, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞

🧭🎯Priorities Under Pressure This week has been quite hectic. A lot of business priorities, a lot of thinking, strategic crossroads. On top of that, the macro situation is unstable — conflicting signals with very pessimistic views in the short term, and some optimistic expectations further ahead. It’s difficult to reconcile all of this and understand what actions to take. I found myself in a mode of constant thinking, trying to decide what to do — with more opportunities than time, energy, or resources to pursue them. In moments like this, two things matter most. 1️⃣ A clear set of priorities. What comes first, second, third. 2️⃣ Discipline in acting on those priorities. Knowing what you will not do. What projects, ambitions, or initiatives you are willing to freeze, abandon, or cut when resources become constrained. This applies to everything — projects, investments, even people. ❤️Priorities must be real. ❤️They must be clear. ❤️They must be aligned with your long-term goals and values. And not only yours — but also those of the people involved. Everyone working with you should understand the relative priority of what they are doing. So that when a low-priority initiative gets dropped, it doesn’t feel random or unfair. ✅Clarity prevents disappointment. ✅Alignment prevents friction. Over time, if you consistently focus on high-priority things and execute them with discipline, the outcome is almost inevitable. 🔵You become stronger. 💪 🔴Your organization becomes stronger. Through chaos, 🌀through uncertainty, through pressure. So prioritize well, while Pavel is everywhere 😎🤕🏕 🛞