I grew up in Kolomna, a small city outside Moscow, raised by my mom and grandparents after my parents separated when I was two. We lived paycheque to paycheque, though I didn’t fully understand that at the time. My childhood still felt full–riding bikes, spending time with friends, and being outdoors.

When I was 13, my dad came back into my life. He gave me a choice: receive occasional money or take a job packing parachutes at a drop zone so we could spend more time together. I chose the job. 

He was a professional skydiver who had already won 10 world championships at the time, and he has since added even more titles. We spent summers at the drop zone from sunrise to sunset. Over the years, I packed around 20,000 parachutes, earned my skydiving licence at 15, and eventually made about 800 jumps myself.

The people I met through my father made a huge impact on me. Skydiving is an expensive pursuit, so many of his clients were successful businesspeople. I listened to their conversations over dinners and while sweating together in banyas, or Russian saunas. One client told a story about being rejected from an investment in a shopping mall, then buying the surrounding land until the owners eventually had no choice but to work with him.

That stayed with me. There are usually many ways around a problem—over it, underneath it, or through it. That mindset shaped how I approached building Stan, an all-in-one platform to help creators monetize their followings. 

At 17, one of my dad’s clients asked whether I had ever thought about studying in Canada. I barely knew anything about the country beyond hockey. My dad overheard the conversation and said he could lend me the money to go. I told him I didn’t speak English.“Vitalii, that’s your problem,” he said.

I mapped the decision in an Excel sheet. Taking on roughly $100,000 in debt was a serious proposition, so I looked at salaries, living costs, and repayment timelines. The math suggested that, over 10 years, Canada could put me in a much stronger financial position than staying in Russia.

I then had nine months to pass the IELTS English proficiency exam, starting from little more than a “Hello, how are you?” in English. I spent nearly all the money I’d earned skydiving on a tutor, studied about 15 hours a week and booked the test for the last possible day–one shot, maximum preparation. I earned the minimum score needed to get into three Canadian colleges.

I chose an engineering program because I’ve always gravitated toward technical subjects, which led me to Grande Prairie Regional College in Alberta. Within two weeks of arriving in 2014, I landed a minimum-wage job as a theatre usher. It mostly involved opening doors and pointing people to their seats. Speaking English was still difficult, so that was a feature, not a bug.

I was one of a handful of students who earned a transfer to the University of Alberta to study chemical engineering in my second year. There, I joined a professor’s lab studying how to separate oil and water for industrial applications. Graduate students spent hours manually measuring bubbles in experiment photographs. I remember thinking: there has to be a better way. So I taught myself enough programming to automate the process. That experience showed me what software could do: take a painful, repetitive process and make it disappear.

After university, I joined Deloitte in Alberta  through campus recruiting. While I was there, I wanted to move to Toronto to pursue a relationship—she’s now my wife—and learned Deloitte had a machine-learning team based there. I offered to work evenings and weekends, remotely and for free until I could prove my value. Three months later, they offered me a full-time role, and I made the move.

I kept teaching myself software outside of work, building a Bloomberg-style financial screener for public companies. That project  helped me land a senior software-engineering role at eBay after I showed the hiring team what I’d built. The job doubled my compensation, and I upgraded my coffee order from Tim Hortons to Starbucks.

But I’d wanted to work for myself since I was 17, and it was still just a job. In 2021, a customer introduced me to John Hu, who was looking for a technical co-founder for a new company he founded out of his dorm room three months before. He had left private equity, became a content creator, and understood a problem firsthand: it was easier than ever to make content but still difficult to make money from it.

I brought the technical expertise John understood the customer, the market, and how to get a product into people’s hands. I believed in the mission, so I quit everything else and joined him full time. 

The early team was John, me, and our first founding engineer. We started with Stan Store, an online storefront built for creators to sell digital products, courses, and other offerings. A social media educator, for example, might sell audience growth templates and guides, while a business strategist could use the platform for courses, tiered coaching packages, and free masterclasses to generate leads. 

John would DM creators directly, get them to try the product for free, and collect feedback. I would ship improvements in near real time. When those early users liked the product, they shared that with their audiences. John also built in public on TikTok and other platforms. The product found traction quickly because he was the customer. He understood the pain point in a way you cannot replicate through market research alone.

That is probably the most useful lesson I can offer: the best businesses often start with a problem you understand deeply because you have lived it. Then you need to prove that enough other people have the same problem.

About a year and a half in, we crossed US$3 million in annual recurring revenue. The next year, we crossed US$10 million. The year after that, we passed US$30 million with fewer than 30 people on the team. I’m especially proud of that because hiring exceptional people was a priority from the beginning. Everything of value I’ve done has come from working with great people.

But as we grew, we found that more than 80 per cent of people signing up for Stan Store struggled to monetize their audiences. Many simply didn’t yet have a large enough audience to sell to. So last year, we decided to build an AI agent designed to help creators grow their followings. It connects to a user’s social accounts, learns their unique voice, analyzes what’s performing in their niche, and generates content tailored to their audience. The product’s early traction validated our belief that creator-entrepreneurs don’t just need generic writing tools—they need tools personalized to their unique voice, audience, and content.

Today, Stan generates more than US$40 million in annual recurring revenue, serves more than 90,000 paying customers, and has helped creators around the world make more than US$600 million online. We now have a team of about 60.

Related: How to Run a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign

I’m proud of what we have built, but I don’t see it as an arrival story. My long-term ambition is to build enough influence and resources to contribute to decisions shaping AI, climate, space, and technology. I don’t yet know what my contribution will look like, but I know the values I want to carry with me: doing genuinely good things for other people. Turning that into meaningful impact requires the ability to act at scale. 

Right now, I’m working on helping people work for themselves. We’ve done a lot, but I still see myself being only one per cent into what I ultimately want to do.