Ruslan Zaydullin — Journey

Strategy consulting for business fundamentals

After graduating from the best local tech university as an MA in science & applied math, I joined strategy consulting — first at Roland Berger and then at BCG. I was a top performer throughout the entire four years, doing projects across many industries and functions. Strategy consulting was my business education.

In my last half a year I led a pro bono project: launching an education non-profit, an analogue of Teach For All. I helped to fundraise, recruit the C-level team, and launch it — it is still working today. I liked the impact, so this was the beginning of my startup journey.

Tech for healthcare quality & accessibility

My first actual startup: increasing the accessibility of high-quality primary care. Uber with doctors — you order a great GP or pediatrician to your home, and they arrive in one–two hours instead of days.

We reached $1M of revenue in our first year, raised huge money, became one of the first legal telehealth providers, and built techy, world-class things for the time.

We underestimated the market, never became profitable, ran out of money, and sold to a strategic buyer for equity. It taught me a lot; many people from that team became successful founders and executives.

EIR & strategic projects in a leading service marketplace

I was invited by one of the best founders I know, a heavy DOC+ user who liked the quality bar we set with the offline service. Profi is a service marketplace where you can order anything you can imagine — a yoga instructor, plumbing, building a house, learning a language — the leader in CIS.

I joined as a partner and entrepreneur-in-residence, answering questions like: does Profi go global? Buy this or that company? Launch a new vertical? I led a successful M&A — the company we acquired grew manifold — and on top of it led the psychotherapy vertical, one of the top-three service verticals by revenue.

Emigration and decentralized digital reputation

We were absolutely against the war and emigrated because of it — together with a few friends and co-founders, to Portugal.

There we started 30 Birds. The most important signals about who to hire and who to work with are not publicly available — they are encoded in personal relationships. Imagine a gamified and financially incentivised way to give high-frequency feedback, with the context defined automatically (a project, a relationship), where every piece of peer-to-peer feedback builds a skills and achievements profile in a decentralized, reputation-weighted way. We built the reputation math and ran pilots with international scale-ups. Engagement was great at first but quickly deteriorated, and we decided to close the product.

The Magic School Bus experience

Imagine that you want to design the best school right now, from first principles, using all the modern educational methodologies and technologies — and design it so that it is available globally, which means online. bina is exactly that: an AI-native school for ages 4–15, high-touch premium education with amazing teachers and small classes. Every educational unit runs about five weeks, and the whole school travels to one biome — tundra, desert, ocean — like the Magic School Bus.

I joined as a partner and second-in-command, responsible for growth, sales, marketing, business operations, finances, analytics, and data. After growing the school 10x, bina's needs and my desires stopped matching. We parted ways amicably this year, and bina keeps growing — I believe it could be a generational company.

Enterprise AI deployment, and looking for new adventures

While I am in between big projects, I am rebuilding the way I work, as many founders do, to fully embrace agentic everything. I explored a dozen ideas, mostly to learn how to work with agents — like a personalized AI newsroom that reads everything online, weights it through an expert network, and shows me only high-quality signals. I am also playing with how AI creates a 3D world in motion.

Most of my time goes into an enterprise AI deployment: a team, partly recruited by me and partly internally from leading products and engineers, building a customer-facing AI solution for the core of the customer journey of a B2C scale-up. I lead the whole product part — architecture, the data engine, annotation, golden sets — and the entire analytics. It gives me first-person experience of how consumer-facing production AI gets deployed inside a real business.