Dmitry Matskevich, Dbrain: on entrepreneurship as a mental disability, AI and emotional security

The first part of my conversation with Dmitry Matskevich, founder and CEO of AI startup Dbrain and a popularizer of neuroscience. This is the next in a series of interviews with top experts in their fields about the product approach, entrepreneurship, psychology and behavior change.

Geography

It's hard to catch you. The feeling that you live between Russia, China and California. Where are you now?

Somewhere between Russia. (Laughs). I'm in Moscow now. Basically, the movements were due to the fact that we have many customers in Shanghai, Dubai and America. We have a development in Russia. But I am constantly watching how I better focus, optimize. After a certain number of flights, I realized that moving so much is more likely net negative for me. Switching between time zones takes a lot of time, you seem to be constantly busy with something, but very often out of focus. I’m trying now to optimize my location in one place.

What do you do to stay fit with so many flights and time zones?

Sometimes in one month I have four flights like SF-Moscow-Shanghai. Learned how to optimize jetlags. I got a basic list of what to do. I treat it as a product, constantly updating.

1. Sleep. I used to work during the flight, and then I had to recover for 2-3 days. Now I sleep on the plane, and especially more than at home. Sleep is the coolest evolutionary mechanism for restoring the body. You can not replace it with dietary supplements and powders.

2. Timing. At least one flight sleeve must be long, and evening must be at the destination at the time of departure. I immediately go to bed on the plane and ask to be awakened at 10 am by the time of arrival. It feels like no time is wasted switching time zones.

3. Accessories. Eye mask blocking the whole face to no light. Silicone plugs. Noise canceling headphones over the plugs. A pillow that minimizes vibration from the aircraft. An hour or two before departure, I start wearing orange glasses, like Tyler Durden’s. They block the blue rays that inhibit the production of melatonin, which optimizes circadian rhythms ... It must be funny that it looks from the side: a dude in a black hoodie, black t-shirt, black pants and orange glasses.

4. Additives. I drink before departure melatonin and amino acids L-glycine, GABA. They say to the body: now there will be a dream.

5. Food. Digestion is strongly tied to circadian rhythms, so I stop eating 3-4 hours before departure, and naturally do not eat on the plane. I minimize insulin in the blood. No alcohol, it interferes with sleep and thickens blood.

6. Place on the plane. Helps to upgrade to business class, I usually have enough miles or vouchers. If you can’t upgrade, I take a seat near the wing, stretch my legs, sleep. I have a special inflatable pillow for the legs, flight attendants often ask where I got it. A very useful thing to stretch out and fall asleep.

In general, the main thing is to get enough sleep, and a little more than you need. It is important for energy and tone.

Do you recognize on airplanes?

Sometimes I meet stewardess acquaintances. They remember me with all these gadgets.

Career and success

You have a cool track record: graduated from FizTech and NES, built a career in online retail, sold your company Flocktory for $ 20M. Now you are doing a machine learning startup. What are you most proud of?

Complex issue. In the Soviet past, parents instilled the line to not be proud of anything, silently crap. Reached - good, but maybe just lucky, we continue to work. So talking about pride in projects is not easy.

I am proud of the understanding I have achieved. Every business, luck or failure gets a bunch of problems from the inside out. You work out something, learn something about yourself, it makes you a little more free.

For example, there was a tendency not to believe in success. I understood where it came from, what emotions it evokes, where it is felt in the body. Found, got, worked. He became freer. It’s like in a game. Level up, the next level.

Like Pelevin in "The Prince of the State Planning Commission"?

Yes. The important thing is that regardless of external successes, there is an internal result. You look at yourself five years ago - and this: wow, I did not understand myself at all, I did not enjoy life. Now I understand very well what I like, where I enter the flow state.

I’m like a multi-dimensional figure, and the world is like Tetris, I need to somehow place myself, to help people around me to be placed in this space. And with each level, I seem to understand better how to do it.

Be proud early. The flow of movement is such that you gradually realize how complicated and incomprehensible the world really is. But you learn the reality around you to prepare better, create a sense of flow for yourself and others, have fun.

Your Dbrain project has gathered all the hottest ideas into one product: here is machine learning, and gig economy, and blockchain. How did it happen?

Rather, it is a bug than a feature. When you just start a new project, of course, you are affected by all the current highs and trends. One must be extremely conscious in order not to succumb to this. Therefore, often, you start broadly, and further along the course of the movement you understand and with a gigantic effort of will and discipline you focus where it turns out. Of course, it is better to go from a problem, not from technology or even a solution. But in real life, I have never had such a book. You all know how to do it right, you can read lectures about this, but in practice you have a lot of things happening that you couldn’t know in advance, and you only manage to taxi.

Now Dbrain is focused on freeing large companies from any work with documents and related data analysis. It turned out despite such a hype around the AI, the usual problems of classifying and retrieving data from documents have not yet been completely resolved. Here we used our two main competencies - the distribution of small tasks in real time among hundreds of thousands of people for teaching AI and creating solutions in computer vision. As a result, we learned how to completely take over all the tasks of working with documents by combining the capabilities of 100 thousand people and ML algorithms in real time. So we get the best from both AI and human capabilities. AI is engaged in frequent understandable tasks, and people solve cases that we have not met before or were poorly trained. And even when we sleep, our AI works and becomes smarter and smarter, learning from these people, who constantly train it with their own example.

You talk a lot about brain function. Is the name Dbrain not random?

D - Dima. Brain is the brain. Just kidding, of course. In Dbrain, we see many situations that require a lot of parallel work by the AI ​​and the people who train it. Dbrain is a distributed brain . AI allows you to adopt and scale what people train it for.

How do you see the future of people with artificial intelligence?

It’s easy to predict for a couple of decades. Further difficult, even experts can’t agree.

Now we see that industrial cases will develop - a narrow AI. This is when the area is narrow, the task is well described, there are many examples of data. Previously, people solved the problem, now we switch to AI. For example, in every large organization there are employees whose task is to take documents, analyze, and enter the results of this analysis somewhere. Historically, this could not be automated, because there was variability in decision making. AI solves this problem. It can be anything - from checking the quality of the meat on the conveyor to the recognition of tumors in the pictures. All these narrow tasks will be fully automated.

Here it is important to tell how the AI ​​differs from previous automation methods based on the so-called heuristic algorithms, when you have a lot of conditions like if-then. There can be a lot of these designs and their combinations, so it was not profitable to automate them. AI helps to solve this due to the fact that the algorithm is taught by people in a large sample. For example, in 10 thousand examples they show where the cat is and where the dog is. Further, the algorithm can distinguish the cat from the dog itself.

It’s hard to say anything about general AI. If you read the experts from OpenAI or the famous expert Max Tegmark, it becomes clear that there is no consensus on this issue. I advise Tegmark’s book “Life 3.0” on this topic, he does a good review of predictions and barriers to the future of AI there.

To be honest, I personally like to do something possible not in 20 years, but here and now.

How to land yourself in the here and now?

Work with the ego. Be more humble. Listen more. Communicate more with clients and users, find out what they need now. Take small steps, solve pressing problems. Gradually solving small things, you begin to do something big and important.

It's still cool to have a quick feedback loop. Check every time if you create value. This is also the source of energy that I found inside myself. I can’t move with a twenty-year vision, I need motivation here and now, otherwise I’m starting to get depressed. Probably, on the contrary, someone needs future vision, motivation from the future feeds them.

I’ll ask a completely different question. There are people who believe that you are one of the best financial modeling experts in Russia. Where does this interest come from?

I try to get rid of this label and not do it anymore. I think that this is not a very useful activity for me. I am a keen personality, and once buried myself in a financial model. I tried to understand mathematically how a business works. Helped people and companies make models and raise funds.

Looking back, I understand that business is not about financial models. Now I think it's more about psychology. When I rethought it, I switched to completely different things - how the human brain works, how behavior changes.

What inspires you the most in creating technology products?

To be completely honest, I am poorly motivated by long-term goals. I understood this through trial and error. Everyone has their own “energy portfolio”. In the context of products, I have three “assets” in this portfolio:

1. Doing good for customers. You show people magic, give them a cool product or process, change their effectiveness, get quick feedback.

2. Innovation. This is a solution to previously unsolved problems. What exactly are you doing is already secondary. The main thing is that it be synchronized with a code of ethics.

3. Feel yourself part of a cool team. I like to be with cool people who do something together. There is such an evolutionary need to serve the group. It is the same with family - when people earn money to feed their family, it charges them. This need provides immunity from the crisis of vision. Let me give you an example: you had a great vision about the importance of chocolate, you opened a candy business, put all of yourself into it, and then realized that sugar is evil, and was disappointed. But you have already built the whole process, all the partnerships and production around these sweets, you just can’t change all this. If the source of energy is your team, then you can pivot and move on.

Interestingly, you are all talking about sugar, not tobacco.

Yes, the tobacco is hot. But the bottom line is that there must be some kind of useful business to handle crises better. If you do useful for the Universe, it will come back karmically.

Team and culture

What did you learn about building cool teams?

I am an amateur and I understand that I do not understand anything about teams, only the most basic things. Here is what I see and what works for me in companies:

1. Emotional security. This I spied on Egor Rudi, CEO Profi.ru . It’s a feeling that it’s safe to express your opinion in a team, to seem incompetent, to mess up garbage, make a mistake, offer a stupid idea. This is all felt at a non-verbal level. Respect for each other. Understanding that when you mess up, they won’t take advantage of this. It’s not just to achieve this emotional safety - it disappears all the time somewhere. When the team is there, you immediately understand this: you have the best brainstorms, you want to wake up faster to get back to your business, you get a lot of energy from interacting with each other. When people believe and trust in you, you become a super version of yourself - there is already a lot of research about this.

2. A sense of autonomy for each team member. I have a belief that it’s very bad to lock onto leadership. It seems that it’s better to be such an engineer from the outside while improving the environment all the time, which helps people to take more responsibility, to be self-propelled, to be in the flow and move together in an optimal way. But, again, when you start very often, you just don’t want to repeat your expensive mistakes of previous projects and cut corners. In the initial search for a product and communication with customers, you should be a lot without intermediaries.

1. Integral feeling of happiness in a team. Based on this metric, you make some decisions. A happy person is a more productive person. Not only on its own, but also as a team. He and others infect on effectiveness. This is a fragile structure, you need to work very carefully with this.

In this regard, it is very important to be able to take people to your team. Here's what we look at first:

1. Emotional and cultural fit. Is a person emotionally mature, does he understand himself well, is able to listen and inspire others, a wide EGO, etc. For us it is more important than functional knowledge. It comes first.

2. An internal charge of energy in the direction where we are going as a company. The ability to get involved, deeply immerse tasks and live the product. Does the person burn with what he does, will he light others?

3. General intelligence. Everything concrete is better studied already in the process from the position of first principles without old patterns.

If it turns out to create such conditions, and find such people, then all this starts to work together with the 10x effect. By the way, I already discussed with you: now it’s very interesting for me how to understand what people are talking about, how to choose an occupation / role for them in which they will be at the maximum of their capabilities. How to put the figures in the right places ...

Then it turns out the self-organization, about which Kevin Kelly writes, or something like holacracy?

It never worked out and there was no desire to make a complete self-organization. Autonomy is super close to me, it charges me itself and this was the main reason why I decided to do business. Since I get so high from autonomy, I want to give it to others as well, but leadership is very important anyway. It is useful and vital to be involved yourself 140% in many roles with processes and an example to show. There is a thin fine line, so that it is not intrusive. In the direction of travel, it’s cool when you get the role by role to take off yourself, passing it on to a person who knows how to do it.

It is clear that a person can learn anything. But someone from one role will be charged, and someone only waste energy. People rarely realize this to themselves. Few people come to me and say: I am a good strategist, but a fig performer, I will formulate high-level things, and I need to find someone who will help me realize them. Therefore, it would be good to be able to recognize this and suggest how to find a place for its maximum effectiveness.

We started talking about teams. How to be an introvert and interact with a large number of people every day?

There is no single definition of what introversion is. I really do not like talking on superficial topics, so I am not an extrovert in this sense. But it charges me in a small party or one on one to talk about something meaningful. For example, when I became interested in neurobiology, I made many new acquaintances.

But I, for example, no longer speak at large conferences. Now I like small groups of people who already know something and want to better understand. This fits in much better with my introversion.

As for the processes within the company, I try to complement myself with other people when I can. I focus on one-on-one interaction, then I find people who can and want to do what I’m not good at.

Mentors, authorities, environment

Let's talk about sports. You once said that every man needs to practice boxing at least for some time on his way. Given how much we talk about the importance and fragility of the brain, it is strange that you called this brutal sport for the head ...

I don’t think boxing is the best choice. Especially sparring, this is a very traumatic thing. Recent studies show that tremors accumulate over time and begin to negatively affect health. Even training with a heavy punching bag can be harmful.

But at the same time, I really think that a man needs to do martial arts. Something with strong combat power. This is important for pumping masculinity and the spirit of a warrior.

By the way, I read the book “Iron John” in Bali, which you advised. This is about the stage of male initiation in different cultures. Very useful, gives an understanding of the importance of initiation for guys.

Maybe there is something other than boxing, for example martial arts oriental. They integrate spirituality into themselves. No wonder they were invented thousands of years ago. They accompany you from teenagers to adulthood and old age. They start at a young age with sparring, then gradually focus on the inner world, meditation.

You need to fight in a safe environment, not on the street where you can be killed, but in the framework of the ring with the rules. The energy from joining a duel is important when you feel that you can stand up for yourself when you dance a combat dance. So you gradually realize that power, independence and aggression are normal.

Are mentors important to an entrepreneur?

It’s the same with psychotherapists here - it turned out that the mentors are my close friends.

The main benefit of a mentor is not functional knowledge. They can be obtained from specialists. It is unlikely that a mentor knows your product better than you. But a mentor is useful in personal things and people skills - in fundamental things that have not changed for centuries.

A mentor is cooler than a therapist in that he has a little more empathy for your situation. You can tell the therapist how hard it is for you and how you want to send everything to hell, but he did not build the company, and no matter how much he wants, he may not understand the level of anxiety and responsibility.

The mentor passed through pits and take-offs. Bankrupt company. Entered into personality crises. You come to him, speak openly with him, he is not your investor, he will not immediately take money out of the company. It’s even cool if you have a cofounder, with whom you can talk just like with a mentor.

Example: you woke up, everything is on fire everywhere, the situation sucks. You cannot tell this to your colleagues. Sometimes you can tell the cofounder. And the mentor can tell you: old man, I went through this 30 times, everything will be ok, sit today at home, this is such a moment, it will pass. In short, this vital experience is important.

Still important is complete trust. Emotional things happen all the time ... For example, you need to fire 50 people. How to do this, in general? A mentor can somehow help you emotionally, be close while you go through it.

I do not believe in the idea of ​​a mentor with functional skills - it's more about advising.

He recalled an example ... He once talks with a dude-entrepreneur, he says that everything in the company is cool, growth, prospects. The next day, an article appears that his company is bankrupt. Entrepreneurs can’t say such things in parties, or to their investors. Colleagues will resign to hell. There are not many people with whom to share such things. So mentoring is good.

Who do you consider your authority?

I have such an approach that there are no authorities. I understand how much I know nothing with my intellect. People with authority cover want to sell something. I also try to sell some way of thinking, in which you notice opportunities and positive aspects, but you remain skeptical.

An example in the field of AI. It happens that you ask an expert with ten years of experience some question ... He says that it is impossible to do such a thing. Six months later, it turns out that this is possible. Experts have their own biases, they are too confident in their innocence, in their authority ..

We at Dbrain are doing competitions among data scientists. We give outstanding tasks in the field of machine learning. Often we see people without regalia in the first place. A man came with a beginner mindset, and defeated dudes with ten years of experience. This does not happen systematically, but it is very likely.

It is useful to listen to the opinions of smart people, but problems often change contexts, other introductory, other subject areas. Everything changes, so you integrate it all into your head with the team. Then it’s cool to be a modest, novice in the moment, realize that you may not know something and look at problems with the traveler’s eyes, sorting through the first principles, teaching your intuition.

Entrepreneurship

Does it make sense for a startup from the CIS to try to get into YC or 500 Startups?

I am not a big specialist in terms of going abroad.

There is an opinion that Neher should be launched in the CIS, one must immediately go to a large market. I know stories when people burned bridges, sold an apartment in Moscow, moved to LA or SF, started something. I know stories when a successful business was built in the CIS, the founder moves to LA and does business in America. The second method is more convenient. Already have validation, cash flow. There is an opinion that it is impossible, that you are very limited by the CIS context, but I have seen many cases when this works. In short, there are different things.

Accelerators are probably useful. Especially if you do not have connections, confidence, sales in a new market. A good accelerator does three things:

1. Validation that you are not a dummy. After all, even if you had exits, you usually prove in a new country that you are not a complete ignoramus. Accelerators give the market a signal that you are worth something. Doors begin to open. It saves energy, removes friction.

2. Quick connections. Top accelerators are configured to give acquaintances and signals to the market, which help even the network and signals, makes it possible to close the round quickly. If there are no validated America. sales, getting money to a startup is not so simple.

3. Circle of support. Around you are people who go through something similar. You have mentors, access to an adviser.

In terms of knowledge, I'm skeptical. You can find all this knowledge through lectures on the Internet. I do not think that knowledge creates any value here.

You spoke about the entrepreneurial party several times. Why build a community around you?

For me, the community will, in the first place, replace therapy and mentors. There are close friends, of course, but there is also a certain middle circle, my community. These are people close in values, thinking, filter of perception. They give energy, they can give an example, they went through something similar.

It is very important for an entrepreneur to have a community. A big contribution to success are those things that are not taught anywhere. These are not functional skills, this is personal growth, the development of psychological skills.

Entrepreneurs live in constant stress. Most have bipolar. You manic fig, then a week you can’t work. It helps you to understand that everyone goes through it, that you are not alone. Already some kind of acceptance: there is such a stage, it’s ok, it begins to live. "Anything has happened." I ate mochi , watched the series, it’s easier for you - you go on.

There are entrepreneurs like Mask and Jobs that everyone admire. Judging by the biographies and stories of colleagues, working with them was unrealistically difficult. It seems that many successful entrepreneurs have psychological characteristics that border on personality disorder. Is there such a thing?

Any entrepreneur is a person with a pronounced psychological accentuation. He is not like everyone else, and often socially not a very nice person. Here I want to say three things.

1. I often noticed bipolar stages in acquaintances of entrepreneurs. Either they were originally, or appeared in the process. Thanks to these stages, you get involved in projects in which normal people do not turn up. In the manic stage, considering yourself to be a god, you start something that, then you understand, wouldn’t start better. Well, in the direction of travel you rake. This often happens with me. An entrepreneur should have a high tolerance for risk, unpredictability. This is not to be confused with risk appetite. Gambling is about risk appetite that kills you financially sooner or later. And entrepreneurship is about risk tolerance. It’s not always comfortable for you, but it gets better over time.

   
   
   
   
   
   
   

2. My circle often has love for people, empathy. You need at least one of the cofounders to have skills in understanding people, motivation, and social integration. When you have a candy factory with a conveyor belt, you can blame everyone for KPI, but if for your success people have to understand, get sick, work, invent and be inspired, then there must be empathy. This is important for understanding customers, users, colleagues, and for creating emotional security in a team.

   
   
   
   
   
   
   

3. Creating meanings. When you are an entrepreneur, you are at the very beginning a provider of meanings. In the process of evolutionary adaptation, we all learned how to coolly unite together around stories in order to achieve great goals. As a result, this has become a very important evolutionary advantage and is of course rewarded with powerful pleasure. It's cool to be able to create these meanings and fall in love with them. I recently watched a documentary about Osho Wild Wild Country, he says the following thing there. In a regular corporation, a person works like an empty vessel, it fills nothing. But man cannot be an empty vessel; he must have content, an inner fullness of something. People constantly take meaning from somewhere: the same religion, family, work. A good entrepreneur helps to create it.

   
   
   
   
   
   
   

This is such a proven “evolutionary interface”: we tend to join in groups to go somewhere. If it makes no sense, you start looking for it - run marathons, ride Iron Man, start a hobby, go to expensive restaurants, travel endlessly. It gives local meaning, you have a short-term goal. I am sure that no successful company can happen without founders who know how to create, find, fall in love with these meanings and, by their example, fall in love with others. Shadow Work has the archetype of a king, which is about that. Among entrepreneurs, it is usually accented.

Recently, talk about entrepreneurship and mental health has become more frequent. According to a study by Michael Freeman of UCSF, traits characteristic of entrepreneurs: creativity, extroversion, openness, risk appetite, are also associated with bipolar, depression, ADHD and substance abuse. What can you say about this?

Entrepreneurship is spiritual growth on steroids. You’re constantly reassembling yourself, a bunch of personality crises. In fact, you are constantly training the ability to hold the vessel and not to splash, not to burn yourself. Many on the road break down. It's like going to the gym and immediately taking a lot of weight - you will tear yourself up.

It's great when there is a circle of support, as I said. For an intensive journey, this is very important: you have dopamine bombs, you can fall into substance abuse. And when there are people nearby who have been through this, they can support, say: “Start meditating, this is normal.” Or: “Try to sleep at least 9 hours, it's all bullshit that you need to fuck work to the detriment of sleep. This is not a sprint, this is a marathon. " It all increases survival, and it gradually trains your mental kung fu's resilience.

Such a mutual support group?

Yeah, Anonymous Entrepreneurs. The main thing is that only losers should not be there - otherwise you will get over the wrong approaches. I joke: there are far more failures than successes; we must learn to philosophically relate to this.

There are probably people who are genetically predisposed to entrepreneurship. Or their parents laid tolerance for the unknown, thinking of plenty, faith in themselves. Such born entrepreneurs. But many more who go through suffering adapt and change.

Skills development

Can risk tolerance be developed?

Hard to say. I have always had a risk tolerance. Risk tolerance is a comfortable feeling of uncertainty.

I recently listened to a podcast with some cool entrepreneur. He was asked what skills he would like for his children. He said that, unlike a hundred years ago, the human psyche today is not adaptive to the speed of change. Therefore, he would like for children to have the skill not to burn out emotionally in the face of uncertainty. For an entrepreneur, this is a key skill.

Three skills that you would wish your children?

1. Trained on the unpredictability of the psyche. Everything changes very quickly, too fast. The brain is emotionally unprepared for this level of suspense. Any new thing causes a release of cortisol, stress. I would like my children to have such an entrepreneurial trait, to continue to exist, even when it flies from the universe.

2. Thinking of plenty. This is about seeing opportunities, radiating confidence, being resource-intensive, enjoying your business, no matter what you decide to do.

3. To think from the first principle. This is about a scientific approach when you think not in patterns and similarities. Musk, in my opinion, talked a lot about it. Not to be confused with a systematic approach when taking into account the relationship between phenomena. To think from the first principle means to get rid of all patterns and approach the problem from scratch. For example, you started inventing a car. Start from scratch. Understand that the problem is how to move something from point A to point B. So you will come to a large version of those solutions that do not have the baggage of previous experience. Once, when everything was not changing so rapidly, you could be born the son of a shoemaker, find out about the boots from Bati, and then simply apply these patterns all your life with minor modifications. Now this will not work, you need to think differently.

I would also add a fourth skill: to learn how to deeply get involved and fall in love with what you do , in different ideas and activities, to get your dopamine corridor there. Probably, this can even be set as a zero point.

Conclusion

In the second part, we will talk with Dmitry about the development of inner freedom, the oddities of neurobiology, the combination of intelligence with intuition and emotions, long-term change in habits and attention hygiene.

On the Ponchik News channel , not only interviews are published, but also articles on product thinking, cognitive psychology and behavior change.