Hi! My name is Olga, and I’m a data scientist and an AI developer, excited by driving business value from data-wrangling to solution-in-production.
Ever since I came to the US in 2015 I have been fascinated with business, entrepreneurship, and innovation in this country. This has led me to make a pivotal transition to tech from the humanitarian / creative sector: having learned how data was used in a small but mighty PR shop, I wanted to scale these processes to other, more impactful problems. So I picked up the basics at a data science bootcamp course, and went through a discovery phase of the different applications of the skills and domains, from growth analytics for small businesses to AI consulting for a hedge fund.
The beginning of my tech journey coincided with learning about cryptocurrency. Back then crypto was still a nascent space in terms of working with data to solve business problems. But I was excited by the accessibility, transparency, and community that blockchain enabled, knowing from my parents (and literature) what life was like in siloed, biased, inefficient systems like the Soviet Union. In addition, it pushed me to educated myself in broader financial markets, which are, to me, a quantitatively accurate snapshot of the collective human psyche behind it. So I set an automatic buy of some blue chip tokens at the end of 2017 bull run and forgot about it until 2021, when I came across the interfaces for querying blockchain. I was happy that with those tools I could apply the analytics stack of web2 to web3, and participate in the open finance ecosystem in a more active role.
Working as a data analyst for a decentralized stablecoin protocol trained me in the figure-it-out-as-you-build mentality of startups in an emerging tech sector. However, the blow-ups and crashes of 2022, as well as regulatory uncertainty was too much for me.
In February 2023 I participated in a hackathon that immersed me in the new and exciting developments of the Large Language Models that are propelling the new wave of AI progress. I was astonished how much of the previous workflows were simplified and am currently taking advantage of these to build things I could barely imagine previously, like automating knowledge bases and building agents.
I think the common thread that guides me is the desire to free up and empower the human potential that’s often locked in an unevenly distributed access to tools and information. I love connecting with similar-minded people, so reach out if you’re interested!
Favorite books / currently reading: