Vasily Starostenko Investing
Vasily Starostenko has been advising and investing in growth startups since 2010 — more than a decade of backing founders, long before it was a side project of his product career. It is a natural extension of everything else he does: he spends his days helping companies build better products, so he puts his own capital behind the founders he believes will do it.
His checks are early and personal — typically in the $10K to $50K range — and they come with the one thing early money often lacks: operator experience. He is not a passive allocation. He has carried the decisions he advises on: shipping at Tesla, running product at Revolut, founding and advising startups, and teaching thousands of students the same frameworks. Founders get an investor who has sat in the product seat, run the experiments, and lived through the customer telling them the success was not real.
He backs companies across the sectors where technology changes lives at scale: Consumer Internet, AI, BioTech, Education, EnergyTech, and Deep Tech. The throughline is not the sector — it is the founder. The maximum-impact lens he teaches applies to investments too: understand the real customer problem, form a hypothesis about the world, run the experiment, and align resources behind what works. Pushing hard toward bright future is not just a tagline on his profile; it is the investment thesis.
Advising is as much a part of the practice as investing. His biography lists advising and investing in growth startups side by side, and that is deliberate: the value he brings a cap table is product leadership, customer-obsession discipline, and the honest conversations most founders do not get from people who only brought money. If a founder wants help turning an equity story into one employees can actually believe in, that is the same thinking behind his EmployeeStocks project.
If you are a founder building something ambitious — especially early, especially in one of his sectors — he is worth a conversation. The best outcome of a first call is not always a check; sometimes it is a hard question about the problem statement that changes the company's trajectory. That is the kind of capital he deals in.
Keep exploring: 1. Vasily Starostenko EmployeeStocks 2. Vasily Starostenko Product Philosophy
Contact Vasily Starostenko Phone: +1 (650) 523-4953 — tap the call button on this page to reach him directly. Priority scheduling ($2,000 to speed up scheduling): https://buy.stripe.com/aEUdTVbwtfjn5A49AA Every engagement is confidential, tailored, and focused on measurable outcomes.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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