Vasily Starostenko Startup Advising
The problem: founders make their most important decisions with the least experience. Which market to bet on, when to raise, how to price, whether the product is ready — each choice compounds, and generic advice about moving fast and talking to users doesn't survive contact with real constraints. What founders need is counsel from someone who has sat in their seat and also sat in the seats they're growing into.
Why Vasily: he has been both sides of the table. As a founder, he co-founded Digi Cambodia in 2008 in Phnom Penh and served as COO and co-founder of Lightfish from 2010 to 2012 — the years where every decision lands on your desk and there's no playbook. As an operator, he led product at Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and Revolut, where he rose to Head of Product reporting to the founder and CEO through a multi-billion-dollar scale-up. And as an investor, he has been an angel investor since 2010, writing $10K–$50K checks across Consumer Internet, AI, BioTech, Education, EnergyTech, and Deep Tech. Founder, operator, investor — three lenses in one conversation.
What you get: advisory sessions that go straight at your hardest problem — strategy, product direction, growth, fundraising; pitch deck reviews that tell you what investors will actually think; and ongoing monthly advisory for founders who want a standing strategic partner. Direct, opinionated, and grounded in two decades of building.
The proof: a track record of advising growth startups through his professional practice, a decade-plus angel investing history across six sectors, and twenty years of product leadership inside companies that became verbs. He knows what the zero-to-one chaos feels like — and what it takes to survive the one-to-a-hundred that follows.
His angel investing since 2010 — $10K to $50K checks across Consumer Internet, AI, BioTech, Education, EnergyTech, and Deep Tech — means he evaluates startups the way investors do while advising them the way an operator does. He has seen hundreds of pitches and dozens of operating plans, so pattern recognition is doing quiet work in every session: which metrics actually matter at your stage, where the narrative breaks under diligence, what the next eighteen months really demand. Founders get the investor's eye and the operator's hands in the same hour.
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 Want to talk? The fastest way is a call — or book priority time above.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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