Vasily Starostenko Travel
Vasily Starostenko has lived the kind of life most consultants only read about. Russia, where he grew up and trained as a physicist. Cambodia, where he co-founded a company as Head of Product. America — coast to coast — where he built products at Tesla, Waymo, Uber, and Revolut. And now Puerto Rico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, where he runs his companies from San Juan. He speaks Russian natively, English fluently, and Spanish by daily practice — the living-it way.
He does not talk about travel the way people talk about vacations. For him, moving between countries has always been education in its rawest form. Every place taught him something his formal degrees did not: Moscow taught him rigor, Phnom Penh taught him resourcefulness, California taught him scale, and San Juan keeps teaching him perspective. The map of his life is also the map of his operating system as a product leader — the instinct to read a room, a market, and a culture before writing a line of strategy.
That is why travel shows up in his work even when nobody mentions it. A product person who has switched languages, currencies, and time zones dozens of times designs differently: simpler onboarding, clearer value, fewer assumptions about what the user already knows. At Waymo he helped take a research program out of the lab and into commercial streets; at Revolut he built financial products for customers across borders. Both jobs are easier when you have personally been the outsider trying to figure out how a place works.
Travel, for him, is not a hobby with a separate photo album. It is the habit of choosing the harder room — the one where you do not yet know the rules — and staying until you do. San Juan is home now, but the map keeps working on him: every new place sharpens the same question he asks about every product. Does this work for the person who just arrived?
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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