Hi ☺️👋! I’m Mica - the founder RunYouself, a pioneering AI-powered platform that helps managers develop transformational communication skills, which helps their companies develop a high-performance culture (without burnout). Here’s my story and what led to RunYourself:

My first experiences of leadership were highly authoritarian and directive. I grew up in an ex-soviet country and my first job was in investment banking. So for a long time, I thought that to lead meant to tell people what to do with a lot of authority. Luckily the following 15 years would teach me differently.

In my first role at Graze.com I found myself managing a team of data scientists and engineers (without being one). I quickly realised that telling people what to do wasn’t going to work, but I didn’t quite know how else to lead. Following that, I held various other leadership positions including a COO position. And during these years I kept wondering - how do you lead without telling people what to do? How do you lead in an enabling and empowering way rather than command-and-control … but still get stuff done at the pace that it needs to be done? How do you develop a culture of ownership, responsibility and accountability?

Years later, I stumbled upon coaching because I was interested in behaviour change. I was absolutely amazed by this different way of communicating that I had uncovered. It taught me that when someone comes to me with a challenge, I don’t need to fix it for them - I can help them solve their own challenge. I call it a super-power - the ability to catalyse critical thinking, creativity and self-awareness in someone else without telling them what to do. 

Over the past 5 years, I’ve spent thousands of hours coaching over 100 founders and leaders in tech companies. Developing the skill of coaching has absolutely transformed my personal and professional interactions. I have whole-heartedly come to believe that it is an essential skill for every leader and manager. And guess what? The research backs that up - employees who have a coach-like manager are eight times more likely to be highly engaged (source: Forrester).

The good news is that coaching isn’t rocket science. The bad news is that it requires behaviour change, which is easier said than done. And hence our mission at RunYourself is to make it easy for leaders and managers to have effective coaching conversations - both between peers, as well as managers and their team members.

Mica Vaipan

🇺🇦 Evgeny Shadchnev

evgeny.coach

I coach founder CEOs and their boards through leadership transitions: stepping down as a CEO or stepping into the CEO role (even if the founder had the title for years).

Founder Coach

Makers

Co-founder and Board member

Makers Academy is an intensive, full-time, 12 week course in web development. We help our students to change careers and become junior software developers and apprentices. We help companies hire great junior programmers.

All Together

Powered by a collective of CEOs from some of the UK's most successful companies, All Together is a pro bono advisory platform offering 1-2-1 advice, peer learning events, and impactful online content to help you build a better business.

Volunteer Advisor

Ada Ventures

Ada Ventures finds and funds extraordinary talent-building breakthrough ideas for the hardest problems we face. We invest across climate, economic empowerment and healthcare & ageing.

Venture Scout

Femme Palette

Mentor

Forward Labs

Forward Labs is a startup lab. Using lean startup methodologies, we validate ideas, rapidly build and test products and hire teams around those products that have solid traction.

Founding partner of Forward Labs, responsible for overall strategy and management, ideation, development of MVPs (Ruby, Rails, iOS, etc), hiring developers and entrepreneurs etc. During the first year we grew the team from 3 to 18 people and worked on Dropwines.com, MakersAcademy.com, PocketShop.com, AppearHere.com and several other projects. In 2014 Forward Labs was merged into a newly created investment fund Forward Partners.

Founding Partner

Forward Internet Group

Technical co-founder of InvisibleHand (http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/), the most popular price comparison browser extension in the world, which since its launch found over 1 billion dollars in savings on products, flights and car hire for hundreds of thousands users.
I led the development of the project for the first two and a half years. The backend written in Ruby and JS maintained an consistent, up-to-date database of dozens of millions of items across hundreds of retailers serving real-time prices to the users.
Ruby / Rails / Sinatra / JS / advanced regular expressions / AWS / MySQL

The company was sold to Skimlinks in August 2013.

Tech co-founder at InvisibleHand

Kappa Prime

Kappa Prime is a startup aiming to help research community to keep abreast of latest scientific developments.

Ruby / Rails / HTML / JS / CSS.

Co-founder

Etera UK Ltd.

Etera UK is a part of international group of companies specializing in web development. We provide a complete range of web solutions: market and competitors analysis, web design, web programming, UI expertise, testing, internet marketing and other services. We develop corporate web-sites, product web-sites, personal web-sites, intranet solutions, billing systems, issue tracking systems etc. In most projects we use our own purpose-built CMS - Sapphire.

Managing Director

Kodofon

Developed a part of a bespoke IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) simulator. Researched the use of error-correction codes in the wireless communications.

C++ / Matlab.

Wireless engineer

No Founder CEO should feel trapped in their job | Author of Startup CEO Succession | ex-CEO at Makers

Feeling trapped as a founder CEO, uncertain about whether to stay or step down?

I’ve been in your shoes, having built and led a successful startup, Makers. I’ve navigated the challenging decision to step down and wrote “Startup CEO Succession: A Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition” to help others like you.

I coach founder CEOs and their boards through this critical process. Whether you choose to stay and enhance your leadership skills or decide it’s time to pass the torch, I offer personalized coaching every step of the way.

𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐲: I help you become the best startup CEO you can be.
𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞: I guide you through a smooth transition, selecting your successor and your next steps.

DM me to turn your uncertainty into clarity and confidence. Let’s unlock your full potential, no matter the path you choose.

I coach founders who'd like to be the CEO their startup needs right now. Together, we navigate the uncertainty, grow in self-awareness and meet the challenges of startup growth.

taplio

The Battle

Mica Vaipan

Evgeny Shadchnev PCC

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