Aleksei Beliankin-Bauer

My father's family were Black Sea Germans, deported to Siberia in 1941. He served in the Pacific naval infantry in Vladivostok, then imported Japanese cars and bought property. He met my mother there. The 07 in every handle I have ever owned is the birth date, not a brand.

The Soviet Union built Akademgorodok to put institutes, a university and the people who worked in them inside walking distance. You grow up assuming the normal thing an adult does is try to find something out.

The roster was five with rotation: Vengefula, Kisselenon, Shurko, me, and others who came through. Venge, Kissel and Shurko were the three who flew to Cologne. That is the part you can check without me — LILiquipedia's page for the 2010 European Regional Championship lists exactly those three as the Virtus.pro roster, and Virtus.pro finished fifth or sixth in a $24,000 draw won by aAa — against All authority, the French org that writes its own name in lower case. What the public record cannot show you is the fourth and fifth names, because rotation players do not appear on a bracket. So take the roster as documented and my place in it as my own word, and weigh those two differently. I would rather hand you the seam than paper over it.

One correction while I am here, because this page had it wrong for months and somebody who knows the scene would have caught it before I did. Cologne 2010 was not an ESL final. It was the European Warcraft Invitational, 7–8 August 2010, run by Blizzard itself as the European qualifier into BlizzCon. ESL's WoW event that year was Intel Extreme Masters IV, in January, a different circuit entirely. The film below is from the real one.

What came with the titles was a small kind of fame, and with the fame came a question I had not expected: can I pay you to play with me? So I did. I played with people who wanted to get better, I taught them what I knew, and I took money for it. I was monetising a hobby before I had a word for what that was.

Nine years later that exact transaction — a strong player, a player who wants to be stronger, and money moving between them safely — was a company with a hundred and forty employees. I did not have a plan. I had a thing people kept asking me for.

Kontorovich — academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, later scientific director of the Trofimuk Institute — died in 2023. The degree is the credential. The habit is the job.

The work was data: well logs, 3D models, and whether the signal is the field or the instrument. Same discipline I use now on a funnel. The other career started in the evenings — find the professionals, find the customers, handle everything in between. That is still the business.

The people mentoring at IIDF had come out of the Russian arms of Microsoft, Yandex, Uber. They taught me the things nobody teaches you in a geophysics department: how to build a sales team, how to run analytics so that the numbers decide instead of the loudest person in the room, how to state a hypothesis and then actually test it, how to ship product, and how to raise money.

Fifty thousand dollars is not much. What it bought was the difference between somebody with a side income and somebody running a company.

Singapore came first because it was the shortest route out. I lived there through 2018 and built Rocket Games Entertainment, which gave the business a home that was not Russia and a currency that was not the rouble. It later folded in as a subsidiary of the American company.

San Francisco was the real destination. In 2019 I opened LegionFarm Inc., moved the headquarters into it, and moved myself. I have not lived anywhere else since — Singapore for a year, then the United States for the rest of it.

The invitation from Y Combinator arrived at the end of that year, which is a short gap between arriving somewhere and being taken seriously in it. I do not think that was luck. We had revenue and a marketplace that already worked; what we did not have was a country where that fact could compound.

Two of those rounds were covered by the press and can be checked without taking my word for anything. TechCrunch, March 2020: “Legionfarm has raised a total of $1.7 million from TMT Investments and Y Combinator.” TechCrunch, May 2021: the $6M Series A. Forbes covered the company that March as well — that is where the photograph with Michael Seibel comes from — and CNBC ran a piece on what a professional coach on the platform actually earns.

When the batch ended, TechCrunch picked the twenty best startups of W20 out of roughly two hundred, and Legionfarm was one of them. The piece says its picks are in no particular order, so I will not pretend to a rank inside it; being on a list of twenty chosen from two hundred is the fact, and it is one you can check in thirty seconds.

The pandemic was the strangest possible tailwind. Everyone was indoors and everyone was playing. A business about hiring somebody to play with you does not have a better year than the one where nobody is allowed outside.

The same year I did the Executive Leadership Development programme at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Y Combinator teaches you how to find something people want and then not die; it says almost nothing about the part that starts once a hundred and forty people work for you. That was the gap I went to fill, and three years later, when the board meeting came, it was the only training I had for it.

The coaching marketplace kept running the whole time. Web3 was the second front, not a pivot: NFTs and a DAO on top of a community that already existed, which is the only version of that idea I ever thought made sense. A token needs somebody to be a member of something.

The UFC work is what made it real to people outside gaming. Daniel Cormier came in as an investor rather than a paid face. Islam Makhachev — the current champion — was an ambassador. And we staged Khabib Nurmagomedov against Max Holloway inside a metaverse, which, as far as I know, had not been done before and has not been repeated since.

Roughly $11M came in across those two years. It was the loudest the company ever was, and it was about eighteen months before the quietest.

A company with people in Kyiv and people in Moscow does not get to have a position on the war. It gets a logistics problem with a deadline. We moved eighty of them to Turkey — visas, flights, apartments, payroll into accounts that still worked — and we did it while the product was supposed to keep shipping.

Everything degraded at once, and that is the part that is hard to convey afterwards. Not one number. The team, the roadmap, the retention, the ability to plan a quarter. A business is a machine for converting attention into output, and every person in it was reading the news.

The round that was supposed to follow the $11M did not happen. Nobody was funding a company with that map behind it, and the numbers we would have raised on were no longer the numbers we had. By 2023 the money was running out, and the decision that came next was already being forced.

I did not leave. I dissolved the board, let the people driving it go, and took my access back. One early investor group took the disagreement to the Delaware Court of Chancery, and for three years I defended the company while it had no outside funding — and rebuilt it, at the same time, into the AI-run business the whole argument had been about. Both halves of that sentence matter: the company shipped through every month of it.

The record now reads the way I said it would. On 1 June 2026 the court dismissed with prejudice every claim that questioned my integrity — Counts II, IV and VI — meaning they are closed permanently and cannot be brought again in that case. On 25 June the court declined, in a second signed order, to reconsider: the plaintiffs had themselves conceded that the paragraph they relied on "lacked sufficient particularity to sustain the claim." Both orders are signed by Vice Chancellor Fioravanti in C.A. No. 2023-0766-PAF, and both are below. I host the PDFs myself so that checking me does not depend on a vendor staying generous.

What remains is bookkeeping, not accusation: two derivative counts over 2020–2023 company expenses — any recovery would flow to the company itself — and one contract-consent count. None of it has been decided, and none of it questions integrity. On 25 August 2026, at my direction, defense counsel withdrew and I represent the remaining counts myself. Accounting and negotiation from here.

Three years, and the claim that ends a founder's reputation did not survive its first real test. Open the two orders and read what the judge wrote — the record is stronger than any sentence I could write about it.

It is not a demo. The agents talk to customers, price work, catch their own mistakes and write their own post-mortems when they get something wrong. They run the SEO, they reactivate a base of three hundred thousand people who have bought from us at some point, and they take the expertise of the professionals working on the marketplace and turn it into the content that brings the next customer in. That last loop is the engine: the supply side's knowledge is the acquisition channel.

The hard part was never getting a model to answer. It was building something that can tell the difference between what is established, what is inferred, and what somebody wants to be true — because at volume, a system that cannot make that distinction produces confident nonsense faster than anyone can check it.

What we grow now is a personal AI assistant for gamers: the marketplace — vetted coaches, escrow, delivery — becomes one of the things the agent can actually do, not five tabs a player has to assemble themselves. Stats, plans, teammates, patch notes. The agents write the pages that bring the next visitor in, and they sit in the chat when that visitor asks. The case study is public, in two parts: part one — AI agents run the marketplace: sales, staffing, escrow, delivery, and part two — 15.7× Google impressions on $0 ads.

The numbers, and where to check them. Ten years of this comes to over $45M in sales and 250,000-plus customers served across two web platforms and five bots, on $17.8M raised from more than twenty investors. I would rather you did not take that from me: they are the figures on our own Y Combinator page, where my founder bio reads, in as many words, “Over $45M in sales… I am still the founder. The company now runs on three people.” Every claim in the column above this story is on that page or in the TechCrunch pieces, and both are thirty seconds away.

Portal AI is Volodymyr Panchenko's company. Before it he built DMarket, a marketplace for virtual items, and sold it to Mythical Games — the Web3 games studio backed by Andreessen Horowitz. He and I had known each other a long time before any of this was a transaction.

OrderHub AI replaced the rented stack at Lfcarry — scheduling, hiring, buyer chat, the agents. Both sides of the marketplace, one building.

AGI House: resident, then product and engineering lead on a 2025 contract. 13,619 profiles scored on six roles. The interface is running here, on anonymised records. I do not claim I ran the hackathon Sergey Brin attended.

ManyChat: I ran the affiliate program end to end for five months, on an agent fleet — research, reactivation funnels, partner-risk sweeps, a human approval queue. Partner chat went up 25×, the program hit #1 Trending on PartnerStack, the channel grew about 20%, and I added about $2M in ARR. They re-engaged me twice. Workspace: cases.ab7.ai/manychat.

Mars Arena is a personal project, not the job — the globe lives in the third column.

A personal practice, not a career change. The company is still the job.

Portal One. Everyone gets their own agent, and it does whatever that person needs doing. What made it interesting to me is the layer on top: a system the team calls the horoscope, which is really more than fifteen different frameworks — celestial mechanics, natal charts, and a lot of other things our civilisation has been carrying for a very long time — combined into something that helps a person navigate the energy and information they are actually standing in. I cannot fully explain why it works. It works.

What it cost to run. At that volume the model bill is the business. I got ours down by 94% — six figures a month — while engagement went up 20%. Cheaper is usually worse; this was cheaper and better, which only happens when you stop asking a large model to do work a small one, a cache or a deterministic step can do. Underneath it sit more than a hundred autonomous agent workflows on an internal marketplace of skills, so the next piece of work does not start from an empty page.

Lfcarry. The last piece I am building is a payout system on-chain. Stripe and Google previously funded the agents that run order success and sales; now the money moves onto a blockchain layer, where a customer's payment sits in custody and an agent facilitates the deal between them and the professionals doing the work — smart contract, tracked progress, the whole operation. Every debt the company took on gets repaid automatically out of revenue share. Then it can belong to the sellers and the pros, and any of them can ask the system for a feature and get it built, tested and shipped. Ten years in, I still run it — three humans and a fleet of agents I write and supervise. The point of the last piece is that one day it will not need the three of us either. It will get much bigger, and the AI will do that, not me.

The company is the work. Lfcarry still has to become a daily assistant a player actually opens — stats, plans, teammates, the marketplace underneath — and I still write and supervise the agents that run it.

The research column is elsewhere. One public piece of it: Mars Arena — a globe built for arguing about where the first habitat should go.