A Story of Dmitry Falaleyev U_Skillz’ing People

Let’s step away from blockchain for a bit. We all must remember that the comfy crypto-blockchain world we are living in is just a small part of the gigantic IT world. And, being curious by nature, I never miss a chance to stick my nose out of the hole. Several days ago I had a reconnaissance of that kind: an old friend of mine, Dmitry Falaleyev, who is a very talented entrepreneur and digital communication professional, hooked me up for one of his U_Skillz series events. All of a sudden, I discovered that Dima has been developing a complex educational program for IT and related people. The program evolved from Dima’s personal development plan, thus it is vast enough touching on areas from biohacking to digital security and modern art.

I joined at the digital security stage. Not something entirely new to me as I’m a regular attendee to lectures and speeches of Ruslan Yusufov from Group-IB and have been doing business with their team. But Ruslan was good enough to make me interested, surprised and even scared. And it made me thinking again about online protection, as hackers are on the alert and constantly seek ways to steal from you. And for crypto projects this is a topic of highest priority.

The evening continued with Ekaterina Skorobogatova, former Facebook Russia business development director. She was on video conference and spoke of social networks’ efforts to retain users’ attention, of business models, customer protection and ability to combine all of that with ethics. Ekaterina was more into speaking directly to Dmitry, like the two were finishing some debate started earlier and that is why I lost some parts of the argumentation. This by no means ranks Ekaterina or Dmitry as speakers -- both are simply brilliant in this respect.

And the third part of the talk was truly groundbreaking. Sort of a panel discussion with Maxim Kashulinsky, Republic publisher, Nikolay Kononov, Secret Firmy editorial director, and Sergei Paranko, Vedomosti digital director. The three grands discussed strategies of reading our social network wires, opportunities to access new information and broaden people’s horizons. That is when an insight hit me. Or, to be honest, I reacted to Sergei Paranko’s thought: he was explaining why it is more safe to use Vedomosti for valuable information rather than social networks. Simple enough, it all comes to agenda and fact checking.

No, you know me: just start a debate on information distribution and decentralized exchange of it, and I’m on it. And I couldn’t ignore this discussion as well. I gave my favourite example with Soviet times Pravda newspaper which had its universal message sent to everyone in the multi-million country. And today’s situation where all sources are available to each and every reader (except for the state banned ones) is something that I adore. And here Sergei cut my wings. “Can you imagine or not, all these free people with unlimited access to knowledge not only live without a unified agenda, but exist in their personal information bubbles. So how hard is it to imagine this leading to civil war?”. And he is damn right; nothing brings together all those people’s maps of the world. The can only be concatenated by special communication abilities which are rare.

And speaking of communications. I really enjoyed format of the event, it was the best networking ever. Dima says this time turnout (around 50 people) was way below its usual 150 visitors but probably this is why I had a chance to reach every person I wanted. Let me visit the next “big” event and see how it goes.

So, to sum up, this is great format, up-to-date and correctly arranged. The announcement mailing with speakers details and important links arrives in your mailbox AHEAD of the event and really helps to get straight to the point and be in the process getting the maximum out of the presentation and speeches.

And be sure, I will be there again)))

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