I was born in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East , where I lived until finishing highschool. After that I came to Stanford where I ended up majoring in Symbolic Systems - essentially a cognitive science program. I loved the program and would do it again, despite the fact that I later come to realise that as any discipline, cognitive science has it's limitations. While I was at Stanford, my main interest was in psycholinguistics and language technology and I worked on some projects with Stanley Peter's Computational Semantics Lab at Stanford's Center for Study of Language and Information. While at it, I also ended up getting into a MS program in Computer Science with a concentration in HCI.

While I always wanted to get a PhD and do research, I could barely resist the dotcom spirit of 1999 until graduation - in March 2000 I ended up joining a startup with a quirky name "Quack.com." The startup was dedicated to using speech technology for building a voice portal, and they needed someone to head internal tool development. Since I could claim understanding of both speech technology and UI design, no further experience was asked of me. The company had 35 people when I joined, but doubled in size before I could say "acquisition" - Quack.com got bought by AOL in August 2000. The next three years had some ups and downs, as I moved from being an army of one, to heading a team of five engineers tasked with half a dozen projects, back to working on my own - as the department was dwindling in size layoff after layoff.

In fall of 2001 I started seriously thinking of going back for a Ph.D., but felt that I have had enough of language technology (at least for a while), and other areas of cognitive science didn't seem appealing either. However, I had been becoming increasingly interested in social aspects of technology development and use, and after a year of soul-searching ended up deciding to apply to range of information science programs. I eventually decided to join UC Berkeley School of Information (then known as "SIMS") and started the program in September 2003.