Arseny Kulish.

My career began in banking. It was symbolic — a newly democratic Russia was stepping into a market economy and building its financial system from scratch. I was building myself within that same new reality.

In a sense, we were pioneers together: the first private retail bank, and me — a very young manager trusted with helping create and launch Russia's first credit card, called STB.

Looking back, I realize how extraordinary the timing was. So much of what I was part of was genuinely happening for the first time — not just in my life, but in history. The first private bank. The first city-level property management authority. The first platform dedicated to structured dialogue between business and government. The first video bridge connecting World War II veterans across Russia and the United States.

And the experience you gain as a pioneer never leaves you. It becomes the ground beneath your feet — the reason you walk toward the unknown without flinching, reach for what hasn't been done yet, and keep becoming someone you couldn't have imagined before you started.

The Mayor's Office of Moscow looked out over a city still deciding what it would become.

I served as a senior specialist in the Department of Property of Moscow City — Coordination of Land and Property Relations Administration. It is the kind of job that teaches you what most people never see: how a megacity actually works underneath the surface. Which deeds move which buildings. Which signatures unlock which gates. How an institution thinks.

From there I moved into the private sector as Operating Director of the Moscow Economist Club — a forum convening senior figures across Russian business, finance, and policy. I learned how to put the right people in the same room and let the conversation do the work. That instinct never left me.

MUZEON · MOSCOWThe Park of Fallen Heroes · Soviet monuments removed after 1991, preserved as public history — between Stalin and Lenin

MOSCOW ECONOMIST CLUBBridging business and government · the room where policy met practice

The Normandie-Niemen was one of the only French air units to fight on the Eastern Front. French pilots, Soviet mechanics, flying together against the Nazis. Most of them never saw each other again after the war.

I traveled personally to London to find the surviving British liaison airmen. I went to the houses of veterans in Paris, in Moscow, in the provinces — sometimes with addresses fifty years out of date. I headquartered the production in Paris and organized a tri-city video conference: Moscow, London, Paris — joined for the 60th anniversary of the war's end.

Men who had flown together against the Luftwaffe in 1944 saw each other on screen, in 2005, for the first time in their lives. Some of them wept. Some of them sang. Several were gone within a year.

NORMANDIE-NIEMEN · 60TH ANNIVERSARY · 2005The video bridge · Moscow auditorium · veterans on screen who hadn't seen each other in sixty years

Through the production I became close with Prince Alexander Trubetskoy, head of the Russian émigré community in France and direct descendant of one of the oldest Russian noble houses. He invited me to celebrate Russian Orthodox Easter at his country estate just outside the Paris peripherique. Authentic gypsy musicians performed in candlelight. The hosts wore the formal dress their ancestors had worn before 1917.

For a few hours I was teleported a hundred years backward, fifteen miles outside Paris. It was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my life — and the kind of access that I never forgot how to cultivate.

The work that followed in Paris included an advisory engagement with a European foreign-policy institute focused on Eastern European affairs. (Details remain professional and unpublished.)

We brought together autonomous skateboards, drones, Aldebaran's NAO humanoids, and two custom mid-size humanoid robots — Adam and Eve — built specifically for us by KAIST.

In 2014, while keeping my residence in Tennessee, I moved to Amsterdam for under a year to serve as CEO of Robot City Amsterdam, leading the operations and European launch of what was conceived as the first large-scale public encounter between humans and a roomful of humanoid robots. I ran the international presentation and secured the partnerships that made it possible — including direct collaboration with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), one of the most respected robotics research universities in the world, and with Aldebaran Robotics of Paris, the makers of NAO.

KAIST custom-built two midsize humanoids for our showcase. We named them Adam and Eve. They walked, gestured, and interacted with each other and with the audience. American and Japanese partners came on board after seeing what we had assembled. It was, for its moment, unprecedented.

ADAM & EVECustom humanoid robots built by KAIST for Robot City Amsterdam

The robots got the headlines. But the part of the project that I cared about most was the smallest robot in the room.

Aldebaran's NAO — a 23-inch humanoid with a curved white shell and a deliberately non-threatening face — was being deployed in classrooms across Europe to work with children on the autism spectrum. Many of these children were uncomfortable communicating with adult humans. But they would communicate with NAO. They would imitate it. They would speak to it. And through it, they would begin to speak to the world.

Research from Paris's François Truffaut day hospital, from MIT, from clinical trials across multiple countries, confirmed what teachers had already seen in the room: NAO's neutrality, its humanoid shape, its child-friendly size — these things gave children with violent or withdrawn behavior a path back to communication that the conventional therapeutic toolkit had not provided.

In 2012, SoftBank acquired Aldebaran for approximately $100 million. Over the following decade, SoftBank quietly de-prioritized the educational and autism-therapy mission in favor of retail and concierge applications. The company was sold again in 2022. In 2025, Aldebaran filed for receivership with a $29 million operating loss. The NAO autism program — perhaps the most beautiful application of humanoid robotics ever attempted — was effectively abandoned.

I will believe to my last day that this was one of the most important uses of technology of our generation, and that letting it die was a quiet tragedy. I helped showcase what it could do. I am still trying to find a way to bring something like it back.

Gatlinburg taught me what genuine America feels like. Knoxville taught me what genuine American science looks like.

I settled in Gatlinburg for a few years — a small town inside the most-visited national park in the country. I loved the people. There is a particular kind of authentic American character in the Smokies, and I count those years as some of the most formative I've had.

When I moved to Knoxville, I stepped into the orbit of Oak Ridge National Laboratory — one of the most important scientific cities in the United States. I served as a consultant to advanced-technology companies emerging from ORNL and from the surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystem, and joined an advisory committee to a regional angel capital group.

NEYLAND STADIUM · KNOXVILLEFilming the Tennessee Volunteers' opening-season Power-T run with a custom 360° camera rig — years before consumer 360° cameras existed

In a separate project I co-led, my partner and I built a custom 360-degree camera rig from six GoPros in a 3D-printed housing — and used it to capture the Tennessee Volunteers football team on game day at Neyland Stadium, including the famous Power-T run. Consumer 360° cameras did not exist on the market yet. We were filming live SEC football in immersive 3D before the format had a name.

THE RIGCustom 3D-printed housing · 6× GoPro cameras · Built before consumer 360° was a category

In 2015, the angel group I advised led one of the largest Series A rounds in the Southeast: an investment in General Graphene Corporation, an Oak Ridge–based startup that had licensed a chemical vapor deposition process from ORNL to mass-produce graphene — a material 300 times stronger than steel.

Earlier in this same period I worked as an international deployment consultant for Bode Technology — the leading DNA analysis services company — on the deployment of forensic DNA laboratories in Saudi Arabia and Russia. And separately for Aldis Inc. (now Grid Smart Technologies), the company that builds the cameras, hardware, and analytical software that the U.S. Department of Transportation and dozens of other agencies use to manage traffic congestion.

DNA labs in three countries. Traffic systems across the former Soviet bloc. Angel investment in graphene. The thread that connects them is not industry — it is moving technology across borders that institutions said it couldn't cross.

KNOX COUNTY PROCLAMATION · AUG 30, 2012Signed by then-Mayor Tim Burchett (now U.S. Congressman, TN-2) honoring Dr. Oleg Kullish — a recognition received in conjunction with my nonprofit work across East Tennessee

During this same period, I served as a board member and active contributor to several nonprofit organizations in East Tennessee. In August 2012, then-Mayor of Knox County Tim Burchett — today the United States Congressman for Tennessee's 2nd District — issued an official proclamation honoring Dr. Oleg Kullish, my father. It was a recognition received in connection with the family's contributions to civic and nonprofit work in the region, and one of the proudest documents I keep on my wall.

The first fully corporate-sponsored UN infrastructure project in post-conflict Iraq. Zero financial transfers from the World Bank, the IMF, or any institutional funding body.

UNITED NATIONS · NEW YORKDelegate session · neighboring seats: Israel, European Union, CERN

When I first proposed an agricultural-monitoring deployment in Iraq, I was told — politely, and inside the UN headquarters — that it would never happen. The Oil-for-Food scandal of the 1990s had frozen institutional appetite for Iraq projects for twenty years. Every person connected to that program had been investigated. The bureaucracy was paralyzed.

I made a different proposal: skip institutional funding entirely. Use the UN's seal of approval only. I would go to John Deere, Monsanto, and the major agricultural manufacturers and offer them a humanitarian project under the UN umbrella — one with full public accounting on a website I could build in an afternoon, because there was nothing to hide when nobody was being paid.

The conversation that followed, in a small room with the second-in-command at the United Nations and a Swiss security officer, is one I'll tell over coffee sometime. The short version: the project was approved. Equipment shipped to Iraq with manuals — no personnel deployed, no security risk, no oversight burden. Spare-parts markets opened for the manufacturers. A 20-year institutional freeze ended.

UN-DESA · CERTIFICATE PRESENTATIONWith Mr. Juwang Zhu — senior official, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs · Sustainable Development Goals recognition for an IIA publication

In Colombia, under the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework, I led the deployment of weather and soil analysis stations on land that had been under militia control for half a century. There the problem was financial, not political: no insurance company would underwrite agricultural loans for farmers on land with no yield history.

I negotiated a first-of-its-kind partnership with a Geneva-based insurer to underwrite loans based on predictive weather and soil data. Farmers received financing. Land that had been unfarmed since the 1960s entered production. The model has since been studied as a template for post-conflict agricultural recovery.

NIGERIA · PRESIDENTIAL OFFICEToken of appreciation from Brig. Gen. Paul T. Boroh (Rtd)

HIS CARDSpecial Adviser to the President on Niger Delta · Coordinator, Presidential Amnesty Programme · State House, Abuja

Across this period I have been honored to engage at the highest institutional levels — including with Brigadier General Paul T. Boroh (Rtd), Special Adviser to the President of Nigeria on the Niger Delta and Coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, on UN sidelines work. These are the rooms where the conversations that move infrastructure actually happen.

My current focus is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and high-value human expertise. I build AI-powered operational systems that handle the work that used to require entire teams — content pipelines, research automation, strategic outreach, press distribution — and deploy them for clients who demand results at an exclusive level.

I co-founded Merchant Chimp, a fintech and payment-processing company, and operated it for seven years. I currently serve as President of the International Informatization Academy of Americas — an NGO with UN ECOSOC General Consultative Status since 1995. And every now and then, I find someone whose company is about to ride a once-a-decade news cycle and I can't help myself.

FURRY FRIENDS FOUNDATION · $21,760501(c)(3) cat rescue · #1 organic Google · 500+ adoptions · T-shirts feature Delilah, the blind kitten saved from euthanasia the day before she was adopted by a woman who drove up from San Diego

Some projects choose you. When my partner Gene paid $3,000 out of pocket to save Delilah — a blind kitten scheduled for euthanasia — I quietly took on the rescue's digital presence. Not as a client. As a believer. The rescue now holds the #1 organic Google position for cat adoption in the area, and has facilitated over 500 adoptions.

I also produce fundraiser events for the rescue under the Kitty Bus banner — rooftop sets, deep house, string lights, and every dollar going to medical care for hard-to-place cats.

Kitty Bus Fundraiser · DTLA · Proceeds direct to Furry Friends Foundation medical fund