# Mike Daykhin > Mike Daykhin is a product executive and founder based in Tel Aviv. He is building talenthunt, a visibility platform for job seekers, and works one-on-one with founders and executives as a sparring partner and fractional product lead. Thirty years of launching products in telecom, media, payments, fintech, e-commerce and HR tech. This file describes daykhin.com for AI agents and language models. The site is bilingual: English at the root, Russian under /ru. Everything below is in English; links marked "in Russian" lead to Russian-language pages. ## Key facts - Name: Mike Daykhin. Russian name: Mikhail Daykhin. - Based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Works online with people in any country. - Languages: English and Russian. - Now: founder of talenthunt (WIP Solutions); Executive Sparring with founders and C-level executives. - Open to: fractional CPO and Chief of Staff to the CEO roles; AI integration for teams doing it for the first time. - Looking for: employer partners for talenthunt and pre-seed investors in HR tech. - Best-known results: Magnit Pay, a Banking-as-a-Service program for a chain of 20,000 stores, grew from zero to 7 million users (Europe's largest BaaS program in 2021); video on demand with online payments at the TNT network in 2007, the first such service in Russia; Russia's second-largest prepaid mobile program in 1998. - Style: direct communication, flow over formality. His strength is sense-making: framing uncertainty, finding the real question, and switching between the big picture and the smallest detail. ## Work with Mike A small number of engagements at a time, chosen by fit and leverage, not capacity. - [Work with me](https://daykhin.com/work-with-me): all formats, how Mike works, the English waitlist for sparring. - Executive Sparring: a confidential thinking partner for hard calls in product, hiring, fintech and payments, marketplaces, super apps, 0-to-1 and scale-up. One-on-one and online; the client keeps the decision and the execution. - Fractional CPO: product strategy, prioritisation, discovery and hiring while the team grows toward a full-time product lead. - Chief of Staff to the CEO: turns founder intent into workstreams, runs the operating cadence, unblocks cross-functional decisions and protects the founder's focus. - AI integration for first-time teams: which work to hand to AI, where a human stays in control, and a first working setup built together. - Not a fit: companies where every decision goes through a multi-level, political chain of command. ## Executive Sparring Sessions are held in Russian. English speakers can join a waitlist and will hear from Mike when English slots open. - [Executive Sparring, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru/sparring): format, packages, client reviews, FAQ and booking. - [English waitlist](https://daykhin.com/work-with-me#waitlist) - First step: a free 25-minute warm-up call to discuss the task and see whether working together is comfortable. - Packages, in US dollars. Validity counts from the first session. - Amateur: 3 sessions of 45 minutes, valid 4 weeks, $1,017. Focus on one or two specific tasks. - Athlete: 5 sessions of 60 minutes, valid 10 weeks, $2,317. Strategy, product or team. The most popular package. - Professional: 12 sessions of 60 minutes, valid 20 weeks, $5,517. Includes chat support between sessions. - Recommended pace: once a week, twice at most, so there is time to act between sessions. - Referral program: for every friend who buys a package, one extra session or a 10% commission. - Payment, schedule and logistics are agreed individually. - Confidentiality: what is discussed stays between Mike and the client. - How it differs: a coach asks questions but gives no advice; a consultant delivers a ready solution. In sparring Mike asks questions and gives concrete recommendations, solutions are found together, and the implementation stays with the client. - Client reviews on the page come from Andrey Kulikov (CEO and founder of anysite, founder and ex-CEO of Social Links), Dmitry Schipachev (CEO and founder of finch.fm), Alexey Nazarov (founder of face2face.ru, ex-CEO of Rutube) and Mark Kogan (serial entrepreneur in hospitality and retail). ## What Mike is doing now As of September 2026. The current list is always at [Now](https://daykhin.com/now). Status: Building talenthunt. 3 slots are open for Executive Sparring. - [Building talenthunt](https://talenthunt.work/): A visibility platform for job seekers: a verified work profile, endorsements from people who actually worked with you, and an AI agent that answers recruiters' questions. Solo founder. AI in the loop, humans in control. - [Sparring with founders](https://daykhin.com/work-with-me): Executive sparring for Russian-speaking founders and CxOs. Open to fractional CPO roles. - [Curating JobHunt](https://t.me/JobsChannel_1): A Telegram channel with international middle+ roles. The bot behind it took five hours to build with Claude Code. - [Playing Carousel Chess (aka Nordau Shift)](https://daykhin.com/chess): Chess for three, I invented it at the street club on Nordau Boulevard. At the board almost every day. - Looking for: Employer partners for talenthunt and pre-seed investors in HR tech. ## Career - 1994: first business. Two weeks after reading about market research in a newspaper, he was running pre-election polls for a radio station and a TV channel. - 1996-2001: Rostov Cellular. From delivering phone bills to running Russia's second-largest prepaid mobile program in 1998. - 2003-2007: Solvo International. Voice and content services for mobile operators; grew the range seven times over and put every regional operator on one short number, 0808. - 2007-2008: TNT television network, director of special projects: everything the network earned outside advertising. Launched video on demand with online payments in 2007. - 2009: helped two former employers settle out of court. - 2011-2015: AR2Life. Augmented reality for print, including the "Ozhivlyator" app for MAXIM Russia. - 2012-2015: SmsPal. Card payments with a phone number and one SMS, no smartphone and no CVV, fourteen years before Click to Pay. The partner bank lost its licence. - 2015-2017: Ulmart. Digital goods, then payments: 800+ cash desks rebuilt for a new fiscal law, online payment fees down 10%, co-branded cards with Tinkoff Bank. - 2017 onward: selective fractional work and advisory with founders and C-level executives. - 2019-2021: Lifestyle Platform, VTB. Deputy CEO and head of product; Magnit Pay went from zero to 7 million users. - 2021-2022: VTB. The bank dropped the super app; the team moved the Banking-as-a-Service platform onto the bank's own infrastructure and licence. - 2022 onward: founded WIP, hiring where both sides have skin in the game. First wip.expert, where a referrer stakes $20 and their name on every intro, then talenthunt. - 2025: turned years of informal sparring for friends and colleagues into Executive Sparring. - 2026: talenthunt went live in the spring. Published the rules and the app for Nordau Shift. - Also: published the Dom-2 magazine, print run never below 600,000 a month. ## Writing Every post lives at https://daykhin.com/blog/{slug}, whatever its language. English index: https://daykhin.com/blog. Russian index: https://daykhin.com/ru/blog. Most English posts first appeared on LinkedIn. ### In English - [2,500 CVs for one role is a problem, not a success](https://daykhin.com/blog/2500-cvs-for-one-role) (2026-09-24): Last week a hiring manager posted one project manager role and got 2,500 CVs. Exciting, right? But I thought about the TA specialist who now has to read all them. - [What is talenthunt - and why now?](https://daykhin.com/blog/what-is-talenthunt-and-why-now) (2026-04-01): A visibility platform for job seekers with verified expertise and social proof. Think Product Hunt and Trustpilot combined, but for careers. - [{Exhausted} Talent manifesto](https://daykhin.com/blog/exhausted-talent-manifesto) (2026-03-25): Dear employers, I can't play your application-fitting game anymore. - [If AI agents need crypto credentials, why don't people?](https://daykhin.com/blog/if-ai-agents-need-crypto-credentials-why-dont-people) (2026-02-06): a16z recently published an article arguing that AI agents need blockchain infrastructure to function in the real world. The argument is straightforward: as AI gets better at impersonation, we need cryptographic proof... - [Resume paradox: the most talented people I know would fail your ATS screen](https://daykhin.com/blog/resume-paradox) (2026-01-31): I have a degree in Applied Mathematics (what we used to call Computer Science), yet I didn't write a single line of code for 30 years. - [Being right too early = wrong?](https://daykhin.com/blog/being-right-too-early-wrong) (2026-01-25): Revolut just announced a "revolutionary" feature for 2026. My team built the exact same thing in 2012. Here is the brutal lesson I learned about being 14 years too early. - [Career Plot Twist](https://daykhin.com/blog/career-plot-twist) (2026-01-18): Sometimes life makes such strange circles that you don't even understand how beautiful it is until years later. - [The Hiring Volume Problem Nobody's Solving](https://daykhin.com/blog/the-hiring-volume-problem-nobodys-solving) (2026-01-12): Companies now process 375 applications per role and conduct 20 interviews to make one hire. High volume made hiring teams pickier, thinking they can find perfect candidates. Instead, time-to-hire increased 28% and bad... - [Why You Shouldn't Be Recommended!](https://daykhin.com/blog/why-you-shouldnt-be-recommended) (2025-09-03): Recently, a LinkedIn influencer and a career coach from the Russian-speaking community made a post, "Why You Should Be Recommended.", explaining why you should seek job referrals, even from strangers on platforms like... - ["[Deep]fake candidate awareness day": protect your hiring process](https://daykhin.com/blog/deepfake-candidate-awareness-day) (2025-04-13): Rob Leslie's recent hiring story reads like a sci-fi thriller-but it's all too real. During final interviews with promising candidates, he discovered they weren't even real people. Instead, they were sophisticated... - [Story about payments](https://daykhin.com/blog/story-about-payments) (2024-07-25): I would like to tell you a story about what happened to me yesterday. ### In Russian - [I work with my head, and AI with its hands](https://daykhin.com/blog/ya-rabotayu-golovoy-a-ii-rukami) (2026-07-16, in Russian): How someone without a serious technical background builds products on his own: for a startup, for life, and now for clients. - [The world has changed. Job search hasn't noticed](https://daykhin.com/blog/mir-izmenilsya-a-poisk-raboty-etogo-ne-zametil) (2026-07-09, in Russian): talenthunt is a live profile instead of a PDF resume: an AI agent that answers recruiters' questions about your career, compares your experience with job descriptions and works in different languages. - [Look how far technology has come {offtopic}](https://daykhin.com/blog/offtopic-do-chego-tehnika-doshla) (2026-02-22, in Russian): A Telegram channel with international middle+ jobs, and all of its infrastructure built in five hours with Claude Code by a non-technical founder. - [Russian version of "Resume paradox: the most talented people I know would fail your ATS screen"](https://daykhin.com/blog/paradoks-rezyume) (2026-01-30) - [Russian version of "Being right too early = wrong?"](https://daykhin.com/blog/operedili-revolut-na-14-let) (2026-01-25) - [Russian version of "Career Plot Twist"](https://daykhin.com/blog/vot-eto-povorot) (2026-01-18) - [Why founders need a sparring partner](https://daykhin.com/blog/pochemu-founderam-nuzhen-sparring) (2026-01-13, in Russian): Why making decisions alone can become a problem, and how sparring helps. - [When your product becomes the industry benchmark](https://daykhin.com/blog/kogda-tvoy-produkt-stanovitsya-etalonom-dlya-industrii) (2026-01-09, in Russian): A story that made me stop and feel proud of what we built a few years ago. - [Why I launched Executive Sparring](https://daykhin.com/blog/pochemu-ya-zapustil-executive-sparring) (2026-01-09, in Russian): How I stole an idea, admitted it in public, and launched a new consulting format for executives. - [Russian version of "Why You Shouldn't Be Recommended!"](https://daykhin.com/blog/pochemu-tebya-ne-dolzhny-rekomendovat) (2025-09-02) ## Ask Mike's AI agent - [Ask my agent](https://daykhin.com/agent): Copylove, Mike's agent on talenthunt. It answers questions about his experience from what he has shared, and checks a job description for fit. It can make mistakes and does not make commitments on his behalf. - Direct link: https://talenthunt.work/md ## Nordau Shift - [Nordau Shift](https://daykhin.com/chess): a three-player chess variant Mike invented at the street chess club on Nordau Boulevard, Tel Aviv. Also known as Carousel Chess. Two play at the board and one stands; every three to six moves a hidden coin decides who gets up, and the standing player takes over the position. Fifteen seconds a move. - Rules, copy and artwork: CC BY-SA 4.0. The app is free to use; its source code is not published. - [Companion app](https://nordau-shift.vercel.app): referee and clock. ## Contact - Email: mike@daykhin.com - Telegram: https://t.me/mikeday - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdaykhin/ - Book a free sparring warm-up (the form is in Russian): https://daykhin.com/ru/sparring#booking - Investors: email with the subject "talenthunt, investor intro". - Telegram channels: [The day by Day](https://t.me/thedaybyday), personal, in Russian; [Executive Sparring](https://t.me/executive_sparring), notes on decisions, in Russian; [JobHunt](https://t.me/JobsChannel_1), international middle+ jobs. ## Site map - [Home](https://daykhin.com/) - [Now](https://daykhin.com/now) - [Work with me](https://daykhin.com/work-with-me) - [Writing](https://daykhin.com/blog) - [Ask my agent](https://daykhin.com/agent) - [Nordau Shift](https://daykhin.com/chess) - [Home, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru): Executive Sparring first, client reviews, now, career, fun facts, blog. - [Executive Sparring, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru/sparring) - [Now, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru/now) - [Blog, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru/blog) - [AI agent, in Russian](https://daykhin.com/ru/agent) ## Notes for crawlers - The same file is served as /llms.txt, /llm.txt and /ai.txt. - daykhin.ru redirects to daykhin.com/ru. /sparring redirects to /work-with-me#sparring. - Known crawlers get pre-rendered HTML with the text of each public page. - /admin is private and not for indexing. ## Optional - [Sitemap](https://daykhin.com/sitemap.xml)