Imperial College London, 2024 to 2025

I read for an MSc in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management at Imperial College London from 2024 to 2025, while SmartUP Innovations was running and had a team of 10.

The order matters. I did not do the degree and then start a company. I had been running one for 3 years, had made a set of decisions I could not fully justify, and went looking for the vocabulary and the instruments to justify or reject them.

The coursework

Three parts of the programme did the most work for me.

Strategic Management. The useful part was not the frameworks themselves but the discipline of stating a position and then arguing against it. As a founder you accumulate a set of beliefs about your market that were true when you formed them and are rarely re-examined, because everyday work never asks you to. A strategy course asks constantly, in front of people with no stake in your being right.

Managerial Economics. The most directly applicable of the three. Pricing, marginal reasoning and the question of what a decision actually costs once you count the option you gave up. Running a company that both builds a product and sells product management and marketing services is a continuous allocation problem: every hour of the team is spent on one of the two. Having a proper apparatus for that question changed how I answered it.

Technology and Innovation Development. The one closest to the product. How a technology moves from something that demonstrably works to something people adopt, and how much of the gap between those two states is a technical problem rather than a product one. In our case the answer is: less than you would hope. Getting a model to identify a consequential clause and getting a reader to trust the highlight are different problems, and only the first is engineering.

What it did not do

It did not tell me what to build. Nothing in a course can, and a programme that promised it would be selling something else. What it gave me was a way to interrogate decisions I was already making, and a room full of people who would push back on them without a stake in the answer. For a founder, that second thing is scarce and hard to manufacture inside your own company, where everyone's incentives point at agreement.

The pattern is one I would repeat. I took Apple Search Ads Marketing certification in June 2024 the same way: because I was already responsible for the thing, not in the hope of becoming responsible for it later. Formal study earns its keep when it arrives after the responsibility, not instead of it.

Before Imperial

I read Journalism at City, University of London, from 2020 to 2024, with coursework in Statistics, Data Journalism and Business Journalism. Data journalism is closer to product work than the two names suggest: both consist of taking a dataset that does not want to answer your question and refusing to publish until it says something you can defend. I also hold a BBA from the School of Business at Belarusian State University, studied from 2017 to 2021.

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