Oleg Rogynskyy has come a long way, literally and figuratively. The San Francisco-based Ukraine native is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of People.ai, an AI data platform for go-to-market teams, which is a commendable achievement at any age, but just the latest career highlight for someone who was accepted to Boston University from halfway across the world at age 15.
“For a young man who had grown up reading adventure books and spending summers outdoors in the Ukrainian countryside,” reads his bio, “starting the next chapter of his life in America made perfect sense.” He wasn’t even proficient in English yet when he started taking classes at BU, but it hardly mattered. He was, even then, living what he called his “two core principles”: “Do your homework” and “move without hesitation.”
The second principle—moving without hesitation—is one Rogynskyy has embodied, and for which he has shown his work. He founded text analysis company Semantria in 2011 and stewarded it until it was purchased by Lexalytics in 2014. Two years later, he founded People.ai, making a huge early bet on artificial intelligence that, it’s safe to say, has paid off. He was doing podcasts about AI’s potential in 2019. That’s probably why many of his early customers came to him looking to “future-proof” their businesses, as he recalled using a sports analogy.
“Take the story of ‘Moneyball’ and the Oakland Athletics,” he said. “How did the baseball teams that did not collect the data feel when they were playing against the Oakland A's? As a long time baseball manager once told me, playing the A’s back then felt like showing up on a bicycle to a Formula 1 race.”
For nearly a decade now, People.ai has been far more Max Verstappen than Miguel Indurain, cutting through the early days of AI with the dexterity of the world’s best driver. A fitting metaphor, as Rogynskyy looks to self-driving cars as the bellwether for AI capabilities, and he believes a true breakthrough is just around the corner.
“It's scary, but I believe it's inevitable,” he said. “And if we think back to people who were scared of cars and just wanted to keep riding their horses everywhere. Were they able to keep up with their competitors who were now driving around? Or companies who didn't take the internet seriously. Netflix ditched the horse. Blockbuster did not."
Rogynskyy has long since ditched the horse. It’s how he’s come so far, so fast. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for sure: he’ll be there.
