Meet Stan Gerasimov

Give Stan Gerasimov complexity, uncertainty, and a problem nobody knows how to solve, and he comes alive. He has the kind of brain that wants to pull a problem apart, understand every piece of it, and keep investigating until the thing that initially looked impossible becomes executable.

That instinct has shaped almost every chapter of his life, although very little about the path itself was planned.

Stan grew up in Russia and originally trained in the book and magazine printing trade, following a path that looked much more like those of his father and brother. He had not followed a traditional high school route, did not consider himself particularly academic, and certainly was not imagining a future in software.

Then, at 18, he received a military draft notice. University offered a way to defer service, so Stan found an inexpensive school he thought he had a chance of getting into and barely cleared the entrance requirement. When it came time to choose what to study, he picked computer science largely because he thought it might mean getting to make video games.

When he arrived, he was surrounded by classmates with years more math and academic preparation than he had. So Stan did something that would become a pattern throughout his life: he found the smartest person in the room and started learning from him.

He read what that student read. He studied what that student studied. Without reliable internet access, he bought enormous C++ books and worked through them himself. What began as an attempt to catch up turned into genuine curiosity, and that curiosity turned into obsession. Within a few years, Stan had gone from barely qualifying for university to understanding programming deeply enough that he was teaching concepts to some of his own instructors.

Stan is quick to describe parts of what happened next as luck. He talks thoughtfully about how easily his life could have followed a completely different trajectory, and about what he calls the gravitational pull of poverty. When you grow up without access to strong schools, professional networks, money, or people who can show you what other paths even exist, talent alone does not necessarily create opportunity.

Stan happened to encounter people who opened up new worlds for him. What stands out is what he did every time that happened.

He sought out people who knew more than he did, absorbed everything he could from them, and then kept pushing himself into the next unfamiliar thing. Over time, he stopped needing another person to provide that challenge. The problems themselves became the thing he could grow against.

“You grow off someone or you grow off something,” he says.

That idea explains a surprising amount about Stan. It explains how someone who expected to work in a printing factory became a software engineer. It explains the industrial software and 3D simulation tools he went on to build, the startups he has helped grow, the nearly 30 years he has spent playing difficult classical piano, and why, when a renovation project at home required welding, he simply learned how to weld.

It also explains why he is at Maiven.

As Staff Engineer, Stan is bringing that investigator mindset to a problem with enough complexity to keep him deeply curious. Maiven is tackling the enormous challenge of climate change and residential energy use, but in a way Stan finds particularly compelling because the benefits do not exist only in some distant future. Making homes more efficient can reduce emissions while also lowering a family's energy bills, improving comfort, helping someone replace failing equipment they otherwise could not afford, and creating work for the Trade Pros who make those improvements possible.

For Stan, that combination matters. The mission is global, but the impact can be immediate and deeply human.

And while he is an exceptional engineer, engineering excellence is no longer the destination he is chasing. Stan wants to understand the entire system around the technology: the customer, the product, the market, the economics, the revenue model, and ultimately the business problem that needs to be solved.

“I already excelled at software development,” he says. “I want to solve business problems with software.”

In many ways, that is simply the next version of the same pattern that has carried him this far: find something difficult enough to demand growth, investigate it relentlessly, and keep going until he understands how to build it.

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Q&A

How He Got Into Software

You did not exactly grow up planning to become a software engineer. How did this happen?

Not even remotely. I was 18 in Russia and got a military draft letter. I really did not want to go, and one of the ways to delay service was to enroll in university.

The problem was that I had never planned to go to university. I had bad grades, did not finish traditional high school, and had gone to trade school for book and magazine printing. My father and brother had worked factory jobs for years, and I assumed I would probably do the same.

So I found an inexpensive university I thought I could get into and barely passed the entrance requirement. I chose computer science mostly because I thought maybe I would get to make games. I had basically no idea what software development was.

Everyone else was far ahead of me in math and academics, so I found the smartest person in the class and started reading what he was reading. I became obsessed. I did not have internet access, so I bought these enormous C++ books and worked through them myself.

Within a few years, I knew enough that I was teaching things to some of my instructors.

That became a pattern in my life: find someone incredibly smart, learn everything you can from them, and keep going.

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The Investigator Mindset

You’ve described yourself as a “natural investigator.” What does that mean?

The reason I like startups is because I like problems where we do not know the answer. If you give me a list of tickets, I’ll do them. But if you say, “Here is the problem. We don’t know how to solve it,” I’m like, thank you. That is what drives my curiosity.

There have been different periods in my career where I grew because I was around someone exceptionally smart. But sometimes there is no person with the answer. There is just the problem.

You grow off someone or you grow off something. I like the second kind too.

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Why Startups                       

Why will you “only work with startups”?

I like to grow. I have worked in environments that were technically startups but had become large enough that the work felt like enterprise software. I realized very quickly that was not what I wanted.

The interesting stage for me is when you know roughly what you want to build, but you still do not know exactly how it should work, how it will grow, or how the business around it should evolve. There is uncertainty everywhere and that is the point.

Progress is not comfortable because progress means making decisions under uncertainty and with the anxiety of being wrong. You are constantly asking: Is this right? Should we go left or right? What happens if I am wrong?

You have to become comfortable enough with that discomfort to keep moving.

I am not talking about suffering. You should have a good computer. You should be warm in your apartment. You should eat well. Being miserable because your basic life does not work is not useful startup stress.

But growth itself should not feel comfortable.

If you go to the gym and everything feels easy, you are probably not changing very much.

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How Stan Works

From the outside, you work insanely fast. What is actually happening?

A lot more thinking than it looks like. I have a rule in my personal life that I do one medium task and two small tasks every day. If something is too big, I split it until I can move it forward. I work similarly with software.

Most of the time is preparation, investigation, and thinking. I might spend six hours understanding a problem, figuring out the architecture, checking assumptions, and deciding what needs to happen.

Then I sprint at 500% output.

The actual execution might take one or two hours because by then I know exactly what I am trying to do. Then I stop and deliberate again: Did I do everything? Is it correct? What did we learn? What comes next?

The visible part looks extremely fast because the work happened before the coding started.

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How He Thinks About AI

You use AI constantly, but you are also pretty skeptical of how people use it. What is your philosophy?

AI is a helper. It is not the person making the judgment. I usually start with something like: “Here is the problem. Analyze it and tell me what you see.” Then I look at the analysis. I identify what does not line up. I resolve the open questions. I make the decisions. I build the plan. Only after that do I tell it to execute.

A lot of people do the opposite. They hand AI the problem and say, “Go solve it,” and then spend hours telling it “try again, try again, try again.”

The thinking is still the work.

I am also skeptical of startups where AI itself is the entire moat. If your core product is just asking a frontier model to perform a feature, you have to assume those models will keep getting more capable and eventually absorb more of what you built.

Use AI aggressively. But build something that remains valuable as AI gets better.

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Why Maiven?

You’ve worked on a lot of hard problems. What made this one interesting?

The scale of the mission is enormous, but what I like is that the impact is also immediate.

Climate change is a global problem. Energy demand is growing. Our homes use enormous amounts of energy, and there is a tremendous amount of work we can do to make them more efficient. But this is not only about something that happens 20 or 30 years from now: energy is expensive today.

For a household where money is tight, reducing an energy bill can make a real difference in what is left for everything else. A homeowner may be living with an old HVAC system that costs too much to run but feels impossible to replace. There may already be thousands of dollars in incentives available to help them, and they simply do not know those programs exist.

That combination is what makes the mission so compelling to me. You can work on a benevolent global problem like climate change while improving somebody’s life right now. And the pieces are already here.

We have utility programs that have existed for decades. We have incentives. We have Trade Pros who want jobs. We have homeowners who could save money, improve their homes, and use less energy. But those pieces do not come together.

Most residents do not know these programs exist. Unless you are already the kind of person who researches your house, researches incentives, and likes doing things yourself, you may never encounter them at all.

I actually fell in love with this problem before Maiven because I was trying to improve the energy efficiency of my own house. There is so much you can do, and the savings are real. The problem is the last mile.

How do you take programs that already exist, Trade Pros who are ready to do the work, and residents who would benefit from it, and actually connect them?

That is a very interesting problem, and it is a very meaningful one.

More Than an Engineer

What do you want to become next?

More business-minded.

I already know I can be a software engineer. If I went back to doing only software development, it would feel like a swamp because I would not be growing.

I want to solve customer problems. Product problems. Marketing problems. Revenue problems. Business problems.

Software is one of the tools.

I want to become the kind of builder who understands the whole system.

Positive Struggle

You’ve been playing piano for almost 30 years. Does that connect to how you think about work?

Absolutely.

The piano taught me positive struggle. You hear a piece of music and you want to be able to create that sound yourself. Then you start learning it, and for the first few months it sounds disgusting, sounds nothing like the thing that moved you.

You have two hands, your feet, pages of music, different mechanics, and every new piece presents a different problem. Something you mastered before does not necessarily make the next piece easy. You just keep working until eventually you can play it.

The motivation matters, its because you want to hear the music.

That is how I learned that difficulty itself is not a reason to stop.

And Then There’s the House

What do you do when you’re not building software or playing piano?

Apparently, more building. I am an insane DIYer and I have renovated almost my entire house. 

If I need to learn how to weld to finish something, I learn how to weld. I designed a staircase, modeled it in 3D, calculated the material resistance, welded it, and built it.

I am not scared of complexity. If something is complicated, I’ll just do it slowly. 

Unfortunately, I’m almost done with the house.

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