Who the f*** is Doni?

It was a long path before I met you all at Aaltoes. So for everyone asking about the track record, or just in general about who the hell Doni is, hopefully this material will help.

I was born in Uralsk, a mid-sized eastern-european town in northwestern Kazakhstan which is closer to Helsinki than to Almaty, the biggest city in southeastern Kazakhstan. Like most boys in Uralsk, my childhood was simple: studies and playing video games or football with friends. Life was carefree until age 7, when my parents enrolled me in checkers school.

First Asian Championship game with Chinese colleague

Yes, checkers—not chess. For seven years, from age 7 to 14, I played professional checkers, spending hours daily in front of black and white tiles. The impact was immense: rigorous training sessions, 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, under a coach who valued skill over status. This intense environment propelled 20 kids from our small town to rank high internationally; I personally became an Asian champion, for which I am grateful for my coach.

At 13, I was admitted to a new school in town that competitively selected top students from the region — think of it as Kazakhstan's version of Päivölä or Ressu, but with 14 branches nationwide. These schools had huge budgets, allowing for innovative extracurriculars like robotics.

By chance, Uralsk Robotics between 2013 and 2020 became the strongest in the country. The first generation, led by an American coach, dominated nationally but didn't have time to excel internationally. Our generation started in 2016, standing on their shoulders. We cemented our town's status by winning 5 out of 7 gold medals nationally and placing 4th in the World Olympiad—the club's best result. From 2018 to 2020, I coached to achieve the dream of Kazakh champions, but we only reached third place.

Uralsk-Kazakhstan Robotics Team 2017 at World Robot Olympiad in Costa Rica

Robotics wasn't just about competitions; it was a community where sparks didn't get lost. Talented kids found like-minded peers, and interests extended beyond robots. I was also a freelance designer; others were videographers or dancers.

Then the turn came to startups.

In 2017, my friend Yerzhan, often on Reddit and programming forums, introduced me to startups. He was excited about Y Combinator, where Sam Altman was in charge at the time. He had an idea for a project to rate services based on emotion recognition. He needed a designer.

- "So, how are you going to get emotions data?" I asked.

- "TensorFlow," he replied.

- "What?"

- "Machine learning!"

Team Mojidet

That's how a group of 16-year-olds from the robotics club started their AI startup in 2018.

We applied to YC Startup School 2018, preparing for YC W19. Back then, Startup School wasn't just online but included supervisors from YC alumni. We, without even the legal right to register a company in Kazakhstan, were being mentored alongside adult entrepreneurs, following the prominent Silicon Valley startup development model. The general calls on progress in our SuS group were even funnier to observe — since Uralsk is in the same timezone as Mumbai and Delhi, we 15-year-old newbies were having calls alongside overnight YC guys and about twenty Indian 30-year-old entrepreneurs.

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PG and Sama were puking on this one

Note: in Finland, exactly during that time, the newly born Meru Health by Kristian Ranta was getting accepted to YC.

We received perks like $35k from DigitalOcean and support from Stripe. Though we weren't accepted to YC (for some obvious reasons), our project, Mojidet, scaled well. In one year we received an offer to implement it in regional public service points. The mayor was pleased, and officials were eager to adopt it cheaply and gain government subsidies. We were even accepted to the first heavily funded startup accelerator Astana Hub in 2018 which just founded during that year, extending our network reach beyond Uralsk. Young boys did not plan to shoot for stars to land on the moon, but just looked down, and started solving problems here on the ground. And it was more than enough.

Presentation to the Mayor and Deputy PM Kulginov

Another friend, who is currently studying in UC Berkeley, was involved in LaunchX by MIT, and together we were promoting entrepreneurship to our whole school.

Defending GDPR values to the press

But after an article by MoiGorod Uralsk - the #1 newsletter in the city - the public raised concerns over privacy and security, especially from technology made by 16-year-olds. We decided to move on.

COVID hit during my final school year, derailing my U.S. college applications. I took a gap year to work in robotics in Almaty, with brilliant peers there who also took a gap year. The work was hectic - we went through a lot of political and economical challenges to make robotics in Kazakhstan from 1 to 1000, and even worked through a national coup attempt in January 2022, with tanks on the streets.

How it started:

Yet by September 2022, we produced Kazakhstan's first international champion in robotics, beating teams from the U.S., China, Germany, and Russia. The long awaited dream has been achieved. The success of it is still echoing to this year - Kazakhstani students remain unbeatable for three years in a row now.

And how it is going,

and going,

and going…

During the unrest, I decided to reach for a more stable and safe place. That's how, I finally got to Finland. Why Finland? It was the best option after the U.S.—straightforward, no-nonsense, direct, and humble attitudes.

Plus, I'm a diehard fan of Linus Torvalds!

In Finland, I met Yerzhan again, who was excited about a society called Aaltoes. Soon, the SILTA guys gave me a chance to create something new, where I am still doing my contributions to enhancing the Finnish ecosystem.

The rest is happening now.