Hey guys, it's sasha, i always get really entertained by these kinds of videos about other youtubers, especially when somebody goes and tries to go and make a big video telling you everything about them is a lie and they're a fraudster and they're making everything up about their Background so now that i managed to go and get my 10 000 subscribers a few days ago and have moved from official noob to beginner youtuber status. I thought why, wouldn't i go and make exactly the same video about myself just so that people can know exactly what my background is before somebody else comes along and tells you that it is complete fabrication and completely untrue. Also, it means that by the time that those people do come and make that video, this one will hopefully be higher than that video in the search rankings. So there's that as well but anyway, jokes aside, let me tell you about my background.

Starting from the beginning, i was born and grew up in moscow. First in the soviet union, then in russia. I made some notes here so that i don't go too far off track. So excuse me for looking at them.

I moved to uk in 1999. First i started at school, then i went to university. I studied mathematics at oxford university, which is also, incidentally, where i met my wife and after that we decided to go and move to nottingham and uk, where i started to work for a company called capital one. This is a big u.s bank that in uk focuses on credit cards.

I didn't really specifically try to get into the world of finance or try to get into retail banking. It just kind of happened. That way. I had several different offers and i happened to choose this one at capital, one.

I worked on product design, risk financial modeling and worked for a segment towards the end in marketing. Unfortunately, while working in capital one during the last financial crisis, i had one of those situations where, with 10 minutes notice, i got a 10 minute meeting penciled into my diary with my director and shortly after that. Video me, along with pretty much every single other person who worked in the marketing team at the time we spend the rest of the day in the pub drinking, with our cardboard boxes, full of our personal possessions. Anyway.

After doing that, i went and joined a company called empower, so my job there was building models to forecast the demand for electricity and gas, starting from short-term to very long-term outcomes and the combination of different things kind of that flew out of the back of that Which was forecasting what power plants need to be operated when turning off and on various wind farms and stuff through to trading and implications on being able to open and close certain positions. A combination of different reasons led me to move from there to bank of america, which, in the uk, is much better known under the brand that they operated under, which is called mbna again. This was mostly a credit card business, mostly because i already had the experience from working in capital one, but they also dabbled in a few other project, uh products as well. I worked on strategy and that kind of underpinned everything from the acquisition in terms of deciding which customers get in and which ones do not, and why and how all those processes work to how do the existing customers get treated? What offers are put in front of them? How does the strategy behind all these products work so all of those kind of things together after doing that for a couple years, or so, i left to start up an online travel business called lazy trips.

There is a lot to talk about what led me to do that and what i wanted to do that and i probably need to make a whole separate video that i'm going to release at some point talking about the details. The objective was to sort of build a mix of a community with travel planning with some other related features within the same thing, it sort of was a type of thing that maybe you're more familiar with from some big brands, which was a long time ago before All these brands really existed before they actually developed into what people know them for today. Anyway, i was working the platform and it was doing really really well and i was really excited, but i had only been doing it for i think, six or seven months at the point when i received a call from a company called suv credit. This was a tiny, tiny company.

I think it was something like 35 people in a tiny office in the middle of nowhere in kent, and they had massive ambitions. They just got bought out by a private company called varde partners, and they wanted to go and become a big time credit card company and for a combination, different personal reasons, as well as just being really excited about the opportunity to go and do really big things. There and the fact that my travel business would take quite some time to get to profitability. I decided that this was a really awesome opportunity, and so i went over there and that was really really exciting.

Today, this company is really big, they're known as new day and during my time there the company really exploded. I was looking after strategy, so everything from designing the original products, literally everything about how they work, how the acquisition process works, how the marketing processes work, deciding how existing customers are treated. Everything about the strategy, working financial planning and pretty much everything in between it was an incredibly busy time some acquisition work as well, but anyway, i managed to get this opportunity to do things really really quickly over there compared to working for some huge banks before and That's what kind of i think, probably set me up for some of the things i came to do later in my career. So then something really interesting happened.

I joined a company called phones for you as a director three months before that company collapsed, not the best decision, career-wise i've ever made, but for the first time i had to go and make a decision as to what i wanted to do with my life. This is the second point i was going through something like this um. As you might recall, i decided that i'll go and start a strategy, consulting business which would help banks and financial services companies with designing products, bringing them to market and making them really work. For the bank or the business themselves as well in terms of the commercials, that's kind of what i did and i learned a lot about working in various different places before and what i sort of became reasonably good at.

I guess probably working through various different from small companies to big companies and in various different uh parts of those companies from marketing to credit risk to financial planning, to whatever it was operations. I've kind of done that in my previous job. So that's why i started, and i started this company called strategy desk and i've been doing that running that business since late in 2014 and i've loved a lot about it. But my problem has been that i am not your natural consultant.

I am not the kind of bubbly guy who goes out there meeting everyone for coffee all the time who takes people out for dinners all the time and that's what you have to do. That's 90 percent of the work of a person running a consulting business because, unfortunately nobody really cares about how good your work is. When you're going to find that next project, you have to go and do the sell. That is what you kind of have to do to grow these types of businesses and i'm not the schmoozing type, i'm not that kind of person.

So i was always thinking like what is the next step. What is the next progression with this and don't get me wrong? The client list for strategy desk has been super impressive. You know some of our biggest clients companies, like mastercard, hsbc royal bank of scotland - tesco there's a lot of really big names in uk and around the world and i'm really really proud of what we've achieved as a company but first brexit, and then everything that happened During 2020 sort of accelerated, my thinking and kind of forced me to really quickly rethink what i wanted to do with my life and how i wanted to actually go and progress from there so a few days into lockdown. Last year i started this youtube channel and knowing absolutely nothing about youtube and having never really filmed a video before which kind of shows in my early videos, but i also in parallel with that started working on my blogging and generally building this online content business.

As a thing that i wanted to go and move towards in the process, i've had to massively change how i work and what i do. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, i've actually done very little in terms of content. You might have noticed that i've been missing out on videos. Not only have i not been doing three a day.

I've been missing on making videos for several days in a row, and the reason for that is i've actually been really busy. Closing down the big london office, i've been selling furniture, computers, monitors, cleaning, stuff, shredding, stuff, uh filling in holes and walls painting all of that fun kind of activity. That's what i've been up to our office leases up and my plan is for this online content business to be my full-time business, and i wanted to achieve this during the course of 2021. I had some expectations of how it's going to go and i was hoping that by the end of the year, it would sort of get to a place where it was viable to be my full-time business.

But over the last couple of months this online content business has been doing much much better than i expected and it is continuing to grow and do even better than that, and so i am really going all in. If you want to find out exactly what i am doing, what's working all the financials everything about the strategy, i'm employing make sure you're going to sign up to my second channel, which is called the sasha yanchen story. That's where i talk about all of those things. That's the entire purpose of that channel, and so my ambition now is from march to begin going all in and going really really hard on the content.

So if you haven't subscribed yet make sure you subscribe to this channel and the other one and we're gon na be going really really hard from march, so expect a lot of really interesting stuff. Thank you very much for watching. I really really appreciate it as always, and i'll see you guys later, you.