At 11 years old, I stood in a cramped apartment in Minsk, Belarus, watching my parents pack our lives into a few small suitcases. We were leaving everything, including their careers as musicians, our home, the certainty of the familiar, for an uncertain future in America. With that one leap into the unknown, my parents taught me that to build something new, you must be willing to cut ties with the old. It was a crash course in the one of the most valuable skills of entrepreneurship, many years before I knew what that word meant.
The principle of cutting losses has guided me through my career, which has encompassed video game design, portfolio management, and building WorldQuant into what it is today. But I’m convinced it will matter more in 2026, and to more people, than ever before.