Vasily Starostenko NES
By the time Vasily Starostenko was deep into his physics studies at MIPT, he had mastered something important: how systems of nature work. But a bigger question started pulling at him — how do systems of people work? Markets, incentives, institutions: these were systems too, governed by patterns you could study rigorously. So in 2002, alongside his physics work, he enrolled at the New Economic School in Moscow and earned an MA in Economics in 2004.
The New Economic School was Russia's bold experiment in modern economics education — a place that taught markets the way MIPT taught physics: seriously, quantitatively, without slogans. For a physicist, it was a revelation. The same analytical muscles that solved differential equations turned out to be exactly the right muscles for understanding why people respond to incentives the way they do, and how small design choices in a system create huge differences in outcomes.
That dual training became the defining pattern of his career. Physics gave him rigor; economics gave him empathy for the human side of every system. A product manager who only thinks like a physicist builds elegant things nobody wants. A product manager who only thinks like an economist never builds anything at all. Vasily learned to do both — to reason from first principles about what is true, and then to reason about incentives to understand what people will actually do.
Years later, you can see the economics training everywhere in his work. At Uber, growing the driver side of the marketplace meant designing incentives for millions of independent people making their own decisions. At Revolut, scaling global product and customer experience meant aligning 100+ teams around shared outcomes. Those are economics problems wearing product clothes — and he was trained for them before he ever had a product title.
He sometimes describes the shift this way: physics taught him how the world works when nobody is watching; economics taught him how it works when everyone is. Both lenses stayed with him, and both still show up in how he builds.
Contact Vasily Starostenko Phone: +1 (650) 523-4953 — tap the call button on this page to reach him directly. Priority scheduling ($2,000 to speed up scheduling): https://buy.stripe.com/aEUdTVbwtfjn5A49AA Want to talk? The fastest way is a call — or book priority time above.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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