IVAN TERTYCHNYY

San Francisco, CA

Hi, my name is Ivan Tertychnyy! I'm deeply passionate about building efficient companies — creating products and systems that make companies run: the internal tools, automations, and operational infrastructure that most people never see but everyone depends on. I started in research, working on my PhD in distributed computing systems at CERN (papers in /publications).

I founded ChatFirst, one of the first enterprise AI agent platforms in the HR tech space, and bootstrapped it for 6 years to serve S&P 100 clients with a team of 10. Since then I've led operations end-to-end at 360Dialog, ElectroNeek (YC W20) and TraceAir (500 alum) — rebuilding how departments actually work and turning manual processes into software.

Right now I'm building Sopos (see sopos.url), a platform that helps operational teams automate their own workflows. I also co-founded the Burning Heroes Founders Association (burning-heroes.url) and occasionally write about AI and operations — fresh copies land in /articles.