I DON’T KNOW IF THIS IS A SUCCESS STORY

Maybe one day I’ll be able to answer that question. But right now, it feels more honest not to judge my life that way at all.

I made my first million and signed contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. There were big houses, expensive apartments, a Rolls-Royce, first class, and a time when I could buy almost anything I wanted without thinking much about the price.

But there were other things too.

War and the deaths of friends. Affairs with other women while I was married. The fear of being exposed and living a double life. A phone call telling me that my son was gone. Losing a business, money, reputation, and people I once considered friends. The shame of no longer matching the image of a successful man that I had spent years building.

And a year ago, I was given a diagnosis that doctors described as life-threatening.

So I don’t want to tell a success story.

I want to tell the story of the journey honestly. What happens to a person between the moments that people later call victories and failures.

And how sometimes you get almost everything you once wanted, only to discover that somehow, you are not any happier.

I was born in a small town in the Soviet Union. At 17, I left my parents’ home and moved to Israel.

I wanted to start my own life. Make my own decisions, make my own mistakes, and take responsibility for the consequences.

At 18, I volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, in a combat unit.

Three years of service. Serious preparation for combat zones. A massive rocket attack, a concussion, a hospital.

And friends who died.

I think that was the first time I seriously asked myself: what price does a person have the right to pay to achieve a goal?

I was barely over twenty. I tried to understand what we were fighting for. Why the road to peace so often goes through war. Who decides how many human lives are an acceptable price for victory.

I had no answers.

But even then, something inside me began to understand that not every goal justifies the way we achieve it.

After the army, I worked in different industries. Much of my work was connected to marketing, sales, negotiations, and communication.

I quickly realized that I was good with people. Talking, negotiating, selling, and connecting people and ideas came naturally to me. I could become deeply excited about something and pass that energy to others.

Then I met the woman who became my wife. We had children.

And I had a pretty simple dream.

I wanted to build a life with the family I loved. Give my children a good life, show them the world, build capital, and one day leave something meaningful behind.

In 2008, I started my first serious business.

Then came the first major contract. Tens of millions of dollars.

Then my first million.

I remember the feeling very clearly. It wasn’t really euphoria. It was more like an internal thought:

I think I made it.

The company grew. We were making millions of dollars a year. I kept moving to more expensive neighborhoods. In 2013, I moved my family to Miami.

Our life became more and more expensive. Bigger homes, expensive cars, a Rolls-Royce, travel, great hotels, first class.

At first, I wanted money so I could build a life.

Over time, money became proof that my life was successful.

If the business was growing, I was successful. If my capital was growing, I must be making the right decisions. If I could give my family more, I was a good husband and father. If I could afford almost anything, I was free.

I truly believed that money could solve almost any problem.

Including the problem of happiness.

Then something happened that I never expected.

The more I could afford, the less happy I became.

By 2014–2018, my life probably looked very successful from the outside.

Inside, I was getting worse.

I felt lonely. I was moving further and further away from my family.

And I don’t want to hide behind the comfortable phrase, “we had problems in our marriage.”

I had affairs.

I cheated on my wife.

I betrayed her trust.

There were secrets, a double life, and constant tension from knowing that one day everything could be exposed.

For a long time, I managed to explain what was happening with almost anything except my own decisions.

I thought the problem was the marriage. My wife. The limits of family life. I thought I simply didn’t have enough freedom.

I seriously thought about divorce. I imagined another woman, another life, sometimes even another family.

I could actually look at Nataly and think: maybe this relationship is the reason I’m not happy.

It is uncomfortable to admit that now. But if I’m going to tell this story honestly, these are exactly the things I cannot leave out.

Years later, I understood something unpleasant: you can change the country, the house, the car, the woman, the business, and the people around you. But if the source of the problem is inside you, you will bring it with you into every new life you try to build.

The hardest part of that period probably wasn’t even the affairs themselves.

The hardest part was watching myself slowly become someone I never wanted to be.

Living next to the people you love while hiding things from them. Telling yourself that you are looking for freedom, while actually becoming a prisoner of your own secrets and your fear of being exposed.

You have almost everything you once thought you needed to be happy.

And with your own decisions, you are destroying the very thing you once wanted to earn all that money for.

I remember one image from those years very clearly.

Lufthansa. Seat 1A.

First class. The best seat. Somewhere between Miami, another business trip, a big house, and another beautiful hotel.

From the outside, it looked like success.

Today I see the irony of that picture.

A man is sitting in first class. The world may think he is successful.

And he understands less and less where he is actually going.

By 2018, I had a very simple and very uncomfortable question:

How can you have so much and still be so unhappy?

I looked at Nataly and saw that she was unhappy too. She didn’t know where I was, who I was with, who I was thinking about, or what was really happening inside me.

The man who once dreamed of building a family was moving further and further away from it.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me either.

And then none of it mattered anymore.

In 2019, I was on a business trip in Germany.

Nataly called me.

Our son had fallen off a skateboard and hit his head. His heart was not beating.

And I heard:

“Max, our son is dead.”

My legs gave out. I couldn’t stand.

For the next few minutes, until the next phone call, I lived in a world where my child no longer existed.

That was the real reset.

Not philosophical. Not intellectual.

Everything else simply lost its value.

The first million. Cars. Houses. Businesses. Deals. Status. The entire picture of success I had spent years building.

None of it was worth anything in that moment.

There was only one thought in my head: my son is gone.

A little later, Nataly called again. The paramedics had managed to revive him.

He was alive.

I took the first flight back to Miami.

I remember the hospital. Nataly crying. My son lying in the bed. At that point, he still couldn’t speak after the injury.

But his heart was beating.

Today he is an adult.

And sometimes when I look at him, I remember those few minutes. The world in which he exists. And the other world that, for a short time, became real for me.

Some things can be understood from books.

But there are lessons life does not explain.

It simply makes you live through them.

After that, the way I looked at business started to change.

It started to change — not overnight.

I don’t believe in beautiful stories about one tragedy suddenly making someone a completely different person.

That is usually not how it works.

You can understand something deeply and still keep living the old way for a long time. Awareness alone does not free us from our patterns.

But a new question started bothering me.

Is it enough for a business to be profitable?

If a company makes millions but what it does ultimately makes human life worse, can I really call that business successful?

And suddenly, my military experience came back to me.

When I was young, I tried to understand why the road to peace went through war.

Years later, as a businessman, I asked myself another question: do I personally want to make money from an industry whose final result may be another person’s death?

I was a co-owner of a business connected to military manufacturing.

I left it.

Not because it stopped making money.

Profit had simply stopped being enough of a reason for me to stay.

I added another test for business: what happens to people because of what we create?

Not only how much money we make.

But what human price comes with that profit.

Then COVID came.

And suddenly almost all of humanity found itself in a situation with no clear playbook.

Governments, corporations, universities, scientists. Billions of people.

Fear. Closed borders. Lost jobs. Loneliness. No one really knowing what tomorrow would look like.

One paradox struck me more than anything.

We had built the most powerful communication tools in human history. You could reach someone on the other side of the planet in seconds.

And yet huge numbers of people felt completely alone.

During that period, I decided to invest a significant part of the capital I had earned into an international technology project.

I wanted to build a business that would not see a person only as a customer or something to monetize. I wanted a system where people could communicate, create, develop, unlock their potential, and earn money.

That became Yolllo.

And it became one of the most expensive lessons of my life.

Not only financially.

I trusted people. Sometimes too much. I gave second chances. I believed that a strong idea and a shared mission could unite people more than personal interests could divide them.

I was wrong.

But it would be too convenient for me to write today: “I simply trusted the wrong people.”

No.

I was a founder.

I chose people. I was part of the decision-making. I trusted. I failed to see some risks early enough. I allowed some things to continue longer than they should have.

So however legal responsibility for specific events is ultimately determined, there is one part of the responsibility I am not going to run from.

Mine.

The company had to stop operating. People lost money. I lost a significant part of my own capital. Legal proceedings began and are still continuing. My reputation suffered.

And I cannot blame people who asked me:

“You were there. You were part of that business. Why should we trust you?”

It is a very uncomfortable question.

Especially when, for legal reasons, you cannot publicly discuss much of what happened inside the company.

But over time, I understood that the most expensive lesson was not that people cannot be trusted.

You cannot build a great company without trust.

The lesson was different: trust does not replace proper governance, controls, verification, and clear accountability.

Good intentions do not excuse a founder from the responsibility to protect the company from their own mistakes.

Then everything else started to change.

A large part of our financial comfort disappeared.

And very quickly, our circle started changing too.

Some people simply stopped calling. Some of those who once called themselves my friends disappeared.

Things that once felt normal became luxuries. Travel stopped being something we could decide to do spontaneously. We had to move from a big house to a much more affordable place. At some point, you find yourself discussing purchases whose prices you would barely have noticed a few years earlier.

And that is when I discovered something successful people don’t talk about very often.

Losing money is hard.

But sometimes losing status is even harder.

Because when the money disappears, your sense of who you are starts to crack too.

Recently, when we were moving from a big house into a much more modest place, Nataly said to me:

“Max, I don’t want people to know. I’m ashamed that we can’t afford it anymore.”

I understood her very well.

Because I felt something similar.

That was when I saw something painful.

For years, we had not only been buying comfort.

We were buying an identity.

The house, the car, the travel, the ability not to look at prices. All of it said something about who we were.

And then it started to disappear.

Who are we when all of that is gone?

Then something happened that I did not expect at all.

When we had less money, my family became stronger.

The woman I once cheated on and once thought about leaving is now one of the closest people in my life.

Not because we somehow became a perfect couple.

We simply learned to talk about the things we used to avoid.

We no longer need to present a polished version of our relationship to each other. We can talk about fears, desires, money, mistakes, and things that once felt too dangerous to discuss.

Our children have grown up.

They work. They understand the value of money. They have their own views, and those views do not always match mine.

We can argue. We can disagree.

But we can be honest.

My idea of legacy has changed too.

I used to think mostly about the capital I could leave to my children.

Now it matters much more to me to leave them the ability to think for themselves, to question, make decisions, take responsibility for the consequences, adapt, recover from failure, and start again.

And one day, to no longer need my answers at all.

In August 2025, I was reminded again, very directly, that none of this lasts forever.

I ended up in the hospital.

I was given a diagnosis that doctors described as life-threatening. They talked about serious risks, restrictions, and the possibility that I might have to build the rest of my life around that diagnosis.

It was not the first time death had come close enough to stop being a philosophical idea for me.

I thought again: if the number of my days is truly limited, what do I want to spend them on?

I could not change the diagnosis.

But I could decide whether it would become the center of my life.

I decided it would not.

I kept working. I kept building. I kept living.

A year later, follow-up tests showed a recovery that, at the time, I could only hope for.

I don’t want to turn this into a medical theory or tell anyone how to treat their health. This is only my experience.

But it reminded me again of a principle I have tried to practice for years: see facts for what they are, then honestly separate what you can influence from what you cannot.

The diagnosis was a fact.

What I would do with my life after it was my decision.

In 2026, this story still has no beautiful ending.

And maybe that is exactly why I decided to tell it now instead of waiting until everything ends in victory and I can neatly explain the past with the benefit of hindsight.

The legal proceedings are still ongoing.

There is a past I cannot erase my responsibility for.

There are people whose trust I may never win back.

There is Beeezo, which we still have to turn into the large company we believe it can become.

There are financial limitations and a lot of uncertainty.

I am not standing on top of a mountain holding a victory flag.

I’m still in the middle of it.

But there is one paradox that means a lot to me today.

When I had much more money, I often woke up unhappy.

My life is objectively more difficult now.

And I wake up smiling much more often.

That does not mean I have given up ambition.

I want to build a large international company. I want scale. Capital. Influence. I want to make the ideas I believe in real.

I am still deeply ambitious.

But now, next to the question “How big can this become?” there is always another one:

What exactly are we scaling, and what will happen to people if we succeed?

That is probably why I am starting this series here, in Transhumanism.

We are investing enormous amounts of money into one question: what else will machines be able to do?

I keep coming back to another one:

What will happen to people as a result?

For me, transhumanism has never been only about technology.

It is about what it means to be human in a world of increasingly powerful technology. About what we want to strengthen in ourselves, what we want to preserve, and why we are building these tools in the first place.

Technology can make us faster, stronger, smarter, and richer.

But it still cannot answer the simplest question for us:

Why?

Maybe that is also why I want to tell this story.

Not because I think I am an example to follow.

And definitely not because I have found the answers.

I am still trying to understand what it means to be a strong person. A husband. A father. A founder.

I used to think a strong person was someone who could make enough money.

Then I decided that strength meant being able to get back up after any hit and keep going.

Now I am not even sure about that anymore.

Because if you keep falling and you are excellent at getting back up, at some point you need the courage to ask yourself:

Why do you keep falling?

How much of the crisis was created by circumstances? How much by other people? And how much did you create yourself?

I think that is one of the most uncomfortable questions a person can ask.

But maybe the next level of strength begins there.

Not when you learn how to get back up after every fall.

But when you understand yourself well enough to stop creating some of those falls in the first place.

That is the journey I want to write about.

Without trying to look better than I am. Without trying to make myself easy for everyone to accept. And without rewriting the past so that the person I am today always looks right in it.

I don’t want to keep maintaining a polished version of myself.

Life is too short for that.

In the next chapter, I’ll go back to 2008.

To the moment when I landed my first major contract, made my first million, and honestly believed I had finally understood how life worked.

I truly believed then: if you make enough money, everything else will fall into place.