Before becoming a venture investor, Dmitry Alimov spent years actually building media businesses, including turning around TNT in his mid-20s and later co-founding IVI, which grew into a leading legal video platform for Russian-speaking audiences—experience that also included publicly challenging a well-known macro investor's claims with detailed facts while at Harvard, a moment later covered by The New Yorker. That operator background carries into how he invests today: he writes directly for founders about how AI is changing what it takes for a startup to survive, giving him credibility with non-technical founders trying to make sense of the shift.