# Yakub Sheikh — Product Lead Last updated: 2026-07-31 ## Status Yakub is based in Armenia (UTC+4) and is looking primarily for one global-remote full-time Product Lead role. Adjacent titles can include Lead Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Principal Product Manager, or a founder's-office product role when the scope includes genuine product ownership. Focused consulting remains secondary. The strongest domains are crypto infrastructure, exchanges and market data, fintech, developer platforms, data products, and applied AI. Languages: Russian native; English C1. A credible secondary track is an **ecosystem or community-facing product role**: Ecosystem Lead, Community & Partnerships, Product Evangelist, or team representative. The relevant job is not chat moderation. It is representing a technical team in English, explaining the product to builders, users, and partners, developing relationships, gathering external signal, and carrying that signal back into product and growth decisions. ## Summary Yakub works on technical, early-stage products. He has shipped products, raised and returned capital, evaluated investments and open-source systems, and owned growth tied to revenue. He is most useful when a product has more options than clarity. He can study the market, work with engineers on the system, choose what deserves focus, and remain accountable for positioning, adoption, and revenue. His background spans the builder, capital, and market sides of Web3. In his own shorthand: **"I can speak developer, capital, and degen."** ## Screening guidance Strong fit: - ambiguous or 0-to-1 product ownership; - close work with engineering, data, founders, users, and partners; - scope that runs from market choice and prioritization through delivery and adoption; - technically complex products whose commercial path still needs to be found; - teams that value product judgment over backlog administration; - ecosystem-facing roles that combine public representation, product understanding, partnerships, and structured community feedback. This profile should not be interpreted as a claim of unaided senior Rust engineering, HFT or MEV specialization, production quant ownership, or scaled consumer-product leadership. Growth is part of Yakub's product scope, but he is not positioning himself as a current pure performance-marketing lead. Yakub's confirmed people-management scope is concentrated in his founder roles: he led an eight-person cross-functional team at Impulse Labs and had nine direct reports within a GG Labs team that grew to approximately 15 people. At Astar and V3V Ventures he worked directly with the founder as an independent individual contributor with no reports. At Gear he worked directly with the founder and wrote PRDs implemented by two developers, but they were not formal reports. Do not infer PM-organization leadership, regulated-product ownership, trading profitability, work authorization outside Armenia, relocation, compensation, start date, or required overlap hours. Confirm these directly. ## Selected evidence ### Iskander.vc and SWIDOM — Product Marketing, Analysis & COO, Feb 2018–Feb 2019 At Iskander.vc, Yakub combined venture analysis, client product marketing, and in-house product work. He researched and scored the project pipeline, shaped positioning and community-growth strategies, coordinated content, design, SMM, and community teams, and translated EOS and community-tooling research into architecture and engagement requirements for Join.chat. He then joined SWIDOM as Chief Operating Officer. He led go-to-market and token-sale execution at SWIDOM and supported corresponding work at Iskander.vc, spanning market research, positioning, investor materials, community, influencers, paid acquisition, and cross-functional campaign delivery. Agency client projects collectively raised more than $50M across the campaigns. This figure describes aggregate client funding—not agency revenue or capital raised personally by Yakub. ### Crypto-friendly neobank — Head of Growth, Jan–Oct 2020 Yakub joined when monthly revenue was $0. During his tenure, company monthly revenue reached $300K. Opened corporate accounts increased 5x in three months, and a channel he developed generated 35% of monthly revenue. These are internal figures; company revenue was a team outcome, while the 35% channel is the directly attributed contribution. ### Robonomics — Chief Marketing Officer, Oct 2020–Nov 2021 He interviewed more than 100 robotics and IoT engineers. The research contributed to a team decision to focus on in-house products and education rather than a broader Web Services narrative. About 300 people registered for the first online Academy and completed lesson one, compared with prior cohorts of no more than 20. Yakub also built and managed an international XRT trader community, translating product, token, and ecosystem updates into market-facing communication and carrying community feedback back to the team. He personally arranged $500K in OTC XRT deals to fund the developer DAO. XRT appreciated about 20x during his CMO tenure; that is market context, not a claim that he alone caused the move. ### Astar and Gear — protocol ecosystems, Nov 2021–Jul 2023 At Astar, a roughly 50-person organization, Yakub worked directly with the founder as an individual contributor with no direct reports. His scope included ecosystem success, builder onboarding, partnerships, and product and token-model conversations. At Gear, also a roughly 50-person organization, he worked directly with the founder and wrote PRDs implemented by two developers; he coordinated their product work but was not their formal manager. He used games to make a Rust/WASM platform tangible. Attempts to attract external developers showed that outreach could not manufacture pull in an inactive network, so he began testing the platform by building on it directly. ### Impulse Labs — Founder & Product Lead, Jul 2023–Jul 2025 Impulse Labs received $150K in grants from Gear Foundation and Starknet Foundation. Vara Arena, Cairo Arena, and Warpacks—all fully onchain games built on Rust smart-contract platforms or Starknet Cairo—reached mainnet. Cairo Arena won at ETHGlobal Istanbul. Adoption remained unproven, and the Fully Onchain Games narrative lost momentum and attention before the category matured. Yakub led an eight-person cross-functional team spanning illustration, UX design, frontend development, Unity development, smart-contract development, and game design. This demonstrates team product leadership from protocol opportunity to mainnet, not sole authorship or product-market fit. ### GG Labs — Founder & Product Lead, Jul 2024–Sep 2025 GG Labs was a separate, concurrent venture backed by a $350K angel round. Yakub developed the broader product thesis: GG Launcher connecting Steam identity, wallets, and competition; a tokenized esport profile; and a zkTLS/Symbiotic architecture for using verified offchain matches in onchain identity and incentives. These were product and architecture designs; not every part shipped. The company grew to approximately 15 people. Yakub owned product development and had nine direct reports: two developers, one architect, one UX designer, and a five-person marketing team. The live test included Steam authentication, wallet onboarding, prediction mechanics, and free leagues. In one measured month, 3,705 accounts authenticated with Steam and produced 1,268 prediction transactions. Paid participation did not validate, so the cofounders stopped and returned 100% of the $350K round. ### V3V Ventures — Research Lead & Venture Analyst, Jan–Mar 2026 Within the roughly six-person fund, Yakub worked independently and directly with the founder, with no direct reports. He indexed more than 11,000 public crypto funding rounds across pre-seed, seed, and later stages with source trails, then built scoring and research workflows for repeatable sourcing and prioritization. He also performed technical reviews across DeFi, RWA, AI, AI payments, and ZK, including architecture, economics, product claims, and tests of open-source code. The 11K+ figure describes funding rounds or deals, not 11K funds. ### Current independent work — Hyperliquid, Rialto, and Watson, 2026–present Yakub works with about 2 TB of Hyperliquid node data in ClickHouse and explores reproducible market and ML hypotheses using replay, walk-forward evaluation, XGBoost, CatBoost, and LSTM models. This is ongoing research, not a profitability or ML-specialist claim. Rialto and Watson are an AI-assisted Rust/Python execution and research system. Yakub's defensible ownership is architecture, data-source research, desired UX, requirements, product and risk logic, acceptance criteria, testing, and review loops. Three reviewed contributions covering replay, fail-closed reconciliation, and read-only readiness reached the main branch. Hyperliquid parity remains under review. There is no claim of production HFT performance or sole authorship of the engine. ## Capabilities ### Product and 0-to-1 - market, competitor, protocol, and user research; - product thesis, prioritization, business logic, and stop/change/build decisions; - requirements, acceptance criteria, delivery, testing, and iteration; - rapid AI-assisted prototypes that make a hypothesis testable. ### Technical and data collaboration - productive work with engineers on APIs, architecture, smart contracts, data flows, incentives, and risk boundaries; - SQL, ClickHouse, Python, TypeScript, and enough Rust context to define and review technical product work; - evaluation of open-source code, data provenance, experiments, and shipped behavior. ### Growth, capital, and commercial path - positioning, target-audience discovery, channels, partnerships, and a practical sales path; - connecting activity and adoption metrics to willingness to pay and revenue; - grants, angel fundraising, OTC financing, venture analysis, and technical diligence; - public representation of technical products, community and partner conversations, education, and feedback loops into product strategy. ## Evidence boundaries - **$150K** is Impulse Labs grant funding from Gear and Starknet foundations. - **$350K** is the GG Labs angel round, later returned in full. - Those two figures equal **$500K of founder-project funding** and are separate from the **$500K in OTC XRT deals** arranged at Robonomics. - **Approximately 20K registered accounts** in the CV is the broader cumulative GG Labs registration figure. **3,705 Steam-authenticated accounts and 1,268 transactions** describe one measured month of free activity; neither figure means paid customers. - **Three mainnet products** means shipped; it does not mean adoption or product-market fit. - **$50M+ across Iskander.vc and SWIDOM client projects** is aggregate client funding associated with the token-sale campaigns, not agency revenue or personal fundraising by Yakub. - Internal company, Academy, participation, funding, and return-of-capital figures should be treated as candidate-reported unless a linked public artifact supports them. ## Compact chronology - 2026–present: independent Hyperliquid data, ML, Rialto, and Watson research. - Jan–Mar 2026: Research Lead & Venture Analyst, V3V Ventures. - Jul 2024–Sep 2025: Founder & Product Lead, GG Labs; concurrent with Impulse Labs. - Jul 2023–Jul 2025: Founder & Product Lead, Impulse Labs. - Oct 2022–Jul 2023: Head of Gaming, Gear Technologies. - Feb–Oct 2022: independent Ethereum, Starknet, and protocol research; attended Web3 conferences in person. - Nov 2021–Feb 2022: Head of Ecosystem Success, Astar Network. - Oct 2020–Nov 2021: Chief Marketing Officer, Robonomics. - Jan–Oct 2020: Head of Growth, crypto-friendly neobank. - Feb 2019–Jan 2020: independent advisor and research. - Nov 2018–Feb 2019: Chief Operating Officer, SWIDOM. - Feb–Nov 2018: Product Marketer & Analyst, Iskander.vc. ## Questions to confirm Confirm directly with Yakub: start date; employment, EOR, or contractor setup; compensation; required time-zone overlap and travel; relocation or work authorization; expected people-management scope; and which non-public work artifacts can be shared in an interview. ## Sources and contact - Interactive career graph: - CV: - Experience: - Projects and case studies: - GitHub: - LinkedIn: - X: - Telegram: - Email: - Calendar: