Episode Materials: CTO Freedom in Startups and Corporations with Kirill Evseenko (Category #Leadership)

I’ve collected the materials from my conversation with Kirill Evseenko, CTO of the Zvuk audio streaming service. The Code of Leadership livestream took place on September 11, 2026. We discussed a CTO's freedom: you might decide quickly and run out of people to implement the change, or gain the resources for something substantial and discover how many other people need to agree.

Kirill compares these environments through his experience at a healthcare startup, START, and Zvuk. He says START's team grew from roughly 12 to 150 people over six years, while understanding how Zvuk operated took him about six months. The conversation explores how scale changes the CTO's work itself.

We discussed:

• When to build in-house. START began with external CDN, billing, and encoding services; supplier costs and limitations later justified building some components internally. How to connect architecture with money and account for maintaining a decision several years later.
• Moving beyond fixing everything yourself. Kirill described learning to work through managers and platform teams. That included spreading knowledge previously held by indispensable individuals: dependence on one person becomes more costly as the company grows.
• Where strong engineers can go next. A technical career track allows greater influence without mandatory people management. Such roles still need difficult problems and a business purpose; a new job title alone is insufficient.
• What happens after the decision. Security, legal requirements, and partner teams can stop a prepared launch. Kirill qualifies the usual picture of corporate slowness: a decision can also take only a few hours. The relevant factors are actual authority, dependencies, and the cost of getting it wrong.
• Closing initiatives that no longer help. Teams want to continue their projects, while a manager may find it safer to wait for instructions when the personal risk of failure exceeds the reward for success. We discussed how these incentives impede change and why accountability includes bringing work to a conclusion, including deciding to stop it.

Episode materials:

📌 Episode page with timestamps 🎬 YouTube, VK Video 🎧 Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts 📝 Edited conversation recap

If you have moved between a startup and a large company, which habit did you have to change first—and which decision proved hardest to carry through to a result?

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