I also like to spend time with my kids and my wife Natasha, windsurf whenever possible, fly helicopters occasionally, help out with high tech startups including IamScientist, Trefis, and PDFFiller, and sit on the boards of Global Cycle Solutions and Terrafugia.

I also support East of Air and Blackjack Science.

In the distant past I founded, grown, and sold Fast Engines, co-founded Vert and GottaFlirt, and made a little money running a blackjack team at MIT which is the subject of this book.  Before all that I grew up in Moscow and Houston, did my undergrad at Columbia, played with virtual reality at IBM research, and got a degree from MIT for creating an early e-commerce system, way before it was cool.   My daughters Dagny, Miranda, Zoe, and Uliana are cute, and really awesome in every way. My much younger son Elio lives in Chicago as does my oldest daughter Dagny.   My cousin Alex writes songs, and my sister Inna is an opera singer who married a rock star.   People often see patterns where none exist.

I can be reached as semyon at-sign semyon.com.