The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

Lena Skliarova-Mordvinova, Good Face Project CTO and Co-Founder: Revolutionizing Personal Care with AI and Resilience in Challenging Times

·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Ukraine’s war changed how Lina’s team worked, including shelter calls and shipping to prod during bombings.

Etienne de Bruin opens by framing the podcast as a place for CTOs to think bigger about technology organizations and the future. Lina Sklyarova-Mordvinova arrives with a background rooted in Ukraine, including work at the Ukrainian Space Research Institute and a deep history in AI and data science. The conversation starts there, but it does not stay there for long. Etienne jokes that they kept things high level, then quickly admits the talk wandered into parenting, the brain, and brain research. That looseness is part of what makes it work. Lina and Etienne both treat technical judgment as something lived, not just written down. He asks about the emotional side of being a parent. She answers from the same place she brings to her work: try, learn, adjust, repeat. They talk about feedback, self-forgiveness, and the slow work of improving. Etienne describes doing retrospectives with his children after he raises his voice. Lina recognizes the same pattern of trying to evolve without pretending it is easy. The episode keeps circling back to the idea that people need room to be restored, not just evaluated. From there, the conversation widens again to AI. Lina reflects that data has long been tied to outcomes with probabilities and that current AI is another form of something that has been around for a long time. The frustrating part, she suggests, is that people are always unhappy with the results. That line lands as both technical and psychological. Near the end, Etienne brings the story back to her product history. Lina talks about hand coding neural networks and building software that was eventually OEMed in the United States. That gives the episode a practical arc: research, productization, and the messy path between them. The closing stretch returns to hidden dependencies in data and the ongoing challenge of making sense of complex systems. The tone stays conversational throughout. It feels like two working operators thinking out loud. The result is less a polished leadership talk than a candid record of how technical people reason under pressure. For CTOs, the value is in that mix of science, management, and personal repair. For founders, the episode shows how a technical idea becomes something the market can actually use.

As heard by us

AI productization, parenting, and CTO judgment, told with the messiness of real operator life.

This episode frames a CTO interview around technical judgment, research, parenting, and product work that do not stay neatly separated. Lina Sklyarova-Mordvinova's background in AI and data science, plus her time at the Ukrainian Space Research Institute, gives the conversation…

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Why you'd press play

A CTO conversation that starts in Ukraine, detours through parenting and brain research, and lands on chemistry AI.

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