Evgeny Shadchnev
Founder of Makers
United Kingdom
Overview
Work Experience
Founder Coach
2020 - Current
I coach founder CEOs and their boards through leadership transitions: stepping down as a CEO or stepping into the CEO role (even if the founder had the title for years).
Venture Partner
2025
I work closely with founders and teams to help startups in EdTech, AI, and digital learning grow and succeed. ✔️ Strategic advice and mentorship for scaling your business ✔️ Connections to experienced operators, investors, and industry specialists ✔️ Guidance on growth strategies in lifelong learning, corporate training, and K-12 education
Co-founder and Board member
2013
CEO
2014 - 2020
Makers Academy is an intensive, full-time, 12 week course in web development. We help our students to change careers and become junior software developers and apprentices. We help companies hire great junior programmers.
Podcast Host
2024
Real stories of CEO succession. I interview founder CEOs who stepped down, professional CEOs who took over and investors involved in the process.
Volunteer Advisor
2021
Powered by a collective of CEOs from some of the UK's most successful companies, All Together is a pro bono advisory platform offering 1-2-1 advice, peer learning events, and impactful online content to help you build a better business.
Venture Scout
2020
Ada Ventures finds and funds extraordinary talent-building breakthrough ideas for the hardest problems we face. We invest across climate, economic empowerment and healthcare & ageing.
Mentor
2020 - 2025
Founding Partner
2012 - 2013
Forward Labs is a startup lab. Using lean startup methodologies, we validate ideas, rapidly build and test products and hire teams around those products that have solid traction. Founding partner of Forward Labs, responsible for overall strategy and management, ideation, development of MVPs (Ruby, Rails, iOS, etc), hiring developers and entrepreneurs etc. During the first year we grew the team from 3 to 18 people and worked on Dropwines.com, MakersAcademy.com, PocketShop.com, AppearHere.com and several other projects. In 2014 Forward Labs was merged into a newly created investment fund Forward Partners.
Tech co-founder at InvisibleHand
2008 - 2011
Technical co-founder of InvisibleHand (http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/), the most popular price comparison browser extension in the world, which since its launch found over 1 billion dollars in savings on products, flights and car hire for hundreds of thousands users. I led the development of the project for the first two and a half years. The backend written in Ruby and JS maintained an consistent, up-to-date database of dozens of millions of items across hundreds of retailers serving real-time prices to the users. Ruby / Rails / Sinatra / JS / advanced regular expressions / AWS / MySQL The company was sold to Skimlinks in August 2013.
Co-founder
2008 - 2008
Kappa Prime is a startup aiming to help research community to keep abreast of latest scientific developments. Ruby / Rails / HTML / JS / CSS.
Education
MSc
2006 - 2007
1st year of a PhD Course
2005 - 2006
Specialist (5 years)
2000 - 2005