He runs the half of the company you never see on camera.
LinguaTrip has two faces. One belongs to Marina Mogilko, who talks to millions of subscribers about accents, visas, and the American dream. The other belongs to Dmitrii Pistolyako, who makes sure that when those millions click “book,” a real school in a real city is expecting them. He is the co-founder and CEO. He is also the person who answers the question nobody asks on YouTube: who negotiates the discount, who vets the school, who keeps the lights on.
Today that machine is a marketplace of roughly 2,500 language courses across 600 schools in 20 countries, run out of South San Francisco. It has booked more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries. And it charges them nothing to do it - the booking fee is zero, and students reportedly save 5 to 30 percent against booking a school directly. Pistolyako treats that $0 as a feature, not an accident. The money comes from the schools, in commission. The student just gets the cheaper, vetted door.
Alongside LinguaTrip he co-founded Fluent.Express, a fast proofreading service where a native speaker checks what you wrote before you send it. Same instinct, smaller package: take a thing that’s slow, opaque, and intimidating - studying abroad, writing in a second language - and make it quick and human.
Vet the school. Negotiate the price. Charge the student nothing. Let the math do the marketing.
It started as a favor, not a startup.
Before there was a platform, there was a side hustle. Marina offered study-abroad consultations for free and took a commission from the language schools she sent students to. It worked. It also didn’t scale - a single human can only counsel so many nervous applicants at once. In 2013, Pistolyako and Mogilko did the obvious-in-hindsight thing: they built the actual booking platform. An Expedia for language travel. The favor became infrastructure.
The two had met years earlier at Saint Petersburg State University, both studying mathematical methods in economics. That detail matters. LinguaTrip is, underneath the travel photos and the YouTube charm, a marketplace - supply, demand, margins, retention. The co-founders met over equations. They later married. The company and the marriage grew up together.
Fifty rejections, one stranger, one phone call.
Raising money for a language-travel startup out of Russia in the mid-2010s was not a warm market. Pistolyako collected rejections - reportedly more than 50 of them. Then he did the un-mathematical thing: he bet on a chance encounter. An American investor named John Rainey happened to be in St. Petersburg. Pistolyako convinced Marina to meet him. Rainey believed in the company, and - more usefully - knew someone inside one of the accelerators they were chasing.
That recommendation cracked the door. LinguaTrip was accepted into 500 Startups, an accelerator with roughly a 3 percent acceptance rate at the time, as the only Russian company in the batch. The novelty drew press from both Russia and Silicon Valley. The accelerator wrote a $100,000 check. After 50 doors closed, the 51st was the one that opened to the Bay Area.
Fifty investors said no. He kept knocking until the math finally had a witness.
From founder to teacher of founders.
Having moved to San Francisco and taken business courses at Stanford, Pistolyako turned around and started teaching the route he’d walked. He runs online courses - in Russian - on how to start a company in the United States and how to actually talk to investors. It’s a tidy loop: the founder who got rejected 50 times now coaches the next batch on getting to yes. The product he sells is the thing he had to learn the hard way.
He keeps a lower profile than his co-founder, and that seems deliberate. While Marina builds the audience, Dmitrii builds the business: the supplier relationships, the retention that keeps 8 in 10 students coming back, the quiet decision to keep the booking fee at zero. It’s the unglamorous work that lets the glamorous numbers exist. A booking engine doesn’t go viral. It just has to work, every single time, for someone about to get on a plane.
The thread running through all of it - the free consultations, the marketplace, the proofreading service, the courses - is a single stubborn idea: studying abroad and learning a language should be affordable, transparent, and not terrifying. Pistolyako keeps building tools that take the fear and the markup out of the experience. The mathematician found a function worth optimizing, and it turned out to be other people’s ambitions.
Retention is the only review that counts.
A marketplace lives or dies on whether people come back. LinguaTrip reports that roughly 80 percent of its clients return - a figure that, for a purchase as infrequent and high-stakes as moving to another country to study, is the real scoreboard. You don’t book a second trip through a service that burned you on the first. That 80 percent is Pistolyako’s quiet signature: it’s what happens when someone personally vets the schools, negotiates the discounts, and refuses to bolt a fee onto the student’s bill.
The scale he’s assembled is concrete, not abstract. Around 2,500 courses. About 600 schools. Twenty countries. Roughly 50,000 clients a year, from 85 countries, served by a team of around 85 people working out of an office at 611 Gateway Boulevard in South San Francisco. Each of those numbers is a supplier relationship someone had to build and maintain, a price someone had to argue down, a student someone had to keep happy. That someone, on the business side, is the CEO.
You don’t book a second trip through a service that burned you on the first. Eighty percent come back.
Two founders, two jobs, one company.
The cleanest way to understand Pistolyako is by contrast. Marina Mogilko is the company’s Chief Content Officer and a public figure - three YouTube channels, a name on Tech.co’s list of women founders making moves in tech, a TOEFL score of 117 out of 120. She is the megaphone. Pistolyako is the chief executive, the operator, the one who turns attention into bookings and bookings into a business that lasts. It’s a deliberate division of labor: one of them earns the trust at scale, the other makes sure the product deserves it.
That split is unusually durable because it started in a classroom and survived into a marriage. Founders who met over coursework in mathematical methods tend to argue with data rather than ego. The company they built reflects it - less a personality cult than a working machine, with a $0 booking fee at the center as a principle the math has to keep proving. Pistolyako is content to let the spotlight find his co-founder while he keeps the engine tuned. In a culture that lionizes the loud founder, he’s a useful reminder that someone has to actually run the place.