Oleg Shardin Put a Whiteboard on the Internet. Then He Went Looking for a Story.

Long before Oleg Shardin put a whiteboard inside a browser, he pointed a camera at weddings. The work was practical, celebratory and mildly perilous in the way all wedding work is: there is no second take when the rings go on. In a 2021 conversation recorded for the Miro team, Shardin remembered that early job alongside his first earnings, his childhood summers in the countryside and the taekwondo lessons of his youth. The details do more than decorate a founder biography. They place a camera at the beginning of a career that would move from video to design, from design to software, and from software back to motion pictures.

That route began in Perm, a city near the Ural Mountains, and with a partnership older than the company that made both partners famous. Shardin and Andrey Khusid were classmates. While studying at the Perm campus of the Higher School of Economics, they helped start Vitamin Group in 2005. It was a design agency, the sort of young company where job descriptions are treated as optimistic fiction. The team made websites, products and applications. It also discovered a recurring nuisance: visual ideas were easy to discuss around a physical whiteboard and awkward to explain to clients somewhere else.

The inconvenience worth keeping

Many founders later polish such moments into lightning bolts. This one was closer to a stubborn office draft. Vitamin Group needed a visual place where people could work together without sharing a room. The first answer became RealtimeBoard in 2011. Its name was literal to the point of comedy, but it stated the promise cleanly: a board, on the internet, changing as people used it. Shardin took on the operating work, eventually serving as chief operating officer, while Khusid became the public-facing chief executive. In 2012, they stepped away from the agency to give the product their attention.

The early product was not yet the spacious visual workplace people know. It allowed users to assemble material, share a link and collaborate, but the team kept adjusting what it was for. The decisive idea was less about presentation than collective thought. A file can be sent. A canvas invites another person to enter, add, move and argue. That distinction gave RealtimeBoard an unusually social engine: each useful board naturally pulled more people into the product. The software traveled because the work itself was already traveling.

The whiteboard was never really about the board. It was about making distance feel less important.A lesson written into Miro's origin

By 2018, RealtimeBoard had more than two million users and raised a $25 million Series A. A year later, it became Miro. The shorter name solved practical problems, but it also removed a ceiling. “RealtimeBoard” described an object. “Miro,” borrowed from the surname of the Spanish artist Joan Miró, suggested a canvas with no prescribed edge. The company was selling a place to brainstorm, map customer journeys, plan products and run workshops. Calling all that a whiteboard had become like calling a kitchen a cupboard.

Then the working world abruptly acquired the problem that had bothered a design agency in Perm. In 2020, meetings emptied out and teams scattered. Miro's reported users rose from five million to ten million that year, then to thirty million by early 2022. The company raised $400 million at a $17.5 billion valuation. Those numbers belong to Miro rather than to Shardin alone, but they clarify the scale of the operating machine he helped build. By then he had moved from the daily executive job to the board, a quieter position suited to a co-founder whose public profile has always been smaller than the product's.

When the canvas became a screen

Shardin's return to film did not arrive as a hobby announced after an exit. His producing credit on Illusions, an arthouse drama filmed in Perm, appeared in 2022. He later served as an executive producer on Blackwater Lane, the thriller starring Minka Kelly, Dermot Mulroney and Maggie Grace. In 2023, he and Alex Lane co-founded Puma In A Tank, a transmedia production company split across Dublin and Amsterdam. The name sounds like a riddle invented after midnight. Its purpose is more sober: combine technology and storytelling while making commercially legible work about social and technological tensions.

The slate makes the bridge plain. DRAGN, directed by Peter Webber, is a science-fiction horror film about an AI-equipped drone that turns a survival exercise into something more menacing. Speak Up is a thriller built around female voices and a wider social campaign. Thieves In Law is an international crime-thriller series. Other projects range from teen horror to supernatural drama. Shardin's biography for the company says he wants to help people relate to one another with more understanding and transparency. It is an earnest ambition, but it fits a person who spent the previous decade making a shared field for other people's thoughts.

“Just wrapped filming of DRAGN. Our first pic at Puma In A Tank.”Oleg Shardin, marking the company's first feature

There is also a pleasing loop in the technology. Software companies talk about storytelling because numbers alone make poor recruits and worse customers. Film companies now talk about platforms, audience data and intellectual property because a finished movie alone is no longer a complete business. Shardin has crossed at precisely the point where the vocabularies blur. In one world, he learned to build systems that let people contribute. In the other, he is helping assemble directors, writers, actors, sales agents and audiences around a story. A film set, after all, is collaboration with a strict deadline and more expensive lighting.

The operator becomes an investor

At 432 Legacy, founded in 2024, Shardin is a venture partner and investment committee member responsible for product and operations. The Amsterdam firm describes its method as data-guided and founder-focused. It looks for bottlenecks in global markets, then searches for the business-to-business tools that might unclog them. Its current focus on the creative economy puts Shardin's two careers in the same room: a software operator can recognize the enabling machinery; a producer can recognize the people who must use it.

His public record suggests a taste for the machinery behind the visible thing. At Miro, Khusid carried more of the external narrative while Shardin worked in operations and governance. At Puma In A Tank, actors and directors occupy the poster while producers make the improbable arrangement possible. At 432 Legacy, the thesis favors the picks and shovels rather than the gold rush. Even his leisure has a mechanical flourish. The 1000 Miglia entry lists Shardin as the Israeli co-driver of Laqueur in that prewar Lagonda, a vehicle whose elegance depends on an alarming number of moving parts agreeing at once.

The quieter biography also contains basketball and an affection for Stephen Curry. Shardin spoke about those interests in the Miro podcast, along with good food and restaurants. Curry is a revealing favorite only if one resists making it too revealing. He is a player who changed the geometry of his sport by making long distance look ordinary. The company Shardin is known for did something similar for office work. Still, a fondness for basketball may simply mean he enjoys basketball. A profile should permit a person the luxury of an interest without turning it into a management parable.

Fifteen years, then another frame

On September 10, 2026, Miro announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Bending Spoons. The transaction set an enterprise value of $1.355 billion and an equity value of about $1.79 billion, subject to approvals and closing conditions. It was a very different figure from the 2022 financing peak, and an unusually public reminder that company stories refuse to move in straight lines. Miro was still used by more than 250,000 organizations. The useful thing built for an agency had survived several versions of work, several names and several market moods.

For Shardin, the agreement closes no neat circle. He remains attached to several works in progress: films moving through production and distribution, founders moving through the hazards of early companies, and Miro moving toward a new owner. The connecting idea is not disruption, vision or any of the nouns that gather dust in founder profiles. It is translation. A wedding becomes a film. A sketch becomes a shared board. An operational bottleneck becomes an investment thesis. A technical anxiety becomes a thriller.

Some careers do not abandon their first questions; they find less obvious ways to ask them. Shardin began by recording moments for people who wanted to remember together. He helped build a canvas for colleagues who needed to think together. Now he is producing stories for strangers who may, for ninety minutes, feel something together. The tools have grown more elaborate. The room has grown much larger. The old problem remains pleasantly unsolved.