Stanislav Synko and the work before the code

At the launch of his first book, Stanislav Synko made an offer. Buy it on Amazon, come to his appearance during San Diego Startup Week, and he would give you a signed copy. Then he supplied the commercial logic: “Amazon likes sales. You know, I like sales too.” An author asking for a purchase is hardly a scandal. An engineer saying it so plainly is rather refreshing.

The book was Simple Custom Wild, a guide to building technology products for people who do not have a technical background. Synko said he had spent more than a year writing it, drawing on a decade of work with founders. His launch video had the looseness of a conversation between appointments: practical advice, a little pride, a date repeated for emphasis. The complicated business of buying software deserved a comprehensible explanation.

That was 2023. By 2026, Synko was co-founder and CTO of Leap Agentic, working on a different way to produce software. AI agents would generate implementations; specifications and tests would preserve the intended behavior. Between the book and the new business lies a useful thread. Both concern the work that has to happen before anyone can sensibly celebrate the code.

A programmer’s first customers

Synko’s relationship with software began in Ukraine. He started creating websites at 12 and freelancing at 15. Those are early ages to discover that a page has two audiences: the computer interpreting it and the customer paying for it. One insists on correct instructions. The other tends to have additional requests.

His author biography describes an education interrupted by his concentration on programming. He was expelled from university, then pursued entrepreneurship through his own web development company. The first venture did not develop as he had intended. America and a new business followed.

There is no need to dress that sequence as a tidy plan. In a later interview, he described his move into leadership as impulsive and said he became a CEO at 22. The early programmer became responsible for work that other people had to do. That changes the question from whether you can solve a problem to whether a group can solve it together.

Learning to talk about nothing

His first IT outsourcing company began in 2012. In 2015, he co-founded Ezetech, focusing its operations on the US market. A year later, he and Patrick Rolandelli presented advice on opening a US office. Their slides covered the expected items: strategy, a legal entity, a bank account, expenses. Then came the more entertaining assignment: become comfortable with small talk.

The advice was about trust. Understanding the client’s business, giving useful knowledge away, and beginning to collaborate could make a relationship last. A technically convincing proposal still had to arrive through a person someone wanted to work with. A meeting is a peculiar machine; even when the specifications are excellent, the operator matters.

At a New York startup website panel in May 2016, Synko was introduced as someone who had worked on both sides of product development: managing the vendor’s work and helping clients connect it to a business case. He advocated minimum viable products. The emphasis was on solving a business problem with an appropriately sized first build.

A seat on both sides of the table

Ezetech became Aleph One. The venture studio paired software building with pre-seed and seed investment, mentorship, and dedicated technical teams. Its stated model included investing cash in clients’ businesses. That gave the relationship another dimension: the people helping build the product could also have money riding on the company.

Synko has described the studio’s first investment, in 2017, as SWAG.COM. He placed it in the same account of his career as the service companies he had founded to help entrepreneurs navigate their technical needs. Advice, implementation, and investment were becoming parts of the same working arrangement.

In August 2023, Aleph One announced its debut on the Inc. 5000 at number 2076. The milestone belonged to the business and its team. It also marked a distance traveled from the young freelancer’s first commissions. Running a studio meant choosing companies, assembling people, and finding ways to keep several kinds of work moving at once.

Today Aleph One’s website foregrounds engineering for promotional merchandise and e-commerce: supplier integrations, catalogs, fulfillment, and modernization. The company’s changing emphasis is a reminder that a founder’s biography and a business’s latest sales pitch run on different clocks.

Three words for an expensive decision

Simple Custom Wild appeared in October 2023. Its organizing vocabulary gives non-technical founders a way to discuss what kind of product they are attempting and what sort of technical strategy might fit. The book covers choosing developers and tools, deciding when technical leadership is needed, handling technical debt, and adapting as a product grows.

The subject is familiar to anyone who has received two confident estimates for the same project and wondered whether the estimators have met the same project. A founder needs enough understanding to ask useful questions. Fluency in every programming language would be an expensive prerequisite for approving an invoice.

Synko’s intended reader might know the market, the customer, or the sales process extremely well. Software introduces another set of decisions. His book addresses that imbalance directly, treating technical choices as things a business owner can learn to assess. It gives the conversation names before it gives the project more machinery.

The public launch was scheduled for New Village Arts in Carlsbad during San Diego Startup Week. A book about building products found its place among people actively trying to build companies. The setting suited the subject: decisions being made close enough to their consequences to remain interesting.

The unglamorous part of a new technology

Blockchain was another substantial part of Synko’s work. In 2017, the AIS Educator Conference listed him as an EZETECH speaker for a workshop on how blockchain operates and how it developed in enterprise use. Explaining a technology to a room requires a different sort of precision from implementing it.

The engineering work involved ordinary constraints with unfamiliar vocabulary. Aleph One used Hyperledger Fabric, and a migration from IBM Blockchain infrastructure to Chainstack concerned deployment, development environments, and the time engineers spent managing the network. In a 2021 case study, the reported outcomes included a 25 percent shorter release cycle and a 15 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.

A separate account of private hosting described the ability to deploy projects in European jurisdictions and hand them over to customers. These were specific operational concerns. The grand promise of a technology still had to make room for where it ran, who maintained it, and how the next release would get out.

The room matters, too

San Diego became Synko’s base and a place to meet founders beyond the development engagement. In 2022, he judged a Startup Week pitch competition whose $10,000 grant was sponsored by Aleph One. In 2023, he joined the Founders Fight Club judging group alongside Neal Bloom, Adam Harris, Kate Nowlan, and Alfonso Arana.

The role puts a technical advisor in front of the business at its most compressed: a few minutes, a proposed customer, a product, and a request for belief. It is another occasion when the quality of the explanation matters.

His leadership interview also returned to mentorship, team dynamics, and the balance between technical work and strategic responsibility. He described wanting an excellent environment for his team. His author biography gives the principle a shorter form.

“Work hard and be nice to people.”

Stanislav Synko

It is an unornamented ambition. Teams still have to work inside the processes their leaders design, however sophisticated the technology becomes.

One specification, five languages

Synko had been thinking publicly about AI long before the latest business. His 2015 essay, Beyond Artificial Intelligence, considered whether human ideas about intelligence were adequate to describe what technology might become. Its questions reached toward the cosmos. His current work has a closer inspection point: does the generated software behave as intended?

Leap Agentic was founded in 2026 with David Pierini. Synko is its CTO. Pierini described their shared question as how to design a development team around agentic AI, and identified Oleksii Shevchenko as part of the effort. The work puts specifications, acceptance criteria, and tests ahead of delivery.

His sqlite-leap project explored generating SQLite-compatible engines in C, Rust, Zig, Go, and Python from a shared language-neutral specification. In a May 2026 writeup, he described seven days of work, independent agents, and tests against an existing software system’s behavior. The exercise gave a demanding shape to an otherwise abstract proposition.

The project reports byte-identical database files across all five implementations and mainline SQLite on two fixed fixtures. That is a bounded result. The repository also documents incomplete regeneration of larger components, remaining compatibility gaps, and performance tradeoffs. It describes a research artifact; replacing production SQLite would be a different undertaking.

Keeping the instructions

LEAP, the open-source methodology around that work, treats prompts, schemas, and tests as the artifacts to preserve. The generated implementation can change. The intended behavior should remain explicit enough to check. This shifts more responsibility onto whoever defines the task and decides what evidence will count as success.

Leap Agentic applies that idea to client software delivery and legacy rewrites. Its offer includes extracting specifications from an existing system, producing implementations, and checking that the new behavior matches the old. The customer still needs to know what the system is supposed to do. A faster means of producing code makes that question more urgent.

Read across Synko’s working life, the continuity is surprisingly practical. The teenage website maker needed a customer’s instructions. The software founder needed a shared business case. The author gave founders language for their decisions. The CTO now puts instructions and checks at the center of generation. Someone still has to decide what is being built. Synko keeps returning to that job.