Ilya Vasilenko

Me in 10 seconds

I am a father, a husband and a son. I am a computer scientist, a data protection, security, legal and compliance professional currently working for the insurance tech holding group wefox. I am an also a passionate learner constantly improving my skills in my spare time. I am a salsa teacher and a choir member. I believe in power of continous learning and love to iterate on mental models, frameworks, learning techniques, and productivity methods. I do wakeboarding and cold swimming, jogging and some light calisthenics to keep myself and my brain fit.

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My Services: How Can I Help Elevate Your Business?

While maintaining a part-time commitment to my primary employer, I've dedicated the rest of my time to consulting. I'm driven by a passion to empower startups and SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) who often seek expertise in specialized areas listed below. My motivation? To support innovation with smooth and fast processes, and continually refine and share my knowledge.

My goal is to provide solutions tailored to the unique challenges faced by my clients. Since our life is too short to be sad, boring, and inefficient, I try to deliver my services as fast and as high in quality as I possibly can. To ensure we're the right fit, I offer the first hour of hands-on consulting or an inaugural presentation at your firm, absolutely free of charge. This serves as a platform for us to understand one another and determine the potential for an impactful collaboration. Curious about how I can assist? Simply DM me on LinkedIn.

• Legal:
  • Set up legal templates: (M)NDA, SaaS agreement templates, SOW, Amendments, DPA, TOMs, SCC. standards terms & conditions.
  • Review a contract provided by your client.
  • Help you to negotiate contractual terms with a current or a potential client.
• Security:
  • Give a talk to introduce your management to the security certification ISO 27001 (including all required steps, timeline, effort and prices).
  • Help you implement ISO 27001 and get certified.
  • Help your company to migrate from ISO 27001:2013 to ISO 27001:2022.
• Data Protection:
  • Set up a data protection program in your company.
  • Carry out a GDPR gap assessment and help close the findings.
  • Help implement any of the required data protection processes (e.g., incident management, data subject request, subprocessor management).
  • Create any of missing policies (e.g., data retention and data deletion policy, incident management policy).
• Sales:
  • Help you create essential documents for a successful, efficient and quick sales process: Offer Template, White Paper on Data Protection and Security, Legal Templates.
  • Help you define a state-of-the-art pricing and packaging structure for your SaaS service.
• Compliance:
  • Create an efficient compliance program fitting for a local or international company.
  • Help you set up tailored trainings for essential compliance topics.
  • Ensure your organisation is compliant with all applicable laws and regulations.

Skills

I was lucky in my life to be able to build up a unique combination of skills from multiple related domains - data protection, legal, IT, security, and others. This skill set allows me to efficiently deliver agile consulting to various companies in Europe and the USA, and excel in my daily work. Data Protection IAPP certified: CIPP/E, CIPM, CIPT Working experience as DPO (7y+) Consulting of other companies on data protection Legal I have been negotiating and managing telecom, data, insights, marketing, service, and SaaS contracts in 11 countries (US, Europe, Asia) for around a decade. Background knowledge: Master in Business Law (FFHS). Computer Science and Information Technologies Master in Natural Language Processing Master in Distributed Systems (ETHZ) 15y of programming, team leadership, IT & strategic consulting, General Project Management and Technical Product Management Security ISO 27001 Lead (6y) ISO 27001 internal auditor ISO 27001 implementation consultant Compliance Compliance with laws and regulations Global compliance program & trainings Compliance processesreporting Other specific skills Pricing and packaging of Software as a Service products Establishment of technical teams and introduction of Scrum Project management Soft skills Multiple years of international negotiation experience Team leadership experience Project Management compliance, and data protection reporting to management and boards Teaching & Trainings: Regular speaker and guest lecturer

Articles, Videos, Summaries, Links, Resources

Here are my articles, videos and summaries that I would like to share with you. No particular order so far. I just like to have them online, also because I can easily send a reference to somebody I care about.

• Parenting
  • My notes on parenting
• Salsa
  • Cuban salsa playlists for practice
• Certifications, audits, reports
  • SOC 2 vs. ISAE 3000 vs. ISO 27001
• Data Protection
  • Must-have privacy resources
• Security
  • Secure Development
  • NIST - Recommended password guidelines
• Mindset, frameworks, metamodels
  • Culture of experimentation
  • General frameworks and metamodels
  • 17 Questions That Changed My Life by Tim Ferriss: Summary & Notes
  • 30 life hacks I wish I knew at 20
• Leadership and communication
  • On management and leadership principles, and on setting goals
  • Starter Kit for a Brainstorming on Lifehacks (an article on great conversations)
• Business
  • 8 ways to motivate your sales team by Jason Lemkin (SaaStr CEO)
• Life style
  • Yerba mate - The beginner's guide
• Learning languages
  • Free and high quality resources to learn German

Work together

Here is an anecdote. In one of the previous companies, it took us four sitting in the same room several months to figure out by accident that we read same books, have interest for the same life concepts and use the same type of meta models. We laughted a lot about it. Later on, an investor Iskender Dirik shared his so called "User Manual" which helped him a lot to provide his peers a crunch of information about him as an entiry point for working together.

After that, I created my doc which I am sharing with people on a regular basis. Here it is - a short document that describes my communication preferences, provides insights into my leadership and working style, as well as describes me as a person shortly and concisely. It intends to (a) make communication more effective and efficient (b) provide an entity point into my personality to allow the first contact based on shared topics.

• Work with me

In addition to that, here is a short article on leadership and goal setting that I wrote to align with my teams on both topics.

• On management and leadership principles, and on setting goals

Talks

Giving talks and guest lectures is a great opportunity to structure my knowledge and dig deeper into the topic. Here you can find a list of my most recent engagements:

• List of talks, conference panels, guest lectures and other public engagements

Best of

What is "Best of"? At the end of the year I recap what was cool in the past 12 months. I share it with friends and colleagues per email and add selected items into individual sections below. If you like to receive my end of year best-of list, ping me on LinkedIn to include you into the mailing list.

Why am I doing it? It pushes me to explore new stuff during the year. I also learn a ton from replies that I recieve from other people.

• Books I recommend reading
• Habits that transformed my life
• Gadgets I enjoy using
• Apps and services that simplify my life
• Cool stuff to watch and listen to
• Quotes I found particlarly useful

Contact

DM me on LinkedIn.

ILYA VASILENKO