Ten years, three founders, one question: what actually changed? We asked everyone — the people who built this agency from zero and the designers who joined somewhere along the way. This is what they said.
Ten years ago, The Gradient's three founders spent two months drinking coffee, inventing a New York office that didn't exist. The money ran out before the fantasy did.
That's not the kind of story agencies usually tell on their anniversary. We're telling it anyway — because everything that came after, including how this team adopted AI faster than almost anyone in the industry, traces back to the same instinct that got them through the broke years: don't fake it, just fix it.
Let's start at the beginning. What was the most cringe-worthy moment of those first months?
Oleg Gasioshyn (founding partner, design director): We were doing nonsense. For two or three months we just walked around drinking coffee, talking about the businesses we'd build — some huge conglomerate of agencies, a cartel. We debated our values. We argued about what our New York office would look like. Then the money ran out, we hired our first person, realized we had to pay him a salary, and real work started.
Who said "let's start an agency" first?
Denys Skrypnyk (founding partner, CEO): Oleg said he wanted to do an agency thing, and I came to him — let's do it together. He said, sure, but there's a third person: Olena. Olena and I actually figured out the other day that we've been working together for twenty years now.
What did you fight about most in the early days?
Olena Zanichkovska (co-founder, director of product strategy): We're very different. We have similar core values, but we look at the world through different lenses, and it took us years to calibrate that — to accept that a partner seeing things differently doesn't mean they think differently underneath.
Denys: Quality, probably. Olena and I always wanted to find a shortcut somewhere, cut a corner. Then Oleg would show up and slap our hands. I picture him like a teacher with a giant ruler, just hitting our knuckles — no, you don't do it that way.
When did you first think, "okay, this is actually serious"?
Oleg: Honestly, I never had that moment. I still think this whole thing is nonsense and not serious. (laughs) The closest we got was when we set our first-year target — a million dollars in revenue. We genuinely believed that was realistic. It was not.
Denys: When we hired Max, our first designer, and realized — wait, we have to pay him a salary. What does that even mean? How do you pay someone? Before that, we'd lived in a world where money just appeared on your card every month. How does it actually work? Nobody knew.
What did your first serious client teach you?
Denys: That this thing scales. Jaja Finance was tiny when they came to us — a fintech startup that needed a pitch video for their mobile bank. Oleg made it, they used it to raise their first round, and from there we designed their app for years. It became a white-label product that ended up live in the UK. That's when it clicked that what we do touches real users and shapes real businesses.
What's the part of building this agency that almost nobody outside ever sees?
Alyona Oliynyk (marketing manager): Every decision costs blood, basically. Take Dila — we'd done eighty percent of the project, rolled out the new brand identity, and it just didn't fit the design we'd spent months building. We started over. From zero.
Dima Koshevoi (associated partner, product strategist): I remember the moment my world tilted a little. We'd built the Dila app, put enormous effort into it, and then realized we had to rebuild it from scratch — a couple of months before delivery. I remember pulling the team together: Semen, Yevhen, Vitalik, Vitya, Oleg, Maryna. We sat down and started figuring out how, with no time left. It felt counterintuitive, almost wrong. And then you ask yourself: what does "right" even mean?
Were there moments when you genuinely thought you might have to close the agency?
Denys: It felt like that every month for the first four years. You don't know if you'll make payroll next week, and then somehow it works out. Then COVID hit — a strange, almost perfect period, because nobody knew what they were doing, so nobody could blame us for not knowing either. We caught the jackpot of crises: COVID, then the war. Every single time we thought, okay, this is it.
Olena: We never actually panicked, though. Hysterics, swearing, sure. But not panic.
What turned a group of people who happened to work at The Gradient into an actual team?
Oleg: I'd say the team spirit was always there. What changed was that at one point we got loose with our hiring standards — projects were on fire, we needed hands, so we let people in who didn't quite match the values. Long-term, that caught up with us. And then there was the obvious question: well, what are our values, anyway? You can write them on the wall a hundred times, stick up "innovation" on a sticky note — but if you're sitting in some rundown chair in a basement underneath that sign, it doesn't mean anything. Culture is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Not what you declare.
So there was a crisis. Everyone gathered around it. We basically told the team — either this goes badly, or it works out okay. Some people left. That was the right outcome. We got smaller, and a lot more tight-knit.
Simon Antropov (associated partner, design director): Think of it like Thanos snapping his fingers — a kind of cleanse. We let some people go, and some left on their own. What was left were the people who actually cared about the work, who wanted to try something interesting and build it.
Was there a moment you felt genuinely proud of the team?
Olena: For me, pride is constant. One that stands out — there's something almost parental about it, watching a team present a fairly complex concept on an e-commerce project and realizing you have nothing to add. I mean that literally. I wouldn't have added a single thing, and that's a great feeling.
Oleg: There's a moment with Dila, recently — you open the app, you book your own lab tests through it, and you think, damn, we actually nailed that part. Every project has one of those moments somewhere in it.
When did AI stop being just another trend for you?
Denys: When Oleg showed us Norvana. Before that, he'd just been talking to his computer, yelling at it half the time. Then one day he showed up with an app he'd built himself — zero development background — and it felt like there was real intelligence inside it. Everyone in the room understood: one guy had built this, alone.
Viktor Hotskivskyi (lead product designer): When Norvana actually worked. We sat down, talked to it, and just looked at each other like — holy shit, did we actually just build that?
Sasha Shumylo (associated partner, product strategist): For me, it was when the first coding agents showed up, around when Bolt was popular. I typed out what I wanted, and I had a working interface — not a mockup, a working prototype I could actually click through. That was the moment I understood this was the future, and from there it just kept going.
What was the actual turning point in becoming an AI-native design agency?
Olena: Every turning point at this agency has one name: Oleg. This was one of those crisis moments where Oleg already understood we needed to go right, and the rest of us were still hesitating — maybe a little to the right, maybe not yet. Oleg basically drifted the wheel and turned the whole car. It rattled us. But what he'd done with his hands — prototyped it, figured it out, showed us how it could actually work — mattered, because in AI the real question isn't three screens in Figma. It's the interaction between a user and an AI system, which at that point nobody understood. Honestly, nobody fully understands it now either.
What does "AI-native" actually mean for how you work with clients?
Olena: The biggest challenge ahead isn't building with AI — it's the speed AI brings, because speed creates the illusion of quality. The real test is holding "we move fast and we do it properly" as a single standard, not a trade-off. That's what clients are going to need from agencies like us — someone who can keep up with the pace without letting the quality bar slip.
Oleg: Something interesting is happening with interfaces. The number of interfaces people need is shrinking. What remains will be more specialized — displaying complex information, handling specific workflows — but the way people input and interact is simplifying toward the most natural thing humans have always done: speaking. That's what we're designing for now. Not screens. Systems.
Sasha: And it raises the bar for everyone on the team. Before, you competed with people who took the same courses you did. Now the standard is different — you have to be a head above AI, which means understanding how to frame a task for it and evaluate whether what comes back actually works. That's a fundamentally different skill. Knowing the tool isn't enough anymore. Knowing what good looks like still is.
What's actually changed day to day, now that AI is everywhere in the work?
Andriy Ladanskyi (product designer): I have two monitors, always. One has Claude or Codex running, whichever still has tokens left. Before The Gradient, AI was maybe ten percent of how I worked. Here, it's clearly past half.
Olena: I got extra hands and skills I never had. I was never strong at presentation design — I could always build a story, but the visual side was always someone else's job. Now, with the right setup, I can build those decks myself, at a level I'm happy with. That kind of gap — between what you can think and what you can actually make — AI is closing it fast.
Sasha: Everything changed, basically. You're forced to learn programming, to understand how products actually work technically, and adapt or get left behind. It's also genuinely fun, because nobody knows the right way to do any of this yet. We get to make it up as we go.
Viktor: What I like most right now is that I can actually build the final thing myself. Before, a lot got lost the moment a design was handed off to development — you drew the picture, then watched someone else decide what it actually became. Now that gap is gone. The product depends on you, not just what it looks like.
What died in design that used to feel essential?
Oleg: Design thinking, as a ritual. Sticky notes, gathering every stakeholder in a room. That kind of upfront alignment used to be the only way to de-risk a build, because getting it wrong meant burning anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars finding out you'd gone the wrong direction. AI-assisted development changed that math. Now you have an idea, you sketch it, you test it immediately. The loop got fast. You still think about who you're building for and why — that part never goes away — but your process happens directly with the material, not with sticky notes and an imagined version of the thing. You see it, you touch it right away. That's the best part of all this.
Denys wrote about where this shift is taking the interface itself — worth reading alongside this.
What does AI still not get close to?
Olena: The energy behind wanting to create something. I don't think AI can replace that — and if you don't have it yourself, it doesn't matter how capable your tools are. You can have access to the most powerful model in the world and still produce something completely empty.
Oleg: I actually believe AI will eventually replace everything, unfortunately — taste included, creativity included, all of it gets decoded eventually. What it can't do right now is genuinely new creation, because the technology works on next-token prediction over training data built from the past. The real breakthroughs happen faster than any model can absorb them — by next week someone's already found a new approach. If you walk up to AI without understanding the technical layer and ask for a feature, it'll hand you the old, "correct" answer from last year's best practices, which is already obsolete. That's the limit, for now.
Viktor: Our objectivity. It'll always have a suggestion, an angle — but the final call still has to be ours. How much that holds depends entirely on the person making it.
What do you think people outside the agency get wrong about you?
Olena: They think we're harsher, colder, more buttoned-up than we actually are. If The Gradient had a zodiac sign, we'd be a Scorpio — sharp and biting on the outside. But you have to go through ten circles of hell to see the soft part underneath. We're a lot gentler than people assume.
Nazar Vonitovyi (product designer): People used to be scared to apply here because of our reputation — this image of a team that just grinds nonstop, no mercy. If I'd known back then what it actually felt like from the inside, I'd have told them: come on, people here are genuinely fun, the whole place runs on roasting each other and a pretty playful mood.
What's the thing about people you're looking for that you could never fit into a job posting?
Simon: It's not one skill, it's a combination — being someone genuinely worth talking to, who isn't shut down by corporate life, even if they're a little scared at first. That's normal, it fixes itself. Being honest with yourself matters more, because people can feel it instantly when someone's performing instead of being real. We're looking for actual people, not someone to fill a role.
Sonia Medvid (HR director): We're looking for curiosity. A spark in the eyes. If someone is genuinely into what they do and wants to learn, that's the person we need. It's hard to put "curious" in a job description, but it's the thing that matters most. If that sounds like you, we're probably looking for you right now.
After ten years, is this just the beginning, or is it already something big?
Denys: Look back ten years, and it's already something big. Look forward from here, and it's still just the beginning.
Oleg: It's exactly what I pictured at the start — the agency itself, I mean. Back then I thought we'd be working with Pepsi, Nike, the biggest names out there. You eventually realize the absolute A-player category isn't really yours, and that's fine — you can do remarkable work in the next tier down, and given where we are, given the war, it's already more than enough that we have work at all.
Olena: We haven't fully figured out what we want to be when we grow up. Ten years still feels like school, in a way. We have a direction, but not a final, locked-in shape. Maybe that's not a bad thing — if you ask me, this is the beginning of something big, not the end of it.
What does year eleven look like?
Oleg: I genuinely hope it's better than year ten, because year ten was brutal.
Olena: More systematic. I want this year to be about turning the energy we built up in year ten into structure — taking some of the chaos and finally organizing it.
Nazar: Bright. We just came through a real storm and came out the other side steadier. From here it should only get more interesting — better clients, better projects, more people worth working with, more energy in the building. And AI won't replace us. We'll be the ones steering it, using it to make something better than we could alone.
That's the thread running through every answer here, whether it comes from a founder who's spent ten years calibrating a partnership or a designer five months into the job. AI didn't rewrite what The Gradient values — it just removed the excuses for not living up to it faster. Ten years in, the team that argued over a fake New York office is still arguing about quality, still rebuilding things from zero when they don't work, still betting on people over playbooks. The tools changed. The instinct that got them here didn't.
We asked similar questions a year ago. The answers were different. That's probably the point.
What does this mean for you?
Discuss with your AI.
Alyona is a content expert with experience in IT and digital products. At The Gradient, she is responsible for covering what The Gradient is working on — our projects, processes, and ideas.
