Our story
Cheetah came much later. Before either of us was a founder, we were colleagues trying to make a new and fairly messy part of digital advertising work across different markets.
Hearst
Mike was in New York, overseeing programmatic advertising, ad platforms, and native advertising at Hearst. Fedor ran programmatic revenue and ad technology for Hearst Eastern Europe, covering the post-Soviet markets.
We first met in person when Fedor travelled to New York for a Hearst conference. By then, we had already spent plenty of time solving problems together online. Mike helped Fedor build relationships with AppNexus, Google, Criteo, and other ad-tech companies. Fedor introduced header bidding in the region and grew the Eastern European operation to third place in programmatic revenue across Hearst worldwide.
Programmatic was still new enough that there was no reliable playbook. The work meant joining tools, commercial decisions, data, and people across borders. That experience stayed with us.
The years between
Our paths separated after Hearst. We each went on to build companies and found out how different growth feels when there is no large organization behind you.
Years later, we reconnected and caught up on what we were working on. Mike was building CanaryTags. Fedor had been building Cheetah and helping B2B companies put outbound and GTM systems together. CanaryTags needed more leads, a better way to expand within current accounts, and a stack that behaved less like a collection of separate tools.
So we started working together again. The technology had changed, but the work still meant connecting a messy set of systems to an actual commercial problem. Buying one more tool was not going to solve it.
What we believe now
A GTM system learns a lot over time: which accounts matter, which signals are useful, why a campaign worked, what a customer said, and what the team decided to do next. That knowledge is part of the company. It should not disappear into an agency's black box or be trapped inside whichever tool happens to be in use this year.
This is why Cheetah builds inside accounts and systems the client owns. We get the first system working in 21 days. After that, the team can run it or keep us involved to operate GTM, extend the system, and maintain the agentic workflows around it.
We start with GTM because it is the field we know. We want companies to get better at using AI without giving up the context and operating knowledge that make them good at what they do.
The founders
Founder
Fedor leads Cheetah's GTM strategy, systems work, and client delivery. Before founding Cheetah, he ran programmatic revenue and ad technology for Hearst Eastern Europe. He later built startups of his own and worked with B2B companies on outbound, sales technology, and agentic workflows.
Fedor on LinkedIn
Co-founder
Mike is co-founder and CEO of CanaryTags. He previously led digital advertising, programmatic, and data work at Hearst and Forbes. He is also an author and an applied data-science researcher. At Cheetah, Mike brings the perspective of a founder building and selling in a difficult market himself.
Mike on LinkedInWe built Cheetah around the kind of relationship we wanted when we became founders ourselves: someone who can get the system working, explain it, and leave the company stronger rather than more dependent.
