Our story
Before either of us was a founder, we worked across markets at a global media and publishing company, turning a fast-changing part of digital advertising into something teams could actually run.
A global publisher
Mike was in New York, overseeing programmatic advertising, ad platforms, and native advertising. Fedor led programmatic revenue and ad technology across the company's Eastern European publishing business, covering the post-Soviet markets.
We first met at an executive conference in New York, after already 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 operation to third place in programmatic revenue across the publisher's global network. There was no reliable playbook; we had to connect tools, data, commercial decisions, and people across borders.
The years between
We each went on to build companies and learned how different growth feels without a large organization behind you.
Years later, Mike was building CanaryTags while Fedor was building Cheetah and GTM systems for B2B companies. CanaryTags needed more leads, better expansion within current accounts, and a fragmented stack made coherent. We began working together again. The tools had changed, but the job was familiar: connect systems, data, and judgment to a real commercial problem.
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 next. That knowledge belongs to the company—not an agency's black box or whichever tool is in use this year.
Cheetah therefore builds inside client-owned accounts and gets the first system working in 21 days. The team can take it from there or keep us involved to operate GTM and maintain its agentic workflows. We start with GTM because it is the field we know.
The founders
Founder
Fedor leads Cheetah's GTM strategy, systems work, and client delivery. Earlier, he led programmatic revenue and ad technology across Eastern Europe for a global publisher. He later built startups 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 global media and publishing companies. He is also an author and applied data-science researcher. At Cheetah, Mike brings the perspective of a founder building and selling in a difficult market.
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.
