Alina Okun
Alina Okun is the founder of Nariway, a research platform on the architecture of working life. Its founding publication, The Brief Experiment, traces the structures of modern work to their nineteenth-century origins and argues that the period we treat as permanent is in fact a brief experiment that is now reaching its limit. She spent two decades in corporate finance, first at Arthur Andersen and Simon & Schuster, then in senior international roles, and finally as CFO of a technology startup. She is a CPA and holds a doctorate in strategy and innovation.
I · 2000–2019
The Corporate Years
2000
Alina begins her career at Arthur Andersen, then one of the Big Five accounting firms. Within her first months, she attends a firmwide event where Enron is featured as a showcase client. Within two years, both have collapsed.
2002
She joins Simon & Schuster. Of every role she holds across two decades in corporate life, this is the one she remembers most fondly. The publisher sits inside Viacom, where its annual revenue is a small line on the parent’s financial statements.
2004
Alina moves to UBS and remains there through 2008. Among the projects she works on is one involving mortgage-backed securities, instruments few people inside the industry fully understand. Within months, these instruments will be at the center of the 2008 financial crisis.
2010
Alina buys an Expense Reduction Analysts franchise, her first attempt to leave the corporate world. She spends the following year learning sales and marketing in a way no graduate program had taught her.
2012
Alina returns to corporate life and takes on financial responsibility for operations across seven countries. She sees how differently business is organized from one country to the next, and how much of the work, in every country, is mechanical.
2016–19
Alina enrolls in an accelerated doctoral program in strategy and innovation. Her dissertation examines pharmaceutical patents, a topic she chooses deliberately for its distance from her professional work. The research becomes the part of the program that will eventually pull her toward writing.
II · 2019–2022
The Years Between
2019
In February, Alina leaves her full-time job. In September, she defends her dissertation. She wants to write a book.
2020
She reads a book every two days and publishes 120 blog posts. By the end of the year, she produces a 40,000-word manuscript. It stays unpublished.
2021
Alina is offered the CFO role at a technology startup. She spends ten months raising venture capital and learning augmented reality. She leaves, realizing that the role has returned her to the world she had been trying to leave.
2022
Alina becomes an angel investor in seven early-stage companies and joins several decentralized autonomous organizations to observe how new structures of organized work form from the inside. She contributes to Luminary Leadership, an anthology on leading through uncertainty that becomes a USA Today bestseller.
III · 2023–2026
Nariway
2023
She launches a weekly newsletter on professional skills, initially called FutureSkill and later MonetizeSkills, which runs through 2025. What begins as a study of skill development and independent income becomes a study of how the modern relationship to work was built. The same year, she co-edits Meet You in Calabar, an anthology of stories by sixteen young Nigerians about growing up in their country. The book becomes an Amazon bestseller.
2024
She launches Artobiography, a Substack on the lives and work of legendary artists, and publishes fifty-two essays over the year. She begins traveling internationally several times a year, often spending afternoons in museums and galleries.
2026
Alina consolidates her research and writing into Nariway and begins its founding publication, The Brief Experiment. Through essays, archival entries, timelines, images, and teaching materials, the platform makes the hidden architecture of work visible.