The Dark Forest

The first time I met Stalingrad Dollosa, he was behind the wheel of his family's car, waiting to drive my partner and I to our hotel.

He was warm, easy to talk to, the kind of young man who fills a silence without effort. But somewhere in that first drive, past the pleasantries, something else showed through, and it stayed with me long after. He was determined in a way you don't often see at his age. He carried himself like someone who had already learned, firsthand, exactly what it takes to survive.

I saw the proof the next day. I watched him step onto a stage in front of four hundred people and hold them, poised, confident, unhurried, with a maturity that ran well beyond his years. This was not a kid faking composure. This was someone who had earned it somewhere the rest of us couldn't see.

Over the conversations that followed, on what came to feel like a long walk down a boulevard neither of us was in a hurry to finish, I got to know the road that made him. He asked insightful questions, genuinely tried to understand my business model and even made recommendations on the best local food to eat in Bacolod. I wanted to learn more about this young man so we eventually we sat down and I heard it in full. It begins, fittingly, with his name.

Ninety-five percent of the time, people get it wrong. Stalinguard. Stalgrad. Stirring Rod, one memorable time.

For as long as he can remember, through grade school and across the walk of his own college graduation stage, his name has been mispronounced, misheard, and occasionally mocked. His father, a self-described history nerd, named him after the Russian city where, in the winter of 1942, one of the deadliest battles in human history ground on for months along a frozen river. It is a heavy inheritance for a boy from a small town in Mindanao.

He could have resented it. Instead, he mined it for meaning, and when he explained it to me I understood I was talking to someone who reframes everything he's handed.* "It's resilience,"* he told me of the name he was teased for. "Just like in that battle decades ago, it's a symbol of never giving up even when your back is against a wall (or in their case, a river), and to just hold out, because one day something will arrive that's going to turn the tide in your favor."

He said it plainly, almost offhand. But I recognized it for what it was. That is not a story about a name. That is the operating philosophy of the man, stated before he'd even begun. Hold the line. The tide will turn.

Ask him who he was before any of it, and the picture is of a shy kid in love with the wrong things for a child his age.

Not cartoons, or not only. Stalingrad was the boy parked in front of National Geographic, Discovery, the History Channel, absorbing a world far larger than his town. He finished every quiz on Encarta and Encarta Kids at least three times before he completed grade one. He memorized the name of every dinosaur on the Discovery Channel's Dinosaur Planet. "No normal kid in the Philippines has memorized that," he said, and I didn't doubt him. He made few friends, because few shared his interests. But underneath the shyness ran a current he couldn't yet name. "I already had the urge to go out of my house and find what the world had in store for me. I wasn't meant to live out my life in that small town."

Hearing it, I thought about the poised young man I'd watched on that stage in Bacolod, and how far he'd traveled from the quiet boy he was describing. He was right about leaving. He just didn't know yet how hard the world would make him work to prove it.

The writing did not begin as art. It began, he told me, because he needed to eat.

In ninth grade, carrying himself through a hard season at home, he entered an essay contest and won a thousand pesos. A small prize. It changed everything. "That was the proof I needed that I had something in me that people appreciated." As a child he'd sensed he was capable of more but had never let himself believe it, because he'd never actually done anything to earn the belief. The thousand pesos was the earning. "You can think of it as the first cog being placed on an engine that wouldn't stop running, up to this day."

That engine ran fast. At seventeen he founded a "freelance agency," and he made sure I heard the quotation marks. "It was a one-man operation, and I was just using my cousin's name to get writing gigs. I don't even know if he remembers it, or if I asked permission." To win work from clients decades his senior, he built a convincing fiction (a team of five, a confident operator who knew exactly what he was doing) and then delivered well enough to make it true. "It was fake and true at the same time. I did deliver the work, I did get amazing reviews, yet somehow it was just me, my laptop, and the self-induced belief that I was running an agency."

I found this the most telling thing he said all day. For anyone who has ever felt too young or too small for the room, here was the lesson, learned at seventeen: confidence is often the thing you manufacture until your competence catches up to it. He faked the seat at the table until he'd genuinely earned it. And when I'd watched him command those four hundred people, I'd been watching the finished version of exactly that.

There was a chapter he could have framed to me as exploitation: a foreign company in the anime space, seven thousand pesos a month, a mentorship that ended badly. He refused the frame. "I don't even consider it exploitation. I know it is, but that seven thousand a month was more than worth it if I look at what I actually learned." He kept the knowledge and the lifelong friends, and left the bitterness behind. "Most of the time, you just have to look past the negativity, and you'll be surprised how much love and kindness there is in life."

During the pandemic, on Fiverr, he found the mentor who would mark him for good.

The company was running out of money; the ship was sinking. Stalingrad, barely more than a kid, offered to take a pay cut to keep it afloat, because he had never really been in it for the money. "I loved going the extra mile, and I always prioritized learning over the paycheck." Maybe that, he figures, is what the mentor saw in him. Maybe he was just gullible. Who knows.

What he carries from that man is a single line, delivered exactly once, after Stalingrad lost a deal to an overly aggressive client. He has never forgotten it. "Don't be a bitch." Some people, he told me, would go red with anger hearing it. For him it meant something else entirely: be brave, be confident, don't let anyone push you around. "When I'm too afraid to take a step forward, or to take a shot in the dark, I always think back to this moment. It gives me the strength to push forward." Listening to him, I could hear how completely he'd made that crude little sentence his own. It had become the private mantra behind every hard decision that followed, including the hardest one.

Here is the thing most builders never do, and it was the moment in our conversation I least expected: in 2025, at the height of it, he shut the agency down on purpose.

He had scaled it from himself and two others to fifteen writers at its peak, worked with brands like UGREEN and XPPEN, made real money. He was supposed to close it in January and couldn't; it felt like waste, like he could still do more, so he dragged it to November. Then one day he simply closed his laptop and sat alone with the question. "Are you still happy with what you're doing? And I guess I wasn't. It felt like I was running that agency just to keep it alive, without a sense of purpose or direction. It made money, sure, but what was the point of it all?"

He had built it to help people on both ends, clients and writers alike. He decided it had done its work, and he ended it on a good note.

When I asked what he'd say to someone frozen by that same dread, the fear of ending a thing you built, he offered a test he clearly runs on himself. Turn everything off, sit alone with your thoughts, and ask three questions. Am I happy? Ten years from now, will I still be building this? Does this journey still have a purpose?

"If all three are not a hundred percent yes, then it's time. It doesn't matter if the ending is good or bad. You can't keep pretending it's all going to work out, because you might just end up hurting yourself, your clients, and the people you're still trying to convince to keep working for you."

Then he did the thing that frightened him most. He started over.

He left an accounting and business background for computer science, walking in knowing nothing.* "All I knew was that a python was a snake and a string was what people used for sewing."* He was older than his classmates and terrified of the lost time, terrified he might not even like it. He went anyway, and the reason he gave me is the closest thing he has to a worldview.* "I always think of life not as one big journey, but as something composed of little adventures that make up the entire book. Knights and heroes don't become legendary because of one journey to kill the demon lord, but because of the hundreds of small quests along the way that built their reputation brick by brick."*

So he worked, in his own words, three times harder than everyone else. And somewhere in that degree, the two halves of him fused into one. He'd always been told coding has no room for creativity and writing collapses under pure logic; he found the opposite. "Revisions for writing are like debugging for coding. You can't build an app if you're not creative enough to imagine how everything fits together, and you can't write something amazing if the logic doesn't make sense." He started reading code like a script and structuring prose like a program. "To my surprise, writing became my unfair advantage."

That advantage has a hunger behind it, and the hunger has a method: obsession. To build Project Daedalus, a rocket-launch intelligence platform, he spent three days devouring the mathematics of spaceflight, watching lectures, reading papers, using Al to check whether he'd applied the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation correctly, then figuring out the rest himself.* "Al helped me learn in three days what would take someone a month. But it's a tool, not a replacement for your brain. Get obsessed with what you want to learn, grasp the fundamentals, and your competence skyrockets."* A man who taught himself enough aerospace engineering in a weekend to track NASA's launches is not, I decided, a man who worries much about starting from zero.

There is a version of Stalingrad he is deliberately leaving behind, and he was honest with me about it.

For most of his life, he admitted, he carried an internal sense of hate, bred by the struggle and sharpened by a fierce pride. It was exhausting. The line he now keeps closest comes from Ted Lasso:

***The hope that we're judged not by the actions of our weakest moments, but by the strength we show if we're ever given a second chance. ***

"Right now, I'm giving myself a second chance to be a kinder, gentler, and stronger person. I want to be curious, not judgmental, and to believe that as long as I become the best version of myself, things are going to be alright."

It's why mentorship matters so much to him now, why he wants to teach, maybe at La Salle. He's had extraordinary mentors by twenty-three, and he knows the difference between a textbook and a person who has actually lived the thing. "Transferring knowledge and seeing people apply what you taught them, it's just so fulfilling. And as you teach, you also learn." The kid who once had no one who shared his interests now wants to be, for someone else, the person he needed. Sitting across from him, I had no trouble believing the students he'd eventually teach would be lucky.

There is one more thing he wanted me to know, and it's the reason I can't tell you this is a tidy success story. As you read this, he is not standing on a summit. He is in the trees.

The YouTube project he built (channels that, at their peak, earned enough that he divided roughly eight thousand dollars among the students who worked on them) was frozen by a technical failure at AdSense. He has spent more than thirty days trying to reach a human being who can fix it, with no luck yet. To pay rent and eat while he fights it, he has taken freelance work and is hunting for a second job. He is, right now, in exactly the kind of hard season this entire story has been about.

And here is what he told me from inside it, not in hindsight, not from safety, but now, with his back against the river: "It's hard, it's challenging, and at some point you'll be so broken you wish you could just stop. But keep going, one step at a time. You'll get criticized, probably called crazy, but as long as you believe you're on the right path, go for it."

Then he offered me the line he is currently staking his own life on. "Fairytales do not start, nor do they end, in the dark forest. You are currently in the dark forest, but one way or another, you're going to get out of it. And you already know what happens next in fairytales."

I thought back to Bacolod, to the composed young man behind the wheel of his family's car, to the poise in front of four hundred strangers. Now I understood where it came from. He scaled an agency from his childhood bedroom before he could legally drink. He won writing awards and then walked away to learn a language where a python was just a snake. He has been mispronounced, underestimated, exploited, and frozen out, and he has treated every one of those as a small quest in a longer book, another turn of a name that has always meant hold the line, the tide will turn. He is in the dark forest tonight, looking for a second job, still dividing what he earns with the people who trusted him, still certain of how the story ends.

The battle his name remembers was a slaughter that lasted through a brutal winter. It ended when the tide turned. It always does, he'll tell you. You just have to hold out until something arrives to turn it. Walking back from our last conversation, I found that I believed him.

Stalingrad Dollosa is a writer, founder, a computer-science wiz pecializing in machine learning and Al engineering, and a founding contributor to BLVD who despite whatever life throws at him, he continues to smile.