Max Klymenko
Maksym Klymenko is a Ukrainian-born British internet personality and educator, recording short videos for TikTok and YouTube, regarding career, business, brands and public issues. His most popular series, titled Career Ladder, focuses on him attempting to guess careers of people met on the street under 2 minutes, while standing with them on a ladder. As of December 2025, Klymenko has 8.1 million followers on TikTok, and about 3.85 million subscribers on YouTube. He is based in London, England.
Early life and educations
Maksym Klymenko was born on July 27, 1995, and grew up in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. He has four degrees, in law, economics, business, and sociology, including from the University of Southampton, London School of Economics, and Warwick Business School. He formerly worked as a lawyer and a consultant.Career
Klymenko began his creative career by writing a blog about artificial intelligence, later also starting a podcast. In 2018, he started a YouTube channel, where he originally published videos about books and AI. He also founded an educational channel on TikTok. Klymenko has created videos about career, business, brands and public issues, garnering over 7.7 million followers on TikTok, and 3.4 million subscribers on YouTube, as of September 2025. In 2024, he began creating a series of short vertical videos, titled Career Ladder, in which he stands on the back rungs of a ladder, inviting one guest at a time to stand on the front side, attempting to guess their career through a series of questions in under 2 minutes. Klymenko stated the format was created to discuss careers without the biases which accompany such conversations, including someone's appearance, income, status, and location. The format was subsequently copied by numerous creators, becoming one of the most popular on TikTok. In 2025, he was nominated for the Creator of the Year Award at the Creator Awards, the largest digital content creators' awards in the United Kingdom.In 2021, he also recorded a speech for TED Talk regarding social media.
Klymenko participated in aid campaigns for the Ukrainian refugees affected by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He also funded 100 abortions for Ukrainian women in Poland, who were raped by opposition soldiers, citing and criticising laws which make it difficult for them to get treatment.
In 2024, Klymenko was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, in the Media and Marketing category. In 2025, he became a member of the NATO Youth Advisory Board.
He is also the founder of KLYM&CO, a communications agency that provides consulting, strategy and production services to clients in 25 countries, which includes the United Nations, World Wide Fund for Nature, NATO, Google, and Microsoft, among others.