A tech conference, a war and five lives upended

This was supposed to be the first year Ukraine would send an official delegation of startups to South by Southwest, the annual technology and arts festival in Austin, Texas. The plan was, of course, disrupted by a war at home.

Six Ukrainian companies were set to go, and before Russia invaded their country on Feb. 24, each of the entrepreneurs was facing similar—and in hindsight, trivial—challenges. In preparation for their trip to the U.S., they filled out visa paperwork, arranged meetings with prospective investors and business partners and booked flights and overpriced Airbnbs, funded by government grants.

Days after the war began, the delegates received a message in a group chat on Telegram. It said the Ukrainian Startup Fund, which had agreed to provide $10,000 to each startup for its trip, was reallocating those funds to the war effort.

The Ukrainian booth will still stand at South by Southwest, which begins Friday. The exhibit will look different than previously imagined, emptier and with an air of sorrow. But it will be there. Here are the stories of five people who were all supposed to attend and what happened to them after the first missiles fell.

‘He doesn’t understand what’s happening’

Dasha Kichuk says she had thought her business survived its worst time: the Covid-19 pandemic. Her startup Effa makes disposable, paper toothbrushes and razors, geared toward travelers before people simply stopped traveling. In retrospect, the worst time is now, she says.

She and her husband Ilya decided to leave Kyiv with their 2-year-old son Luca before any Russian troops crossed the border. They went to the western town of Ivano-Frankove, near Lviv. An investor who had agreed to wire funds to the company by Feb. 23 missed his deadline. After Russia moved in the next day, the investor said he didn’t know when he’d be able to pay. Kichuk, who had just made payroll, gave her six employees a little extra and told them she likely wouldn’t be able to pay them again for a while. She said she’d understand if they quit. Nobody has.

Air raid sirens regularly ring out in the middle of the night. The parents drag Luca out of bed, and the three take shelter in the bathroom. “He doesn’t understand what’s happening,” Kichuk says. “We tell him, ‘It’s just a game where everyone should go hide in their caves. Let’s go play.’” He often asks why she keeps crying, she says.

Dasha and Ilya run the business together, but she says it’s hard to focus on work. Instead, they have been putting together supplies of baby formula and diapers to send into war-torn areas of the country. Kichuk had been excited about the trip to Texas but says she doesn’t think much about it anymore. Her mind more often goes back to the howling 6 a.m. phone call from her mother in Kyiv the morning the war started. Sometimes, she wonders about the 5,000 paper toothbrushes they were planning to bring to Austin. Shipped from China, the package is currently stuck somewhere in Romania. The razors are in a box back in Kyiv. “I hope they will be safe,” she says.

‘I left my country’

In the two months after winning a spot in the delegation, Alexandra Gladyshevskaya obsessed over the event and over her business, a pet health-care service called Spokk Insurance. That changed abruptly when she awoke the day Ukraine came under attack. “There was no business question,” she says. “We were trying to save our families and save our lives.”

The day after Russia attacked, Gladyshevskaya, her husband and their 13-year-old daughter rounded up their pets and jumped in the car. They drove southwest from Kyiv to Vinnytsia, where Gladyshevskaya’s uncle lives. There, they met her parents, who had also fled the capital, and spent an anguished few days debating what to do.

Gladyshevskaya, her mother, sister and daughter decided to drive to the border of Moldova. They had to go without the men of the family, who are forbidden by law to leave the country during the war. Now in Poland, Gladyshevskaya battles complicated emotions. “I left my country, my friends,” she says. “I was feeling guilty.”

She’s currently back at work on her company. Spokk has designs on an expansion to the U.S. Gladyshevskaya, the chief executive officer, is working with her head of technology, who decamped for Israel before the invasion. Most of their employees stayed in Ukraine to fight, and she’s in touch with them every day, she says. Some are helping the army build software. “We are the future of this country,” she says. “And we have to build a future in this country.”

No one from Spokk will be attending South by Southwest, Gladyshevskaya says. “A conference is more about entertainment,” she says. “We cannot entertain in this spirit. We don’t even listen to music now.”

‘A symbol of victory’

For most of the past few months, Kazbek Bektursunov’s interactions in Ukraine were over text message and video chat from his home in Los Angeles. Bektursunov, a Kazakhstan-born newsman turned fashion impresario in Ukraine, co-founded a metaverse clothing startup called Proof of Love. On Feb. 24, text messages with people in his adopted country became more frequent and frantic.

The startup’s chief product officer, Anna Kolesnyk, had been preparing to travel to the U.S. for the conference. Bektursunov tried to help when her business trip quickly morphed into an escape from Kyiv. She secured a visa on March 2 and flew to Los Angeles two days later. Meanwhile, Bektursunov was trying to arrange assistance for family in Kyiv, including his 76-year-old mother who is alone in her home. His sister is on the other side of the Dnieper River, which is difficult to cross due to militia checkpoints.

The conflict caused Bektursunov to rethink his startup, which had been designing virtual clothing that could be worn in a metaverse. “We don’t think it’s a good time for us to make a fashion show,” he says. The company is now building a three-dimensional replica of the Kremlin, its walls hung not with portraits of Vladimir Putin but with creations by Ukrainian artists. The vision: People will be able to purchase the art as nonfungible tokens, and the proceeds will go to charities supporting Ukrainian babies born since the Russian invasion. “It can be a symbol of victory,” Bektursunov says.

Bektursunov deliberated with his two co-founders about whether to fly to the conference, and on the eve of the event, they appeared likely to go, “to present Ukraine,” he says, “to show to the world a more valuable part of Ukraine.”

‘I’m in the city of heroes’

The trip to South by Southwest was designed as a show of Ukrainian invention. It was a project of the government’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, which served as a point of contact about the event to the delegates. The ministry’s communications largely stopped once the tanks rolled in. The officials are, understandably, preoccupied.

Anton Melnyk, a representative of the ministry, had been slated to attend the conference. On Wednesday, he responded to a reporter’s questions with a brief comment. “I’m in the city of heroes, Kyiv,” Melnyk wrote. “We hold on.”

Later, Melnyk explained that the government had planned to use South by Southwest to promote a new, tech-friendly legal and tax framework known as Diia City. The ministry will send one of Melnyk’s female colleagues to Austin. Despite the uncertainty in Ukraine, Melnyk took a moment over email to promote an upcoming tech convention, U Tomorrow Summit, scheduled for July in Kyiv. “We believe and know that we will soon win and end the war, and participants from all over the world will come to the big IT conference in Ukraine,” he says.

‘You don’t have time to have emotions’

In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, Kate Degtyar was jolted out of bed by a phone call. It was a friend in the tech industry who had been a firm stay-in-Kyiv advocate, even as the U.S. sounded alarms about a likely Russian invasion. The friend, now panicked, said he was driving west and suggested she do the same. “Are you kidding me?” she recalls asking.

Degtyar, a fixture of Kyiv’s startup scene who organizes events for local entrepreneurs, was on the road by 6:30 a.m. Already, traffic was jammed on the usual routes out of the city, and she took a little-trodden backroad through a forest north, passing Ukrainian tanks along the way. “You don’t have time to have emotions,” she says.

She stopped in Lviv for gas and to pick up a bulldog, Rubi, that belonged to some neighbors who couldn’t bring the dog across the border to Poland. When she and Rubi finally reached the Polish border around 10 p.m., cars were backed up more than seven miles. They didn’t make it across until almost four days later.

Degtyar’s career has revolved around community organizing. She was a leader at the business incubator Techstars in Ukraine, ran the local chapter of the group Startup Grind and served as an outside expert for the Ukrainian Startup Fund and its project to send entrepreneurs to Texas. Once in Poland, she spent the first week working with a nonprofit to organize supplies to send to Ukraine. On Tuesday, Degtyar flew to the U.S. with a plane ticket she bought.

She’s now in Austin with her Startup Grind co-director, Hannah Zenn, who came separately from Ukraine via Moldova and Romania. Together, they are salvaging what they can of the Ukrainian presence at South by Southwest, slotted for Booth 1531 at the Creative Industries Expo. “It took so many years to warm up the startup stage,” Degtyar says. “Now the game is not to lose what we already built.”

To contact the author of this story:
Sarah McBride in San Francisco at smcbride24@bloomberg.net