Upon his first visit to Ukraine in late May, technology entrepreneur Mark Turrell had no idea what to expect from a country that is at war. By his fourth visit two months later, though, he already had a team of six Ukrainian website and mobile application developers working on his new business.
Born in Canada, Turrell, 45, is a member of the Young Global Leaders (YGL) community that is one of the World Economic Forum’s Foundations, according to the World Economic Forum representative.
Turrel was invited to Ukraine by Andrey Kolodyuk, managing partner at AVentures Capital, a private equity fund that invests in Ukrainian technology companies. Kolodyuk is also a member of YGL.
According to the Ukrainian investor, there will be more initiatives organized by Ukraine’s current YGL representatives and alumni that include Ihor Shevchneko, ex-Minister of Ecology, Wladimir Klitschko, professional Ukrainian boxer, Eurovision song contest winner RuslanaLyzhychko, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin of Ukraine.
The May tour, in which Turrell participated, aimed to invite the world’s business leaders and show why “Ukraine is a new European ‘black swan’”.
“It gave us the ability to involve global and Ukrainian politicians, business and civil society leaders who are involved in the country’s transformation,” Kolodyuk says.
Young Global Leaders is a non-profit organization, that was established by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum in 2004. Since then every year hundreds of representatives aged 40 and younger from 70 nations from business, politics, the arts, media, and science are chosen to work together on solving global issues. They can be nominated by YGL alumni for a six-year tenure.
Turrell was nominated to be the Young Global Leader in 2010. Currently residing in Berlin, he co-founded Imaginatik, his first company, in Boston in 1994. It was selling business-to-business software solutions and went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2006 after achieving more than $7 million in revenues and having Pfizer, Allianz, Boeing, and other business giants as its clients.
Later Turrell left operating activities in Imaginatik and founded Orcasci, a strategy consulting and marketing agency. It was involved in different array of projects such as, elections and movie marketing.
Now he has a new business in mind, one that involves opportunities in Ukraine.
The idea is to create a new service for business people who seek to broaden their network. It is supposed to be a blend of LinkedIn, a professional social network, and Tinder, the mobile application that matches people for dates based on a person’s profile.
“It was surprising to see what I saw the first time I came in May. After watching the EuroMaidan Revolution, the news from the war front, I thought, it must be very depressing here, but it’s not the case,” Turrell said. “People are actually proud about the revolution. They like the changes that happened to the country.”
Turrell says that after visiting over 50 countries so far, including former Soviet republics Russia and Latvia, he found the energy of Ukrainians one of the most driving.
“I need to quickly find people to build revolutionary software,” he said. In addition to the hired Ukrainian developers, Turrell is searching for sales and marketing specialists who have an American skill-set.
“Ukraine has some great tech specialists, but I am trying to figure out if it also has really great sales and marketing specialists. I am already used to working distantly so if I don’t find any of those, I will have to find them in Berlin,” he said.
Finding developers in Berlin, Europe’s tech business capital, would be a much more complicated task, according to Turrell. It would take too much time to pick the most qualified ones because developers with different qualification levels come from all over Europe and Asia.
Looking for developers in California’s Silicon Valley would be hard due to the fact that there is “too much money, and no people,” Turrell said. People tend to open up their own startups there, rather than work for somebody.
Ukraine is a better place to establish a work force, he concluded.
“Eventually problems will get solved, the economy will go up within two years, and Ukraine will bloom soon,” Turrell said.
Kyiv Post staff writer BozhenaSheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
