Tech Brew Ride Home - Profile Of Ukrainian Startup Lemon.io

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Listeners from Ukraine got in touch to tell us what it has been like for one particular tech startup in Ukraine these last few weeks. From the founder of the company: Lemon.io, Alekskandr Volodarsky, @volodarik these are the charities he recommends: https://bank.gov.ua/en/about/support-the-armed-forces https://www.1kproject.org/ https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate/ (including crypto donations) https://koloua.com/ https://novaukraine.org/donate/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Okay, this is Brian, and you're going to hear from my co-host, Chris Messina, of course, in a second. But I want to state this very clearly again. This is a unique special episode.

Two weeks ago, a longtime listener to this podcast reached out, wanted us to talk about their experience as a tech startup in Ukraine. We're going to hear about that startup right now, lemon.io, hearing from the founder, Alexander Voladarski. But the listener that got in touch to make this all. happen was in a bunker because there was shelling at the time of this recording, so they couldn't participate in the recording. So yeah. And also check out the show notes for links given to us directly from Alexander. If you want to help the Ukrainian cause, these are the links and charities and nonprofits he suggests, including those who take crypto. Alexander Voladarksky. Thanks for coming on the tech meme.

at home experience. Pleasure to be here. Let's start by telling me about lemon.io, which is the company you founded. How old is Lemon? What does Lemon do? Just give me a basic background on your company. So, Lemon I.O. is a marketplace of editing engineers. What we do is that we connect, we connect companies who are looking for engineers and engineers who are looking for work. And what we do is we test and that we test and interview developers from one side to make sure that they have the skills in place, the hard skills and especially the soft skills. There is the lack of soft skills is usually the biggest problem of unsuccessful projects.

Also, we do the same on the client side. So we make sure that those are projects that are developers looking for because they want to work with developers that we work with, they want to work with technical people, you know, the companies who have designs in place and specs in place, and they just know how to work with developers directly. So we make sure that those are companies too. And then we match developers and companies based on the skills that they're looking for and the projects developers are looking for. This is what we do.

How many years have you been operating? Yeah, we started, actually, we started this company six years ago, but it was different business model. the beginning we started as a it was just a side hustle but when it developed to a something that looked like a company was a kind of Uber for for web development projects so it was mostly small small medium-sized businesses e-commercees or small agencies coming to submit projects like you know that there were in a range of two to 20 hours of work you know create a page move a button i don't know fix a bug um and

And we were doing this for a few years, and it didn't work out. We couldn't scale it. So when it was, it was working well when we got, we got people from referrals, but we tried to do marketing. We actually couldn't scale it. It was operationally hard. And then almost exactly two years ago, we pivoted to Lemmonio, before the company name was coding ninjas.

So we pivoted to, to a new business model where clients are, companies are looking not to do some projects. They're looking for, to place person in the role. and then they can manage them directly. And we rebranded to a current brand and rename the company to Lebanon. And how many roughly devs are on your platform over the last six months or so? I don't know how many developers in general, but active developers that are on projects or looking for projects around,

I don't know, like several hundreds, something around maybe 600, Yeah, I don't keep up with that. But in general, developers go on Bata Base. There are tens of thousands of developers. But we're paying them from time to time, but we require some specific level of skills to be able to work with our clients. And how many employees? We have now 47 employees.

47. So one little detail that we've left out of this description so far is we're founded and based in Ukraine, correct? So what, we're recording this March 24th. Today, as I speak to you, what is the operational situation for lemon.io? I mean, it's so until a week ago, we had to kill most of our operations in the company just to be able to keep the essential operations alive. because from the beginning of the war, most of the developers became unavailable,

not developers, I'm sorry, employees were unavailable. There are a few people who were immobilized. There are, you know, a lot of people who had to relocate. And just first two weeks, you know, we and us also, but also our employees had to be busy with their stuff. So what we did is we killed like, you know, creating new features or customer development. All this went, you know, went away.

And we just had to work with developers and work with customers. That's what we did until last week. Now we're, you know, a little bit of coming back because most of the, most of employees were able to relocate, find safe places and, you know, are able to manage to, you know, working space for themselves. Again, like, I don't think they have any working space. They have just, you know, those people mostly, you know, went to their relatives or friends and leave there, you know, they gave him one room to be there.

So that's what I mean by working with. I'm the same. I was able to educate my family to Israel, but we live at our friends. So they gave us two rooms. It's six of us, my parents, me and my wife and two kids. So working space, I mean, like are able to go online and be, you know, be available. But again, like most of most of people are not as productive if they weren't. We don't expect them to be. But operations are coming back a little bit little right now.

I mean, this, it just, it sounds, I mean, incredibly stressful. And I can only imagine, you know, trying to get work done, trying to sort of think about, you know, tasks and like Jira and bug fixes and all the rest when, you know, literally like, you know, whether there's bombs falling or, you know, you're just trying to get your family together and your effects together. What has been your, I guess, your approach to, to Sorry, by the way, Brian, are you recording? Yes, I am. Yes, I am.

Okay, sorry. What has been your approach to, I guess, coaching your staff and getting them ready for this? You know, like, as you mentioned, you know, one of the things that Lemon focuses on are those soft skills. And so here you have a situation, totally unprecedented that I certainly, you know, as a former founder, never imagined that I would have to deal with. So what has been your approach, I guess,

maybe even to prepare yourself or to think about this and then coach and work with your staff to help them through this process. So we were trying to get to get ready, but we don't know. We didn't know anything. Like we before, so before the was started two weeks before that I think there was a lot of speculation in media about, you know, the possible invasion and and we sat down, we saw the people stressful and we said, okay, we have to, you know, prepare some kind of something.

What was your sense? Like, did you think it was going to happen? I mean, my understanding is that a lot of people just really didn't think that it was actually going to happen. People were in kind of either denial or just sort of like, oh, it would never happen. You know, I mean, you guys had the experience in 2014 with Crimea. So, you know, that's real and that happened. But, you know, what was your sense for whether it would pick up again?

Like, I guess, like, going into this, how much did you think you really would have to, like, deal with it? So the war did start in 2014, not only in Kriman. not only in kremlin but also in on the eastern uh two two eastern regions the embass and lugansk and uh yeah we were in denial like looking back like if if i was not in this kind of denial i would probably be able to do something else and something more something you know that will give us more results in terms of safety for for police and the family and everyone and we were in denial even though even though like i was like we did some rules you know and did some not coaching but we did a few stops that are going to talk about um i think it was

a week or two weeks before the war started uh but like in reality it's uh i don't know if i can tell it here but it's like total crap i mean looking back like only a few things were meaningful but the rest was like we didn't know i was never at the war right i don't know like how it looks like because i'm going to tell what we did like we first of all we gave two months uh salary advance for everyone in Ukraine just because like if something happens, if there's full invasion, the banking system collapse, they cannot get cash. At this time, cash is the most important to move around, to get, you know, foods and everything. So we did that. And it was smart. And I'm really happy we did that. Even though there was no collapse of banking system, it became really hard to get cash. There were

huge lines in the ATMs and, you know, in most places the branches were closed. And then we said, okay um if you um also what we did was smart we made people sure that everyone who is mobilized they will keep getting salary until the company is alive uh and you know they will go fight the war and protect us and they will keep their salaries their work they will come back to the same working you know working roles and everything uh even though those people who want to volunteer they will also get paid full salary no question asked if you have to take care of your family or relocate or you know unless you're relocated you know unless you're relocated you to Russia, you're going to get the same salary and no question asked about your decisions.

Then we said, okay, if something happens and you feel unsafe, come to this city to this location where one of our founders and we will help you find accommodations and, you know, and so on, we'll help you over there. It's like on the western, it's a western city called Lviv and also we said that if the connection goes down, there's no internet and no phones, you also go to this connection and go to this location and we will have to, you. First of all, we were dumb thinking that people actually going to go to this location because people have their own plans. Like, first of all, they have families all around Ukraine and then go to another Western city. Second, you know, a lot of people have families. Like one girl, her mom didn't

want to move. They were in Harcow. Harcow is one of the cities that was hit the most. And she didn't feel safe to go from her apartment. So they stayed with her mom in the apartment. And we didn't even think that there would be a circumstance where people wouldn't want to leave with such kind of, you know, then they had a missile hit the next entrance of their building. They had to go to the basement, not even the bomb shelter. They stayed in the investment two weeks and like two weeks, like last week, we're able to get them out from Harcalf to the Western City. So we didn't even think this is possible. You know, it was not an agenda. You know, there are things that you know that you don't know. And the things you don't know, you don't know, this is one of the ones.

of the things. Then, like, I actually overslep the sirens, so I didn't hear them. I woke up an hour after. And by the time we were like thinking, like, we have to leave the city. We live in Kiev. The roads were blocked. Like, all the people wanted to leave. The roads were blocked. There were people who stayed like 20, 30 hours in traffic. And like, this is one thing. We also didn't know, like how we were able to, we were playing to get out people from the cities, just. just roads of luck you cannot go out of city. And the cities on the west are packed, we were not able to rent anything. So we had to manage the people who did actually go to where we had to find places by

someone we know and so place them. So all these things were just crazy in terms of we just didn't, you know, we were very naive and foolish thinking that we would be able to do anything at all. And it was hard to find drivers. A lot of people didn't have cars. Like if you want to go, to go by train. Like if you ever saw those images were like in Harcow there like one train that you know can contain maybe three, four hundred people even standing and sitting and there was like you know a few thousand people standing in line and yeah. So I didn't didn't think it's possible. So we tried to coach them in a way that you tell even with like you know download offline maps and it was we were thinking we think we thought we are smart, you know, we gave them like minimum we

we did we just before two weeks before that we did a training of the first aid it was a we had a corporate event we decided to do that not connected to war we do this we did this once a year before before COVID and like we knew like what kind of medicine do you need like first first aid and we gave it list so we thought we're smart but at the end we're you know looking back very naive and very hopeless like especially we have several people who are in who are in occupied cities right now and cannot there's no chance for them get out like you know at some point like one of the teammates she managed messaged me like we are we cannot get out and we have almost no more food left and like very hopeless and very naive and huge mistake like if I was here

I don't know four weeks ago I would probably get everyone who wanted to go get everyone out of the country and you know I don't care about the money about the money about everything just to not to get to the space space. Can I ask a really basic practical question? What are the tools that you're using to stay in touch? Or even what tools are Ukrainians in general using to keep in touch? So we use Slack and it works fine for us. The people who are in occupation and they have much worse.

access to connection. We use telegram. My, you know, our HR, she's in touch more with people and she should probably use a telegram or calling them. Depends on this. There's one person who they don't have their access to mobile internet is very poor. The Russians hit one of the, one of the stations. So one of the company doesn't work. And they, what they did smart, they did inside country roaming. So if your, if your provider is not available, you can freely,

you know, access another provider. But still, like he almost doesn't have internet. So yeah, for that, calls are better. But Telegram is one of the biggest,

even though there were a lot of rumors that Telegram, and I don't know if it's true, but Telegram is working with a FSB, you know, still like a lot of people use telegram. So basically, we're in a situation where a certain percentage of your employees either made it to areas that are not currently occupied or have made it out of

Ukraine entirely. And a certain percentage are still in country. Obviously, I imagine that you are all doing what you can to help people that are in immediate danger. The folks that have made it to relative safety, I'm curious, is keeping Lemon going? Has it? Has it? it been useful for them to still feel like there's there's some some normalcy there's some you know i'm just curious about the morale in terms of the company and continuing to work the morale is very down and i didn't expect anything like going back to normal so we expected this and we're okay with that unless um you know i mean we're not okay for people being down but we we don't push we we don't put any pressure on them.

A lot of people just don't work most of the day and they are available when they're available and we're okay with that. First of all, like even in relative safe places, they still are subject to sirens. And like, you know, like yes, I'm sorry, not yesterday. Monday we had a call and I just tweeted this today

that like, you know, it was twice. We had a break for a, for a rate alone. And, you know, the other person who is CMO, he didn't have to, connect to the call but he's he's in military now so he connected and it was it was kind of nice to see him but you know he was driving the car and in his arms and everything but yeah morale is very down and like even when we get in leave there was a meetup of our team who are in louvieve and like i asked my co-founder like you know how did they go he said it was it was fine but like

people are very down they're speaking about evocation or they're significant others who may be mobilized and you know like how do they volunteer and like yeah people everything changed like nothing will go back to normal for a long long time i guess i had a couple of questions um you know you did you did mention or allude to some of the i don't know i suppose the the perception or the confusion or the question about telegram one of the one of the of the things that's been kind of hard to, I guess, understand and relate to is the information environment. And so I'm very curious to know how you're making sense of this moment, how you're finding out information, how you're discovering things, you know, what media is

reliable for you and trustworthy, what are you, again, telling, you know, your staff or the people you work with about how to make sense of what's out there? And, you know, The first week or two weeks were kind of messing because you were down on the phone, you know, even like on the road, you're checking all the time what's happening. Now, like last week and a half or two weeks, I'm in a very strict information that because it's really hard to keep, you know, it's really hard to leave. And like, if you're just reading and you're getting those notifications in telegram that this happened and this happened, it's just impossible.

So and also like the people, I spoke to people who got out of the country and just in terms of whatever they are feeling will influence their environment and their teams. And it's very important to stay sane and try to live your life. If you're outside of Ukraine and you can live your life, it's better to do that and show that there's still possible life and be a more positive person because you influence the rest of the team. In terms of information, like right now, I decide not to reach any analytical articles because, I mean, they don't say anything.

Like, you know, whatever they, their assumptions are in the end will be 50-50, right? It will happen. It will happen. So, and just if you feed yourself with all this information, you stay inside all the time. It's just impossible to keep saying that. And also, you aren't productive. Me, I got out, we relocated to Israel. And, you know, for me, the main task right now is to be as productive as possible.

So the rest of the team can keep getting their salaries and we have enough revenue because we pay salaries and all the expenses and the rest, all the profits we give to the army and volunteers. So it's like the most I can do by reading news, even reposting news will not do any great value to the country, to the people. So I have the tell. What I read is just, I don't know who's playing like tactical things that happen, like just to be in touch. with reality, like, you know, what places are safe, what places are not safe, and, you know, what, you know, what direction is going, but no, no analytics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

We still have a lot of families and friends over there and we, you know, keep up what's happening over there. But like, I go to those telegram channels only once, only once or twice a day, just to check, you know, hundreds of message that came, but it's muted and archives. So I don't see it. Try not to look at it. How are you doing? What is your state? I'm fine, to the honest. I mean, kind of guilty to say that, but I feel fine.

Of course, it's all uncomfortable, and there is a lot of stress, but, you know, if to compare it to the rest of the people who are in real danger and real stress, and yeah, I feel kind of sane and fine. very much you know you feel responsibility and this actually keeps you really same totally there are no no other options and before that I got I got a question like once someone asked me like as a founder like what do you do when you get burned out like you just you know next day you just go to work and like there's nothing you can do it's completely different than burnout if you feel depressed like what do you feel undepressed you know you just go and do work and like Like nothing, no, not many options.

I mean, to that point, I mean, it does, it must be somewhat clarifying. I mean, you know, to have that purpose and to know that people are counting on you. And, you know, so, so in that regard, you know, I think it's, it's so important, I suppose, to keep going, to keep it together, you know, on behalf of your team. I guess, you know, the last question I would ask is, you know, when you do think about, and if you do, think about, you know, next steps and like, what, where do you want this to sort of, you know, go for you and your team? Like, how do you see this kind of evolving? Maybe, you know, in the next, even a couple weeks. Like, do you have some steady state or any other next steps for how to keep your team kind of, you know,

together or motivated or anything about the future? Until, until, like, this week, I was, you know, I dismissed all our Oki-Rs or all our goals for this year. And I said, like, our two goals is just keep the same. you know, keep the salaries and donate the rest to the army. Now I realize that we just need to get back on track on low K-Rs. And again, it's not me caring about our growth revenue, but the wins and the kind of, you know, this positive attitude and positive perspective

is very important to people hoping. So we'll, we, again, no pressure to the team. And we, but we still, we decided we'll keep hiring. So we have like five or seven open roles. and we'll keep hiring and we'll keep growing buying advertising and we opened to

I think 15 more countries in Europe and like in the next couple of months we're going to open to Latin countries for engineers in those countries and just and this I saw that this actually changed how people feel just because they

have goals and they just can relate to wins and it's very important Yeah. Final two questions, but very much to that end, the first one being we've got thousands of listeners in Silicon Valley and tech companies around the world. Is there a way anyone listening in tech can help lemon.io specifically? Lemon.com. Yeah. I don't want to, I think it's better to help someone else.

there are a lot of people who are need we as a company we're actually doing fine again there is a there is a there is a there is a there is a lag a little but uh you know we're fine but uh i think the most important um to to to to be able to help people directly um after i i tweeted about you know my intention to keep people salary and this kind of went went viral and after that we had a lot of clients who reach out to us and said like our developers unavailable um because he is you know is mobilized or in the digital place, but we want to keep paying them sellers. So this is very generous from their sides because like this is my team, but usually, those developers are temporary developers for a few months.

They hire them, you know, sometimes they hire them for one, two years, but again, it's temporary work, but they still decided to keep paying the salary. So helping people directly is very important because like there are a lot of big organizations, like Red Cross and everything. But right now, the most people in need are being cut directly. So first of all, there is a direct help to Army. I can, you know, you can post links. I can share it with you.

There are a couple of funds that are very transversy and are helping our Army since, you know, the war started in 2014. And there are some really great project. First of all, a lot of people, if you saw this, went online to Airbnb and just started booking, booking stays in

cities where you know cities don't even exist anymore and they keep those you know and the money go go directly

there is a great initiative one by one of the VCs over here in Ukraine they you can pay

you can donate like one K to them and they will send this 1K to specific family who is in this

card situation and they're a lot of initiatives actually, you know, to help, but helping directly, you know that this money will go directly to something. Now we'll go to organization, the band will spread the money and, you know, but directly to army, directly to volunteers that will take this money and, you know, not like 30, 40% will go to operations. It's very important at this point. I, we're going to talk offline and I'm going to make sure that in the show notes, there will be links to whatever charities or whatever, that Alexander specifically,

would recommend people donate to. So anyone listening that wants to help, this will be directly from Alexander. So if I remind, I will add also a great help if you can hire local businesses to do stuff for you. There are a lot of designs agencies, development agencies. There are a lot of people who sell something. So this will help them to keep their jobs

and their employees jobs and pay taxes. And this is also like, you know, something you can participate. So try to shop and employ in Ukraine, if at all possible, is also your suggestion. Alexander, I want to thank you so much. I say this from the bottom of my heart, I'm sure from everyone listening as well. God bless you and everyone in your team and be safe and be well. And thank you for sharing your story with us.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing my story. I'm really, really thankful. I think this will do a lot of good. Thank you.