Mayak Innovatsiy

Mark Patchett is ECom Entrepreneur and founder of Growth Shop, an international marketing agency and one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the world. In less than 2 years, GS has grown by more than $ 1 billion. The company’s offices are based in the UK, Ukraine and Vietnam.  We’ve been talking about e-commerce.
How does it work?
What are the key components of growing a brand online?
 Why Tik Tok is cool, and how to use it?

Max Gurvits is a US/European entrepreneur, Chief Host at Summit Summit & Partner at Vitosha Venture Partners. Active in Europe and the Middle East as startup advisor and investor, Max is particularly focused on Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Also, Max runs TRACTION Camp, a series of three-day workshops with Silicon Valley operators, for top founders in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
 We’ve been talking about new normal in events, and on the startup & investments scene, about Ukraine as a powerhouse for tech talents, and also about what’s next?

Daniel Szemerey co-founded and spearheads the growth of Health Venture Lab, a pan-European Healthtech accelerator with offices in Hungary, Spain and Poland. HVL covers the full pipeline, from need-based research, through early-stage product-market fit iteration, to growth-stage companies.
We were talking about MedTech trends, immortality and the merging of humans and machines - how soon will it happen?

Ivan Dorn is a singer, DJ and producer, MTV European Music Awards winner. His music combines elements of house, disco, pop, jazz, funk, UK garage, hip-hop and soul. 
In 2016, Ivan started Masterskaya, a music hub and an independent music label focused on bringing the exciting sound of Ukrainian underground to the main stage.
We were talking about rebelliousness, American dream, the identity of Ukrainian music, and contemporary technologies in music.

Andrii Degeler is a journalist and podcast host based in the Netherlands. He is covering all things technology since 2007 for Tech.eu, Engadget, TNW, Ars Technica UK, the Kyiv Post, and more. We’ve been talking about recent tech news, and about the perception of the Ukrainian IT-ecosystem in Europe. 

Yaroslav Azhnyuk - the co-founder of Petcube and Ozero Design. Petcube designs and develops hardware and software products for pets. The idea for Petcube came when a dog of the co-founder suffered from separation anxiety and boredom. Rocky destroyed furniture and barked excessively when he was home alone, which made neighbors worry and call the police. That’s the story of developing the first prototype Petcube Camera to entertain Rocky and make him less anxious. In this episode of Mayak Innovatsiy we were talking about pros and cons of launching a company in the USA, about specific moments of running a hardware business, and some more things like - is a position of CMO, chief meow officer of Petcube, already taken?
This episode was  ZOOMed.

Rick Rasmussen is an Industry Fellow and Member of Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of Startup Programs for the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology where he is responsible for creation of new programs centering on Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation. Rick Rasmussen is an advisor and board member of UNIT Factory, the coding school of UNIT City. We were talking about quarantine in Sunny California and transformation of entrepreneurs’ skills in this crisis. 
This episode was ZOOMed from San Jose (California, USA), Kyiv and Odessa (Ukraine).

Jan Peter de Jong has over 20 years of sales and management experience in digital transformation. As a Country Manager of Microsoft in Ukraine, Jan Peter is focusing on digitization, philanthropy, education, and the overall progress of Ukraine.
Jan Peter graduated with a master's in Astronomy at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Thanks to scientific research at the beginning of his career, and his passion for the applicable project management, he shifted from pure science to business.
We were talking about the main pillars of digital transformation, growth mindset, fairness and transparency of data, education, and empowerment of people, and about how to make Ukraine a better place using technologies.

Andrew Sorohan is Venture Lead of u.ventures, one of the VC funds in Ukraine that really invests in tech. There are Petcube and 3DLOOK in their portfolio. We were talking about startups & investment in Ukraine in numbers and figures.

Eli David – the founder and CEO of StartupBlink, Global Map of Startups & Ecosystem Rankings. In 2020 report the Kyiv startup ecosystem is ranked #1 in Ukraine and 32 globally among 1000 cities. We were talking about the definition of the ecosystem, about conditions for growth. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Is that right regarding startups?
P.S. Couple of words about circumstances this episode was made in: Dom had stuck in Kyiv traffic jam, but in order not to delay the recording Andrei and Tatiana had used AI to do the voice-over of an intro, and rolled in the conversation, in a while Dominique had joined - and it was good!