This is More Than Work, the podcast reminding

you that your self worth is made up of more than your job title.

Each week, I'll talk to a guest about how they discovered that for themselves.

You'll hear about what they did, what they're doing and who they are.

I'm your host, Rabiah.

I work in IT, perform standup comedy, write, volunteer and of course podcast.

Thank you for listening.

Hello, and thanks for tuning into this episode of More Than Work.

I'm really excited to bring you this guest.

It was a privilege to talk to him.

He is from Ukraine.

He fled his home in Kiev and is now safely in another city where he, along with a

bunch of other people in the tech space that he's worked with before, or, that are

friends of his, founded a charity that's benefiting the Ukrainian troops direct.

You'll see in the show notes that I have links to the organization

if you want to make a donation.

You'll know where the money is going.

You'll hear from Andrew he's the guest.

I really enjoyed talking to him.

He and his organization reached out to me to see if he could do the podcast.

And when I learned more about, um, he was, he was a perfect fit because he has

had his career in tech, but he's also now discovered like volunteering and charity

and, and made that part of his life.

And it's really changed the meaning of work.

And he talks about how being in crisis has also affected as team.

I think this is something that will resonate with a lot of people,

even though the idea of being at war, isn't familiar to a lot of us.

Um, I just I've been so struck by the grace and the bravery of the people

that I've encountered from Ukraine.

Just that have been in my life that I know from school and that

I had Veronika Didusenko on the podcast before and now Andrew.

So I really hope you enjoy this episode.

It's kind of a quick one for More Than Work, but it's really, to me, it was just

meaningful to get to speak with Andrew.

And I hope to meet him one day in person.

We've already talked about that.

Like hopefully this will be done for them soon.

And, we will all be able to meet in person and help help them rebuild.

Um, there's not much more to say because it's just anything I say is

trite for, for what's going on, but I'm glad to share the message of this

organization and of Andrew's story.

Thank you again for listening and enjoy the episode.

All right, everybody today, my guest is Andrew Alexseyenko.

He's the co-founder at KOLO and co-founder at Storypoint and Partnerway.

And we're going to find out what all those things are.

And this is really special episode.

I'm glad we're getting to share his story.

So thanks for being on Andrew.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Rabiah.

Yeah, of course.

And where am I talking to you from?

What's your location in the world?

Yeah.

So right now I'm located in Vinnytsia.

It's a small city in Ukraine.

It's about 200 kilometers from my native city.

It's Kiev.

So basically I moved from Kiev around like three months ago because

of the war has started there.

So it's pretty safe here as, at least as, as it could be here.

Yeah, well, that's, um, I mean, I, I just can't imagine how

difficult it is just to move your life.

And so you left a lot of things there, I imagine.

And then you just brought what you needed to with you, right?

I just like left everything.

Like I just had my backpack when the war started.

Uh, so on the second day, uh, we just went to train station.

And on, the train station, there was like trains going everywhere.

And, uh, we just like hopped on the first train.

And I, I didn't didn't know where this train is going.

So I just had a train to west Ukraine and, and, and this that's basically a story

how have I ended up in, in Vinnytsia.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, so we're going to talk more about, about all of that.

And I just want to say at the start, like, I'm very sorry for what you guys

are going through and Ukraine, and I'm, I'm really glad that you're taking

the time to share your story cause I think you have a great More Than Work

story, but also there's something that, again, we'll be able to offer

that people can do who are listening.

So first of all, I'll just state, you're pretty young in my opinion,

compared to me, but you're already an entrepreneur .And you've been a

product manager, which I was a product manager a little while ago in my career.

Let's talk about your work as a product manager and also what Storypoint and

Partnerway your two companies are.

Yeah.

Sure.

Basically I, uh, worked for as a product manager for five or six years.

I started my career in, um, in MarTech.

So I was working in conductor.

It's a company that is doing like search engine optimization for B2B companies.

We were acquired by WeWork.

So it was free pretty interesting ride.

Uh, we were required just before WeWork were going to IPO and then they'll all

those articles about Adam Neumann and 47 billion valuation and all this, like

smoking weed on his plane and, and that.

The devaluation of, uh, WeWork is not going to be the same and it's

not going to have an IPO and you're internally on all this stuff.

So, and then the, afterwards, WeWork acquired our company, WeWork sold the

company back to founder of a Conductor and that's, that's also amazing story.

And now the folks in Conductor, uh, are driving company further by themselves.

And they think that they are doing even better right now.

And after that, I joined the company called aura.

So we were doing different VPN apps like hotspot shield, better

net, VPN 360, and basically the companies doing the security.

So I was mainly managing if you, a few products.

So, uh, we were doing like a lot of AB testing, a lot of launching

some features some new products.

So it was super interesting.

Yeah.

So you were doing all that and then what made you decide to found

your own companies after that?

I thought that I need to have more responsibility

on my life and what I am doing.

Like the folks in companies, they, they did, they gave me a lot of

responsibilities inside, but still, uh, you know, th there were a lot

of freedom in what I was doing.

But still, I, I wanted to have more impact and by more impact, you need

to have like more responsibility.

If you're like managing like more people and you're managing more users in your

products, you're making more impact that, that you, you you've done before.

So I just like wanted to have like more responsibilities.

You founded a Storypoint first then?

Or.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, um, I know Diana, which is my co-founder around like eight years now.

And we were brainstorming on different things, how to make our own company.

Several people who reached out to Diana and they wanted, uh,

us to make an apps for them.

So we decided that we can start with something to build

some products for our clients.

So that's, that's how it started it.

So we decided that building products for other people, it's

also good and also makes impact.

I've done the same thing where I've been inside

a company, working for the company for the products of the company

on the website and the mobile app.

And then I've been on the other side where I've been a consultant more recently and

doing, not really product management, more project management, but with the

knowledge, right, it's still there.

And it does feel different.

You're feeling for me, the feeling of responsibility was a bit different, but

I still always feel very responsible.

So how did that shift the perspective for you going from managing your

own products to really building products for other people?

Yeah, so firstly, you don't have, uh, your manager here.

Sure you have your clients that, that, that on the first place, but you

don't have like managers and that's how you need to be more responsible

and you need to have like some internal motivation to do something.

So, uh, so you would, you would know what.

You want to do everyday?

Like when you're waking up, like, what is your goal for this day?

Like you everything just like starts from scratch.

I learned some discipline from, from this.

So I just want to have my daily routine in each morning, like to wake up, brush

my teeth, have some water, do some exercises and then starting the day.

And it helps me a lot to just start off the process.

So your routine sounds like you changed a little bit

managing yourself because you didn't have a manager, but then as far as even you

managing products, like for me, when I went from managing my own products for

a company I worked for, I would feel very possessive and very responsible

for outcome and the way that, like I was making the decisions, but with consulting,

what I found was I would almost just say, well, this is what we advise you

to do and if they didn't want to do it, they would have to just come back and

ask us to change something else because they didn't, they made a bad decision.

So did you find anything for you?

Like your relationship with products changed when you owned them versus you

were just helping people put theirs out.

Yeah.

Um, so, um, for me, personal and not a lot of things changed

on the decision making side.

I always try to make the decisions that will impact the user

itself, not the decision maker.

For example, if you want to if you know that the user flows that we are proposing

is better and we do some user testing with users and they like it more and

we have the data, uh, that support it.

So that we are sharing to our clients and we are trying to make the decisions

that will be better for the end user.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think that people forget the end users sometimes

when they're making decisions.

So they think, well, this is my idea though, it's good.

It's like, well, yeah, but the users won't understand it, you know?

yeah.

So it's funny.

So Storypoint, that's where you're building apps and products for people.

And then what about Partnerway?

How did you come up with that and what is Partnerway?

Yeah.

So Partnerway is, uh, the companies that, uh, is a reseller.

So we are a partner of Google, And Zendesk and Asana in Eastern Europe.

So we are helping companies to do better and digitalize their businesses.

So a lot of businesses in Ukraine, there are not so high digitally as others.

So for example, a lot of Agro businesses in Ukraine, for example, they don't

use the latest technology and we are onboarding those people and learning how

they can use and get most out of the team collaborations and are learning how to

work with like project management tools like us on that customer support that

they can automate the process of their customer experience, understand taking

like just by phone calls, they can do it online on their websites and so on.

Cool.

You're doing all these things and then just like that

your, your country is at war.

I mean, just to put it really bluntly.

And so that caused you to change directions a little bit too, right?

And you found a, um, KOLO project.

So what is it?

As the war started in, in Ukraine, I just like, want to

share like my story and I think like a lot of people are feeling similar.

I was sleeping with when the war started.

Everybody was like calling me...

The war started at it's like it's 6:00 AM.

And, uh, I, I was sleeping till, uh, nine or 10.

I don't know.

And I I'm just like sleeping very good and nothing can can woke me up.

So even the war.

When you're waking up the first thing is like shock and you don't know what to do.

And most of the people I know they, they were like scared, like they

were evacuating and that's it.

So during like the first one or two day, like I was almost, uh, uh, do

nothing, uh, in terms of productivity.

I was just like evacuating as my friend and families we're doing.

Uh, and the second day you're realizing that you need to do

something and you need to help.

So what we created with my friends my friend like Bohdan Kit, and my other

friend from Netherlands, Martijn Verbove.

We chatted that we need to create some website and help our, uh,

trusted organizations to collect more donations to help army with vests.

At that point we understood that a lot of people were willing to fight, but

they just didn't have any equipment.

Do you want to fight for a country where they don't have access to even

military equipment of the shortage?

So we decided that we need to change and we created a website called Help

Ukraine Win where are we make a list of all this like trustable organizations.

And we launched it on product hunt.

We made it on the first place.

We had a lot of traffic on this website.

During the first few weeks we had half of million people have used it, our web site.

Fortunately, we don't know the amount of the donations that were

made because we were collecting donations to other organizations.

Uh, and what we found that during the first weeks, uh, those

organizations there were overwhelmed.

All those organizations grew by 100% in the amount of,

uh, their money at that flow.

So they just like, couldn't keep up this operations.

At that time we uh decided that we want to merge with a KOLO.

So we, we, we collected all those donations on the website.

It was around, uh, 60,000 euros.

Yeah.

So was KOLO existing before.

No, no, no.

KOLO wasn't existed before.

So KOLO in parallel, like on, when we were launching this, the, um,

group of like product managers like me, they created this organizations.

It's the same ideas that we need to help the, uh, the army.

So it's, it's also like my friends and, uh, that they're working

in, in big companies, like Wise.

Like Tumblr.

Like bolt and others.

So it's like, Pavlo Pedenko, Tolik Kozlovskyi, Anton Diatlov, Bodhan Kit...

And some other Eastern European names that you probably won't pronounced, but,

Yeah.

How has your perspective changed when now you're managing this kind of

organization versus your other ones?

Like, is there any difference in how it makes you feel or how your focus

in your life has shifted a little bit?

Yeah, sure.

A lot of things changed.

Now in KOLO there are 50 or 70 team members.

Um, and, uh, most of the people that are doing it, part-time not like full-time

and they're having like their daily jobs.

The difference that it's it's fully volunteer activity and people are just,

uh, uh, doing it because they, they want to do so I see that on the work sometimes

people just sport because of the money or just because they need to, and you see

this difference because so many people like brought together and, and they're

not like bringing together because of the morning money or some, uh, other

incentives they are bringing because they don't want to help other people.

So, uh, The environment is a little bit different.

And then do you see some, so much passion from those people and so I

think that the culture is different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's one, it's one purpose.

That makes sense.

I mean, sometimes you end up with a purpose at work that makes sense

for someone, but not for someone else, but you're just doing your job,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One thing in IT...

I mean, and another jobs too, but I know very distinctly in IT, you'll

send up having "emergencies" come up like everyone panics and the client's

really mad and oh, we have an emergency.

You have to fix this now.

And usually what happens in my experience as you go through these like crazy

times, and then everyone will do stuff.

And then at the end, someone always says, well, we're not curing cancer.

We need to calm down.

Or we're not saving lives.

We need to calm down.

Cause it's just our way of dismissing the fact that people were

probably acting inappropriately.

And really making something more than what something was.

But in your case now you are working somewhere where you guys

are actually trying to save lives.

And do you think that this will shift your perspective later on?

I mean, hopefully you guys get through this sooner than later and can start

rebuilding, but then you'll have your job again, your regular day jobs.

Do you feel like any shift in your perspective already, or do

you think it will in the future?

yeah.

I think everyone has shifted in their daily lives life's perspective

and their life values here.

I think before the world, a lot of people were focusing on like small things

that not matter so much, uh, they were like upset about the daily situation.

They don't have some stuff in their homes.

They can buy and afford some uh, some physical things, but right now

they understood how life is important and the it shift their perspective.

For me personally like if the war ends, hopefully soon, I won't stop volunteering.

Like the main goal of KOLO is to help saves lives in army.

So, because of like, we are buying this like vests and helmets and

other protections, and drones, After we can finish the war we

need to rebuild the country.

Like a lot of like homes are destroyed, a lot of other

constructions are destroyed.

So you need to take also responsibility for that.

And I think that I would rebuild the country.

So, as for me personally, uh we transitioned, uh, two companies,

Partnerway and Storypoint to non-profit organization.

So before the war ends, we don't make any profit to, uh, the founders.

We are giving this money to other volunteering activities.

Sometimes it's to KOLO.

Sometimes is to, um, other people impacted by war uh, like refugees and other things.

So I think that we will make some, some project like that in the future.

I'm thinking about, um, several ways how we can do this.

We can do some percentage.

So for example, we can gather companies that will make, uh, 1% or 5% of their

income, and that would, would, would be directly to some restructure fund.

And we'll make some impact with this volunteering project.

I'm willing to invest that for my company.

So I don't know how others, but I think that is an interest in this.

Hmm.

Yeah.

And did you, I guess before this, did you volunteer?

I mean, for me, service is a big, it's a core value of mine.

A hundred percent I've spent, I've spent quite a bit of time, not enough

time, in my opinion, but quite a bit volunteering and doing service.

And I don't know where that came from.

Personally, it just, it's just been part of me since I was a kid.

Did you have that in you before?

Or is this something that's new that you're experiencing now?

Well, uh, I, I did some volunteering duties.

Is this just studentship uh, when I was studying in university,

uh, we were organizing, uh, TED events, like that conferences,

local ones in Kiev, and others.

So I think during my life.

I just like had to volunteering now and then, uh, a little bit, uh, around that.

Like back then, we were more interested in learning.

So because of we were interested in education, it made this educational

conferences to share as ideas to, to, to, to do something.

Now we shifted our perspective and they think like right now we m ostly want to

help people to survive, to end this war.

And then I think that we will have different values, but you have

different values during your lives.

But steely of this volunteering part is there so.

Cool.

Yeah, no, that's great.

And, I think it's really cool that you've you looked kind of rationally at what

needs to be done and you started doing it.

One thing with KOLO too, it's you guys are all

tech people.

So it's kind of a lot of nonprofit organizations, at least from my

experience, they're created for the cause that they're working for.

And they're working on programming for that.

And then the tech all came in as a secondary option.

And so you'll see kind of bad implementation and stuff, but you

guys are starting from scratch as tech people with the cause but

the tech people for the cause.

And so you've got a little bit different of a website.

Since you weren't in fundraising before, how did you go about architecting?

What you wanted to display on the site and the transaction flow and everything?

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

First like almost all the co-founders.

They are like product managers in the past, uh, and, and very

experienced product managers.

So our main goal is like to, to bring tech to the military and tech to volunteering.

So what, what we are doing is uh, we created a subscription.

Um, probably it's the first war subscriptions that exists, uh, and,

uh, so how it looks like it's, it's, it's, uh, around like $6 per day, which

is $200 per month to support, uh, the army and all those funds are, going.

We, firstly, we don't have any salaries in NGO.

So like there are a lot of NGO, like, uh, the Red Cross and other

organizations as a paying sellers, but one kind of the percent of the donations

are going directly to the needs.

That's one difference sources that we are having.

When we just like launch to subscription, we had, uh, around one, 1000 to

people who subscribed in three days.

Uh, yeah, mostly from Ukraine because of.

In in, in Ukrainian.

It's, it's such a good example of how people collaborate and going

together and want to help and giving their donations and, and,

and support to these organizations.

And right now we also launched this subscription, not only internally

to Ukrainian, but also externally.

So anyone can subscribe.

We have, uh, the reports on our website, where this money goes

and so everyone can see it.

And right now it helps us to do plan activity.

And we know that we can buy some vests in then as next months or some other things

like night visions or thermal imagers.

Nice.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And smart to just kind of productize the idea of donating one thing

that I've thought a lot about and I think a lot of people have.

A lot of people who are external to this, I think have good intentions.

They want to help.

I had an experience recently where you know, everyone's saying they want to

help and they're doing the hashtag, you know, for Ukraine and everything.

But then when asked to do an action, it's hard to get them to actually do it.

And one area I can see that I know too is like in an IT recruiting and businesses.

And how have you seen a shift in how you're experiencing working with

businesses outside of Ukraine and just kind of people they're getting

displaced from their homes, but also possibly their jobs if companies

aren't surviving and things like that.

So have you seen any thing there?

Yeah, so from what we saw, uh, during the first few weeks

a lot of companies that were working in local market, they were forced to fire

people in tech and other industries.

Like for me, as I'm working in tech, it's more related to, to, to me.

As an example, we have a company called Rozetka.

It's a small Amazon here in Ukraine.

Like the biggest e-commerce.

So their revenues in first two weeks say dropped from four billions dollars

of revenues per month to 23 million.

They fired some part of employees and the same things with other local

companies because of the market is shrinked so they needed to fire people.

And we are seeing that there are a lot of great people, uh here in Ukraine.

Um, because for men is not allowed to leave the country.

So, uh, they they're staying here.

And what we are seeing that from, from trends within the industries

that companies are not willing to hire in Ukraine because of the risks.

And a lot of people don't have just like jobs and that's impacting

like the GDP of the country.

And they can't find a new job.

So it we be created some kind of the platform for people to sign up and then

we we are searching for the clients who are willing to, to hire those

people and that's also our impact in, in, in the economy and helping those,

uh, people who, who can't leave the country, but they still have jobs.

Like usually we don't have a lot of problems with hiring, uh, Ukrainians who

are in Europe or in US or other countries.

But there's still the huge problem of hiring within the country and

those people are in safe locations.

So like, it's in, in Lviv, Chernivtsi, Vinnytsi as I am like,

I'm, I'm sitting in the office.

It's quite safe here, but they still can't have a job so that's also our

project that that we want to develop.

Great.

Well, I mean, Andrew, I really respect what you're doing and

the insights you're bringing into helping your country in this way.

I mean, there's different ways to do it.

You could, you know, strap on a vest and go or do things

this way using your strengths.

So.

Good, good job on that.

I mean, it's, it sounds trite to say it's almost embarrassing,

but, um, yeah, it's just really, especially to talk to you about that.

Do you have any like advice or mantra that you want to share with people,

which is something I ask every guest.

In terms of mantra, I don't know, like, I just

think like making some impact.

I don't know, like it could be some local impact or just to, uh, global, uh,

something that, that gives you energy.

For me, this volunteering activity gives me energy.

, I don't have any mantra specific.

I just like want to advise people like, just do what you love, uh,

make other people's lives better.

yeah.

Good.

Okay.

So I have these set of questions that are kind of silly.

They're called the fun five that, I mean that I'm going to ask you.

So the first one, what is the oldest t-shirt you have and still wear?

well, a good question.

I can tell about a hoodie.

It's around like eight years and I love it.

Um, they, the hoodie has type of, uh, "don't give a fuck about

weather" and, and it has a story.

Like about eight years ago, I was an intern in a marketing

agency called ambulance.

And I was running my first half-marathon and it was like minus 11

because it was just like three days before the new year.

It was like new year marathon and we make this t-shirts for all the people

in the company who are running that day.

So it's, it's, it's a guy that have, uh, uh, great stories that, that,

that this connected to this hoodie.

Yeah.

Oh man.

That's crazy.

It's hard enough to run.

Well, I can't run, but just at all, but then in that kind of weather.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

So are you familiar with the movie Groundhog's Day?

Have you seen that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's one of my favorite movies of my childhood.

All right.

Good.

I just wanted to make sure.

So, if everyday was like Groundhog's Day, which should kind of might seem like

that for you right now, I don't know.

Um, what song would you have your alarm clock set to play every morning?

So, uh, in, in this situation, I, I would, I would pick right

now that John Lennon song "Imagine".

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's a, that's a good song then it makes sense for

what you're going through now.

Um, okay.

Coffee or tea or neither

Well, I love coffee.

I just like drinking coffee everyday.

And addicted to it.

Do you like it any specific way or just black or?

Um, I like cappuccino, flat white, uh, alternative

as well, like all kinds of coffees.

nice.

Okay, cool.

And can you think of something that just makes you like laugh already

cry or something that did recently where you were just cracking

well, uh, it's a good question.

Good question.

I just like met my friend that, uh, I haven't seen like for three

months and, uh, we were just like, laughing together after not

seeing like four for three months.

That was a situation where I laughed a lot.

Nice.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And it must've been nice to see him.

Okay, so last one, who inspires you right now?

Well, uh, it's, it's, it's tough to say, uh, I would

say I'm more inspired by technology.

And I think that the technology will, it's making our lives better.

So I, I think that those people who derives the most out of

technology, they inspiring me.

So, uh, I like Andrew Ng.

He's a lecturer in, uh, he's co-founder of Coursera.

And he's making a lot of education in machine learning and all this stuff.

So I think that their machine learning will you'll do you'll benefit a lot.

Nice.

Yeah.

I mean, there's definitely a way to use it for good and ways it's

improved our lives significantly.

All right.

And so how do you want people to look you up?

So maybe they want to look you up Andrew and talk to you,

or they want to look up KOLO.

Where do you want them to go?

And I'll put all the links in the show notes and more.

Yeah.

Cool.

So, um, we have a website kolo u a dot com (koloua.com) where everyone can go

and, and, and can look around about our information and donate if they want.

I have my social media so if anyone has any questions or want to help

they can reach out to me there.

And the yeah we have a websites of my companies if anyone is interested.

Okay, cool.

And I'll put everything in the show notes.

Well, Andrew, it was really a pleasure talking to you today so

thanks for taking the time to share what you've been doing and also

just what's going on, where you are.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening.

You can learn more about the guest and what was talked about in the show notes.

Joe Maffia created the music you're listening to.

You can find him on Spotify at Joe M A F F I A.

Rob Metke does all the design for which I am so grateful.

You can find him online by searching Rob M E T K E.

Please leave review.

If you'd like to show and get in touch if you have feedback or guest ideas.

The pod is on all the social channels at at more than word pod

(@morethanworkpod) or at rabiah comedy (@rabiahcomedy) on TikTok.

And the website is more than work pod dot com (morethanworkpod.com).

While being kind to others, don't forget to be kind to yourself.