He soon established a non-profit social network for entrepreneurs called Mesto — the Russian word for place — in hopes of boosting the start-up market in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. When he launched a new startup of his own, Duplicat, which aimed to identify fraud in the non-replaceable token market, he contracted a team of artificial intelligence engineers spread across Russia.
He also invested in several Ukrainian start-ups. One of them was Reface, an AI company recommended by Mr. Podolyanko. Last summer, meeting other companies and colleagues in Kiev, the two attended a boat party hosted by a group of Ukrainian technologists and investors. Mr. Podolyanko brought his girlfriend, a Ukrainian financial analyst named Stacy Antipova.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
It was a journey they now look back on with remorseful affection. Russia invaded six months later.
After the invasion, Mrs. Antipova from Ukraine and flew to Tijuana, Mexico, where she was able to enter the United States as a refugee. She now lives with DobryDom. “When I went to breakfast for the first time,” recalled Mr. Doronichev, “I didn’t know what to say.”
While recently sitting in the backyard next to her new roommates, Mrs. Antipova also didn’t know what to say. “I wasn’t going to go that far so soon,” she said. “I’m just trying to improve my life, understand what I want to do, because I’ve put the rest of my life behind me.”
On the other side of the table, Dasha Kroshkina, another Russian-born entrepreneur, explained that she was in the process of relocating employees from both Russia and Ukraine and that she wanted to restart her company’s service, StudyFree, in Africa and India. . When the war started, many of his clients — students seeking scholarships and grants at universities abroad — were in Russia.
“We all feel a trauma,” says Mikita Mikado, another DobryDom roommate, who emigrated from Belarus. “But the trauma is different for each of us.”
Mr Mikado and Mr Doronichev are now working to relocate their own employees from Russia and to European and Asian countries that accept Russian citizens without a visa, but not all of them are willing or able to leave. The two entrepreneurs cut ties with anyone who stays.
