Alex Fox was born in Ukraine and grew up in Italy — mainly in the Veneto, then Milan and Lake Como, and a year in Rome, where the Trevi Fountain is still his favourite spot on the planet. Music school (flute, clarinet, sax), a referee’s whistle from the age of fifteen, and hacker friends who called him “the Professor”. In Italy he was “the Ukrainian one”; in Ukraine, “the one raised in Italy”. Only later did he understand it was not a fracture but a bridge.
In 2012 he worked for UEFA’s local organizing committee at EURO 2012 and stayed in Ukraine for nearly three months. In 2013 came the online polls that led to Okean Elzy’s first concert in Italy — and to Mark, his partner in almost everything since — and, on 16 August 2013, a proposal to BlaBlaCar that was turned down and framed. In January 2014, in the middle of the Revolution of Dignity, Alex took a one-way flight from Rome to Kyiv — drawn not by safety, but by possibility.
“When was the last time you did something for the first time? If the answer requires you to think for more than ten seconds, too much time has probably passed.”
This passion for first times — for building bridges between nations, people, and possibilities — would define his entire life's work.
In Lviv, together with Mark, Alex stumbled upon an 1882 Austro-Hungarian book factory — dust, printing equipment, crumbling plaster over nineteenth-century brick. The inspiration came from H-Farm in the Veneto. An old book factory could become a hub where different people meet and ideas become real.
That building became OK Factory. On the main wall, an LED sign: “Everything Will Be OK”. James, an Australian founder, walked in among the half-painted walls as the first coworker. A cat named Jira became “Senior Kat Advisor”. And watching Knut, a Norwegian coworker, write his book there every day planted the seed of this one.
Then came Ernest Airlines — financed by one of the co-founders of Minecraft, led by a president who had been Head of Global Marketing at Armani, planes named after the partners’ children. Alex’s team ran most of its local non-flight operations. The licence was revoked, then COVID closed the skies in March 2020. Then war came.
War didn't stop the mission — it accelerated it. When Ukrainian producers lost their markets overnight, he built Faktorist. When the blackouts came, he built BRAVE. War-Life-Balance wasn't theory; it became daily practice. He lives between Lviv and Italy, speaks six languages, and this is his first book.