A top marketing guy who offered to help with Alex’s “phantom concert” experiment in 2013 — the online polls that led to Okean Elzy’s first concert in Italy. He became the lifelong partner of almost everything that came afterward. Together they found the 1882 book factory that became OK Factory; it was Mark who found and named Jira the cat, Mark who said “Let’s do it” to a national TV spot three days before launch, Mark who presented Lviv at the Brand Festival in Jesi. Years later he too moved from Italy to Lviv. “Happily and with no regrets, he swears.”
“Let’s do it.”
OK Factory wasn’t officially open yet when the painters, brushes still in hand, introduced the first coworker: a young startup founder from Australia with a laptop under his arm. “Can I work here?” There was nowhere to host him properly, so they solved it the natural way — a beer together, talking about travel and technology. One evening, after a misunderstanding over who had an idea first, James shared the lesson that would prove prophetic: execution is the ocean.
“Ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution is priceless.”
A Norwegian coworker with whom Alex ate the best ribs in the world at Rebernya in Lviv. Day after day, Knut sat at his desk at OK Factory, completely absorbed in writing his book — he had come to Lviv to finish it. When it came out and the enthusiastic reviews arrived, something clicked. Without watching Knut write, Alex says, the book you are reading probably would never have existed.
“Sometimes you need to disappear into the middle of nowhere to bring something important to completion.”
Named after the well-known IT task manager, Jira was found by Mark, who took him for a kitten a few months old. The vet said he was at least six or seven. He was confirmed in the role anyway: Senior Kat Advisor, by seniority of service, consulted on every complex decision — with a 100% approval rate, as long as cuddles and food were involved. When Mark’s consulting invoices carried a few odd extra euros, the explanation was utterly honest. He is thanked in the acknowledgments, in strict alphabetical order.
“It’s for Jira’s food.”
An English investor in his fifties — venture capital in Berlin, London and Silicon Valley — who walked up to Alex on a hotel terrace over the ocean in February 2022, a glass of wine in hand: “You’re the one from Ukraine, aren’t you?” Alex described the platform he was building. John needed three words to change its scale. He was among the first to truly believe in Faktorist and to support it.
“That’s Alibaba of Ukraine.”
Born in Mariupol, Oleg met Alex as a kid at school in Italy; they grew up kicking a ball around the neighbourhood fields. When the invasion began, he took in, in Italy, the team’s girls fleeing the country. Then he quit his job at Amazon and returned to Ukraine, to go and liberate his Mariupol. He fell at Bakhmut in March 2023. His last message is still unopened. The book is dedicated to him.
“Oleg, this bridge is yours too.”
A very dear person Alex worked with in aviation. In the first days of the invasion, when everyone was burning through energy helping everyone else, she made an analogy that became a guiding principle for the company: to help others in the long term, first make sure you can keep going. “She doesn’t know it yet, but she is present everywhere in this book: her name is Sofia.”
“When the oxygen masks drop, you have to put yours on first, then help the person next to you.”
In the winter of 2022–2023, with the energy infrastructure under systematic attack, many cities had electricity only four to eight hours a day. Volodymyr was producing technical fabrics for a foreign client, Lukas. To fill the order, his factory organized night shifts from four to eight in the morning — the only window of power — and kept all its jobs and commitments. Lukas: “It’s a demonstration of resilience that none of my suppliers in Europe could match.”
“It’s strange at first, waking up at half past three in the morning to go to the factory. But you get used to it. And above all, it works.”
A Ukrainian artist Alex met at the Future of Ukraine Summit in Berlin in June 2023. She had fled war twice — from Donetsk in 2014, leaving her home and studio, and again in 2022 — and had turned each flight into a creative opportunity. When the book was complete, there wasn’t a single second of doubt about who would create its cover. Viktoria designed it.
“Creativity is the only thing they can’t take away from you.”
During the pandemic, on the verge of resignation, the phone rang with a +1 prefix: Canada. Thousands of units of disposable medical clothing, by air — the first real international B2B order, before the marketplace even existed. It arrived thanks to Andrii, a Ukrainian living in Canada who introduced a client from his network: the first UAmbassador ante litteram, and the seed of the whole program.
“If one bridge had worked once, it could work ten million times.”
A travel blogger with a crazy goal: to visit every country on the planet — already past 100. During the pandemic, with Lviv’s tourist flats empty, he gathered IT specialists, marketers and creatives into a whole apartment building: a coliving with a coworking inside. Alex lived there for months and kept writing the notes for this book; Orest turned the experience into a bestseller on his “Productivity Formula”.
“Nothing happens without one or more pushes.”
In the border and liberated regions — Kherson, Kharkiv — tractor drivers must inspect and demine the fields before they can work them. Every now and then a tractor is blown up, by a drone or an undetected mine. Petro is one of them. This, the book says, is what lies behind the word “resilience” in reports: people with first and last names who decide every day not to stop.
“This is the price of the grain we ship all over the world.”