August 22; Touring Ukraine 🚙🇺🇦
Heading out for thirteen cities and 3000km on the road... this was my week
Happy Sunday,
Last Tuesday I arrived in Ukraine, where I’ll be staying for two weeks to do a 3000km road trip with my friend and partner Zhenya Rozinskiy, with whom we run our TRACTIONCamp franchise together.
TRACTIONCamp is normally a series of skill-sharing trainings of several days each, where we work with local founders, enabling them to learn experientially from accomplished entrepreneurs, investors, and operators. Last year, due to the pandemic, we weren’t able to do anything in person, in Ukraine or anywhere, and we held a series of online sessions, which sure was fun enough, but not nearly close to the vibe and value of our regular retreats. To compensate for this, Zhenya and I decided to graduate our Ukrainian founders from the program through a series of personal visits with them in their hometowns, inviting them for a lunch or dinner, to put a face to the name and offer much-needed personal rapport.
After a wonderful day in Kyiv, where I met a few close friends and for a bonus got the chance to see the dress rehearsal of Ukraine’s 30-year anniversary of liberation military parade, Zhenya and I picked up our rental and headed westward to our first destination, the city of Rivne.
Rivne is an industrial city that was destroyed several times over during WW2, and today is largely another cookie-cutter post-Soviet place full of factories and housing estates. Our local founders had the good idea of inviting us to a forest restaurant outside the city, where we had a taste of rare delicacies like deer heart and boar carpaccio.
The next day we stopped for lunch in Lutsk in the Volyn province of Ukraine, which as a town isn’t much different from Rivne, except for the beautiful Lubart’s Castle built by the medieval king Lubart, when Lutsk was the capital of the Kingdom of Rus. And by evening we made it to Lviv, the beautiful former Polish and Austro-Hungarian city that today serves as Ukraine’s cultural capital.
I had been on a few seaside holidays with my parents in what was then Soviet Crimea in the 1980s, but my first proper visit to Ukraine was in 2008, when with a college friend we toured half of Europe together, in a former military ambulance that had been converted to a camper van. One day we left Krakow in Poland, and crossed over to Ukraine on our way to Lviv. I remember how the road after the border crossing was shockingly poor compared to Poland, and how over the 80km from that border to Lviv, we we were stopped four times by the local traffic cops.
Once in Lviv, back then in 2008, it seemed as if we had stumbled upon a fairy tale no one had ever heard about. It was mid-July, and the picturesque old town was almost deserted, with barely any tourists, and most waiters at restaurants not knowing any English or German.
If you have set foot in Lviv over the past 10 years, you wouldn’t recognize that description. Today Lviv’s old town is bustling with crowds of tourists and locals, bar upon bar and restaurant upon restaurant. Same metamorphosis too for Ukrainian roads and traffic cops; so far most of the driving has been very comfortable, and we only had the police stop us once over many hundreds of kilometers.
Since that first 2008 visit, I’ve been returning to Ukraine dozens of times, and it’s incredible to see the progress the country is making. To me, the most fascinating thing about this place is that it’s Europe’s most important transitional experiment, which coincidentally happens to take place in Europe’s biggest country (by land size). Fast growth has its upsides and downsides, and in Ukraine you can see the contrasts everywhere. Hundreds of successful startups and globally relevant IT firms, next to people begging on the streets or grandmothers selling flowers from their gardens to passers by. Endless swaths of fancy condos in construction, and over a million IDPs living in shared flats and working two or three shifts a day.
An economy and society in transition means nearly unlimited possibilities to succeed, and succeed fast, with as many unlimited possibilities to lose everything in the process and to suffer. While Ukraine is fighting a war with an occupying army and growing its cultural and economical identity almost from scratch, it will depend on us in the EU to offer it a path to join our family of nations, to become a member of the convergence experiment that has allowed many other formerly troubled countries to become wealthy and stable modern European states.
The tiny bit that I can do is to offer my time and resources in helping provide opportunities to Ukrainian entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what Zhenya and I are doing here this week and next.
After meeting three Lviv-based TRACTIONCamp startups over lunch in the old town on Saturday, we set out on the next leg of our journey earlier today, taking us through the Carpathian mountains down to the Bukovina region and its capital of Chernivtsi. More on that and many more Ukrainian cities, towns, and impressions next Sunday!
Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇
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