War Taught this Ukrainian Entrepreneur the Value of Resilience

Salome Mikadze-Struk, the daughter of refugees from the Abkhazia region of Georgia, built a software-development business during the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running through Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and now mentors founders on resilience in entrepreneurship [1]. Mikadze-Struk was studying at Georgetown University when the pandemic forced classes online and she moved back to Ukraine [1]. She and cofounder Nor Newman incorporated Movadex there in early 2020, focusing on providing engineering talent and product-development guidance to startups [1]. The Abkhazia region her parents fled was the site of a 1992–1993 war that resulted in de facto independence and the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Georgians, according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [6][8]. "They left everything behind," Mikadze-Struk said of her parents [1]. In early 2022, during her final semester at Georgetown, Russia invaded Ukraine [1]. The founders told employees to take the day off, then spent the following days evacuating staff to the company's headquarters in Lviv, in western Ukraine [1]. "Half of my senior year was actually spent in bomb shelters," Mikadze-Struk said [1]. Movadex partnered with the nonprofit arm of the Lviv IT Cluster business association to help resettle refugees from eastern Ukraine and offer job placements [1]. Mikadze-Struk graduated from Georgetown in 2022 and later took an extended leave from Movadex to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, which she completed in 2024 [1]. She also gave birth to her daughter that year [1]. Throughout her studies, she volunteered as a startup mentor and public speaker, emphasizing adaptability in the face of rapid technological change [1]. "You need to be okay with risk, you need to be resilient. You need to be okay with disruption and okay with uncertainty," she said [1]. Now stepping back into an active leadership role at Movadex, she aims to drive U.S. expansion and help clients implement AI [1]. She described AI's democratization of software prototyping as "mind blowing," but noted the pace of change is "both exciting and scary, because you don't know what tomorrow will bring" [1].