Post by Michael Wirachowski

Yesterday I sat on the jury at TechEmbassy | formerly UAtech Venture Night Berlin. Alongside investors from Earlybird, IBB Ventures, Redstone, Lunar Ventures and more. What stayed with me was not the pitches. It was the context. Ukrainian founders are building companies through a full-scale war. Air-raid alerts at night, rolling blackouts, things we can not even imagine having in Germany - despite complaining about a lot of minor stuff in our daily life ;) And still: in the fifth year of war, Ukraine produces unicorns, lists on Nasdaq and builds frontier deep tech. Over 60% of startups stayed in the country. Teams ship faster, sell abroad earlier, and use grants to buy time, not as a business model. There is a lazy word for this: resilience. But that undersells it. What I saw was not people bouncing back. It was execution under conditions most of us will never face. That does something to how you look at a pitch. When someone builds with that kind of discipline, "we'll figure out operations later" isn't an option. The structure has to hold from day one, because everything else is already on fire. The best teams on that stage understood exactly that. Also many thanks to MIRA Ukraine for putting the social value factor into the deserved picture. In a world of greed and challenges people often forget about the most important. Grateful I could be part of it. And humbled by who I got to watch build.