Founder Shares The Value Of Entrepreneurship

Salome Mikadze-Struk is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she built a software development business as an undergraduate during the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running despite the outbreak of war in her native Ukraine. Now, he uses his knowledge to educate tech-startup founders and speak publicly about the importance of resilience in business.

Mikadze-Struk was studying at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, when COVID-19 struck. Classes went online, and he returned to Ukraine. During that disruption he saw an opportunity to develop his business idea, called Movadex, by tapping into Ukraine’s pool of talented young engineers. Then Russia attacked in early 2022, during his last semester. Taking online classes in bomb shelters and helping workers evacuate to safer parts of the country was surreal, he says, but the team kept the company running and he graduated later that year.

In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took a break from her business to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, which she graduated this year. In his precious spare time he mentors startups and gives lectures, using his unique perspective to promote the need for business agility—something he thinks is increasingly important in the software industry as AI coding tools upend old business models.

“You need to be risk-averse, you need to be patient. You need to be prepared for disruption and be prepared for uncertainty,” he says, “because this is going to be part of this industry for the foreseeable future.”

Early Educational Focus

Mikadze-Struk’s parents settled in Ukraine after fleeing conflict in Georgia’s Abkhazia region in the early 1990s. “They left everything behind,” he says. “You can look on Google Maps and zoom in on where their houses were and it’s all trash.

Despite this background, Mikadze-Struk says she and her sister were raised in a typical middle-class environment in Kyiv. His father owned a small shop and his mother was a housewife. His parents placed a strong emphasis on education and encouraged him to study hard and participate in extracurricular programs such as the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, which introduces students to research.

He says: “They were not rich, so they knew that our way of life was not to invest money, but to earn based on our achievements.

When Mikadze-Struk was 14, her family discovered the newly launched Ukraine Global Scholars program, a non-profit organization that helps talented students secure scholarships abroad. This program helped her win a full scholarship to the Emma Willard School, a private girls’ school in Troy, NY.

Discovering Tech

After graduating high school in 2018, Mikadze-Struk was accepted to Georgetown to study business administration. But it was outside the classroom that his career direction began to take shape. He won the first competition with a medical device he had made for schoolwork and, although the business idea went nowhere, he sparked an interest in business.

The Ukrainian software industry was booming, and he began attending startup events and competitions in his home country the summer before starting college. There he met his founder who ended up being Nor Newman.

Although both were only 18 years old, they saw a gap in the market. The pair noticed that many inventors have strong ideas but lack the technical expertise to see them through, while engineering students often struggle to gain real-world experience. Newman had started randomly connecting startups with his college friends, but the couple quickly saw the business potential. “We realized that we could actually build our own startup studio and help startups as a team, as opposed to just connecting people,” Mikadze-Struk said.

Then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, during his sophomore year, it brought both disruption and opportunity to Newman and Mikadze-Struk. While travel restrictions and lockdowns have made life difficult, there has also been an increase in companies looking to move their businesses online. He says: “Covid has greatly increased everything we have been doing.

Seeing an opportunity, Mikadze-Struk and Newman incorporated Movadex in Ukraine in early 2020. From the beginning, they decided to focus not only on providing engineering talent, but also on helping start with product development. Many times, says Mikadze-Struk, the vision of the software developer doesn’t match what the users really want. “What’s really helped us grow is not just engineering or code quality, but rather a holistic approach to building a product and actually getting into the user’s brain,” he says.

Navigating Difficulty

Back in Ukraine, Mikadze-Struk had to juggle this booming business by studying remotely—studying at night and working during the day. He says it was tiring but it allowed him to quickly apply what he learned in business classes to build his startup.

After successfully navigating the epidemic, Mikadze-Struk was dealt another wild card. In early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and his life was changed again. It was very traumatic for his family, as they had already been displaced from their home in Georgia because of the war.

In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took a long break from her company to pursue an MBA at Stanford.Christie Hemm Klok

“Seeing my parents go through all the things they went through was really sad,” she says. “But at the same time, because I had heard so much about their resilience, I had the strength to fail completely.”

On the day of the attack, the founders told employees to take the day off and send emails to customers to warn of possible disruptions. The next few days were spent screening workers and transporting as many as possible to their headquarters in Lviv, Western Ukraine.

By the following Monday the business was back up and running. Soon after, they partnered with the non-profit Lviv IT Cluster business unit to help resettle refugees from the eastern part of Ukraine, where the strikes were concentrated, and provide employment. All the while, Mikadze-Struk was also finishing her final year at distant Georgetown. “Part of my last year was spent in bomb shelters,” he says.

Encouraging Entrepreneurship

That summer, Mikadze-Struk graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and learned that she had been accepted into Stanford University’s MBA program. In 2023, he took a long break from Movadex and moved to California. She also gave birth to her daughter in 2024.

Balancing studies and parenting became a full-time job, but she continued to be involved with the ecosystem by volunteering as a first-time counselor and public speaker. Now, after graduating from Stanford, he is returning to an active leadership role at Movadex, where he hopes to accelerate the company’s expansion into the United States. He also wants to develop a strong focus on helping customers understand and use AI in their businesses.

While AI is undeniably disrupting the tech industry, Mikadze-Struk, now an IEEE Senior Member, is optimistic about its impact. “The way AI is democratizing access to software for building and prototyping … it’s amazing,” he said.

But it will require a big change in the mindset of engineers, especially junior engineers who are job hunting. They need to “fall in love with AI” and embrace it as a powerful driver, he says. As these tools increasingly take over the nuts-and-bolts work of coding, engineers also need to develop high-level skills such as systems thinking and architectural design.

Perhaps most importantly, given the rapid pace at which technology is evolving, engineers need to increase their flexibility and resilience. It’s exciting and scary, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.