Name: Stepan Veselovskyi
Age: 29
Education: Lviv Polytechnic, Lviv Business School
Profession: entrepreneur; CEO at Lviv IT Cluster, IT Arena conference organizer
Did you know? He is a vegan. He believes it’s impossible to be good at sports — he does swimming, fitness, and tennis — without caring about what one eats.
Stepan Veselovskyi says his goal is to make Ukraine a better place for young people to live in, and he’s going to do that by developing Ukraine’s tech market.
He has spent four years building the biggest local IT community in Ukraine, and launched a tech conference that brings specialists from tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter to Ukraine.
Veselovskyi’s brainchild — the tech community called the Lviv IT Cluster — has brought together almost 70 information technology companies to improve the quality of Ukraine’s education, promote the country’s image and build infrastructure for IT specialists.
He says he chose IT because it is an industry that “favors the development of free spirits.”
“There are no boring meetings, Soviet approaches to management, and strict nine-to-five working hours,” Veselovskyi told the Kyiv Post. “A free atmosphere bonds people in this industry, not strict, outdated rules.”
This atmosphere of freedom, combined with a good education, is what helps people succeed, Veselovskyi says. To help improve Ukraine’s tech education, Lviv IT Cluster has started a project aimed at launching new degree programs at technical universities around the city.
In 2016, the Lviv IT Cluster team launched its first program with Lviv Polytechnic — the first “Internet of Things” degree program in Ukraine. Since then, the community has also launched courses in Artificial Intelligence at Lviv Polytechnic, and Сomputer Science, Data Science and Data Science & Intelligent Systems courses at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
Veselovskyi says he always eager to share his knowledge.
“I just believe in competition — it drives progress,” he says. “Ukraine’s IT industry on the whole would be much more successful if tech communities in all the cities competed.”
Notwithstanding his belief in competition, once a year Veselovskyi co-organizes an all-Ukrainian tech event that brings together more than 2,000 tech people from all over the country — IT Arena. It’s one of the biggest tech events in Eastern Europe and the biggest one in Ukraine.
To promote the country, Veselovskyi brings to IT Arena speakers from global tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. Veselovskyi has become a driver for change and has influenced the tech industry nationwide.
“I’ll stay in Ukraine and will continue doing what I can for its IT industry,” Veselovsky says. “IT in our country is a place for free people, and free people can create magnificent things.”
