Age: 18
Education: Kyiv Academy of Media Arts
Profession: Entrepreneur
Did you know? Kateryna loves mathematics and believes that mathematical mindset is compatible with and conducive to creative efforts
Kateryna Mykhalko became a businesswoman when she was 16.
Within two years, she has brought her startup to international success and is now aiming to pass her business knowledge on to youth in small towns across Ukraine.
Mykhalko founded a startup called Nuka that combines modern technologies to disrupt a much more ancient practice — writing by hand.
Three years ago, she and two partners invented a notebook that is resistant to water, tearing and other physical damage. It can be easily erased and written over. The pencil for the notebook is made of a special metallic alloy that never runs out.
Nuka’s three founders say they started their business in a garage, investing about $200 each, which was their pocket money.
As they created their first prototypes, they were spotted by the Kyiv-based Product Idea Accelerator run by the tech firm Concepter. They took Nuka aboard their business acceleration program, and soon Nuka launched several crowdfunding campaigns and collected its first 1,500 orders.
Mykhalko learned everything she knows about entrepreneurship at the accelerator: business modeling, sales and raising investments.
That experience also motivated Mykhalko to start another venture: Project.Mova.
With this project, Mykhalko and her another team plan to find leaders from so-called generation Z, aged 14-20, living in cities with not more than 50,000 inhabitants, and teach them how to run a small business.
“We will be searching for local leaders changing their communities,” Mykhalko says. The potential candidates will undergo testing to try to forecast “the degree of their influence in the future and the probability that they will end up running their own projects or businesses.”
Sponsors have already shown interest in supporting the project and providing the $55,000 needed to launch its first stage. Mykhalko says negotiations are going well.
To make this youth project a success, Mykhalko needs a strong team, including mentors, “people with big achievements… entrepreneurs and top managers.”
The core of Mykhalko’s team consists mostly of young people like herself. “The project is meant to be from teenagers to teenagers,” she says.
The project grew from simple statistics: “I have calculated that there are 16,828 schools and colleges in Ukraine, and, of course, there is at least one leader in each one,” she says.
She realized that if she helps these leaders develop, they will then influence their school friends and eventually drive changes in their regions and across Ukraine.
Mykhalko likes to share: Last summer, the United Nations Population Fund asked her to give lectures on entrepreneurship to her peers in former front line city Sviatohirsk in eastern Ukraine, where Ukraine fights Russian-backed militants.
“And I’m not that type of person who has dealt with (war-related things) before. I had big fear,” she says.
But as she went there and talked with kids in the war-affected area, she felt her life changed. “I saw talented, cool kids there,” she says. “(They are) reading the same books and asking interesting questions, while just lacking the resources we have in Kyiv.”
The trip helped Mykhalko understand that she should continue helping people across Ukraine’s regions.
She says, “I really want the opportunities we have in Kyiv to be available to kids and teenagers in the regions.”
