Age: 27
Education: Lviv Polytechnic
Profession: Tech entrepreneur, CEO WeSoftYou
Did you know? Petruk has a punk rock band. That’s why his company WeSoftYou has a plectrum in its logo
Ukrainian Maksym Petruk has come a long way from reselling DVD discs and working at construction sites to launching his own hi-tech firm with clients in Silicon Valley, the tech hub of the world.
Petruk recalls his first attempts to earn pocket money at the age of 13. When he turned 18, he was hired by a big international corporation, but couldn’t stay there for long — the corporation’s way of working restricted Petruk’s thirst for personal growth and his desire to get into the tech industry.
So he quit at 24 and started applying for jobs in information technology firms. Petruk believed the tech sphere shapes the future of humanity and that, working in tech, he could follow innovations and take part in changing the world, too.
“But nobody wanted to employ me without any experience in IT,” Petruk says.
Eventually, he was hired by a startup in Kyiv. For this job, Petruk moved from his home town, the western city of Lviv, to Kyiv, but the startup failed and closed in three weeks after. Petruk was left with no money and no job.
“At that point, I understood that I can get a good job in IT only if I create this job myself,” he says. So he started working on his own web and mobile development company without any experience in this. “This was painful and hard.”
For seven months, the Ukrainian was unsuccessfully looking for at least one client. When he was sending out what he thought to be the last email before he would start looking for a proper job, he didn’t expect it to be the start of his business career — he got a reply and had his first client.
Founded in 2018 and named WeSoftYou, Petruk’s newly-appeared firm developed a mobile application that earned its clients $100,000 in profit.
Two years passed. Today Petruk is based in Silicon Valley, where 30-person WeSoftYou has its main clients. But unlike most of the Ukrainian tech companies that register their business abroad to avoid problems with Ukraine’s regulations and that have only research and development centers here, Petruk’s WeSoftYou is a chiefly Ukrainian firm that pays chiefly Ukrainian taxes.
The firm has been so successful it’s got recognized by big tech guys in the U. S. Financial services company Payoneer named Petruk the Innovator of the Year in 2019. Other nominations included the best entrepreneur, e-commerce retailer, and freelancer of the year. In total, Payoneer went through 4,500 candidates to find the winners. Even international Forbes mentioned Petruk’s success.
“Getting recognition is a vital milestone for me. It means we are doing everything right, it gives confidence. It was hard to build a company, there were failures, hard clients who didn’t pay,” he says. “Now I get recognition, which means that everything goes as it should.”
WeSoftYou develops fast, and Petruk aims to grow it to 130 employees, eventually turning the company into a business accelerator, inviting startupers to share their business ideas and help make a business out of them.
“In Ukraine, there are many people with excellent ideas, but they lack tech skills and they don’t know how to bring them to life,” Petruk says. “We will help.”
