Age: 29
Education: IT engineering, Kyiv Mohyla Academy
Profession: Co-founder of Veterano Brownie
Did you know? He co-founded Veteran Brownie with his wife Julia Kochetova-Nabozhniak. She joined him in the war zone and directed an award-winning documentary about their love story on the front line, called “See you later.”
A long path led Roman Nabozhniak, 29, to selling brownies in the heart of Kyiv.
In 2014, Nabozhniak felt the invasion of Russian-backed militants in eastern Ukraine left him no choice but to take up arms and defend Ukraine. As an active participant in the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, it was “his duty” to defend his country.
He put his music band and his job in marketing behind to spend 14 months in eastern Ukraine, including 10 months on the front line. His girlfriend joined him there for a few months and they got married on furlough, in August 2016.
When he got back, he underwent rehabilitation process but couldn’t deal with an office job. The war left scars that were difficult to overcome. “I had post-war thoughts, we were sleeping with the lights on, I had to get rid of the habit to wake up at 2 a. m. and at 4 a. m. for my shifts,” Nabozhniak remembers.
To put the “war thoughts” away, the couple decided to use the one-way ticket to Nepal that Roman had offered Julia for their wedding. It was the first step in a long journey that took them to the Himalayas, India and Azerbaijan, from where they hitchhiked to Tbilisi, Georgia.
Before the trip, he already had the habit of cooking for Julia to cope with PTSD. One evening, he decided to cook one kilo of brownie, a successful experiment he then repeated, over and over again, trying different recipes and adding new ingredients.
The idea to make it a business came during their trip in Asia.
“We went to Goa, then we rented a cheap room by the seaside, and this is how your typical start-up story begins. I was lying on the beach, in Goa, with my computer and writing my first business plan,” he says laughing.
The idea to join the Veterano group was also born in odd circumstances. “There was a moment in Nepal, trekking in Katmandu valley, at a rare point where we had the internet, when we saw a Facebook post by Leonid Ostaltsev, the founder of the whole Veterano group, where he wrote that if you’re a war veteran and have any business idea, write me to help developing it,” he says.
What started as a home bakery became a proper hipster cafe in Kyiv’s historic center in Podil. While his bakery employs veterans, job offers are not closed to civilians — most of his employees are internally displaced persons from Donbas and Crimea. His coffee shop attracts veterans as well as students from nearby Kyiv Mohyla academy, where he used to study.
Part of the space is devoted to producing high quality brownies, but it mainly serves to welcome curious customers.
The next step is to expand production and open other Veterano Brownie in Ukraine, beginning in Ivano Frankivsk, a city in Western Ukraine, located over 600 kilometers from Kyiv.
He “truly believes in small entrepreneurship”, and when it comes to a new project, he applies the life philosophy he learned on the Maidan.
“I recall the motto of that time: ‘who except us, and when except now?’ This life is not a trial period, there is no life in the future. It’s not about our past, it’s now. We have everything now.”
