Slav Kulik and the business of taking the blame

Slav Kulik has a useful job description for a software company: ghostwriter. Someone else gets the applause. Your people make the thing work. It is an unusual ambition in a business where even the office coffee can acquire a personal brand, but it suits a founder whose career has moved between code, commerce and the difficult business of being accountable for both.

“In many ways, we’re tech ghostwriters,” he says. The comparison is more revealing than a catalogue of programming languages. A ghostwriter has to understand another person’s intentions, find a workable form for them and accept that the finished work will carry somebody else’s name. There is plenty of room for skill. There is rather less room for vanity.

Kulik is the co-founder and chief executive of Plan A Technologies, the third software business he has built with Aron Ezra. Before this, he was chief software architect at MacroView Labs and chief technology officer at OfferCraft. Both companies were sold. By the time he became the person running the engineering partner, he had spent years on the customer’s side of the arrangement.

A programmer, before the job titles

Kulik came to the United States from Ukraine as a teenager. His enthusiasm for coding began in childhood; the sequence he describes is work, mentors, increasing responsibility and eventually partners who nudged him toward starting companies. He gives the people who helped him a place in the account. Encouragement, in his telling, preceded authority.

The early engineering work was practical: fraud prevention, data warehousing, e-commerce and customer support systems. These are the parts of software that attract attention when they fail. His career took him into senior engineering positions, including SVP of engineering roles, before startup life gave him a different set of problems to solve.

That background matters to the character of his current business. A payment platform has to process transactions. A customer service system has to serve customers. The architecture cannot simply look persuasive in a meeting. Kulik’s professional education took place among systems whose usefulness could be tested by people trying to get through an ordinary working day.

Two sales, and a familiar collaborator

MacroView Labs built mobile applications and a cloud-based platform for casinos, hospitality and retail. In July 2011, Bally Technologies announced its acquisition. The appeal included the ability to deploy applications across smartphone operating systems and connect mobile experiences with casino systems. The work joined the phone in a customer’s hand to the larger machinery behind the property.

OfferCraft approached customer engagement through rewards, artificial intelligence and games. Its software distributed incentives through channels including email, text messages, websites and kiosks. NRT announced its acquisition of OfferCraft’s assets in March 2018. There was a commercial point to the playfulness: making an offer more likely to be noticed and used.

Ezra was the chief executive of those businesses; Kulik held the senior technical roles. Their partnership continued into Plan A, where Ezra chairs the board. A recurring collaborator gives this career a different shape from the familiar procession of founder, exit and fresh cast. The two have carried experience from one company into the next.

The technical record includes Kulik’s name alongside Ezra, Keith Michel and Pierre Darbouze on a smart rewards incentive system patent. Another application names Kulik, Ezra and Michel on recommendations based on a user’s content profile. The paperwork supplies a pleasingly concrete detail: behind the executive titles are designs for how software might actually behave.

The supplier they kept wishing existed

The origin of Plan A was partly accumulated irritation. While building their earlier companies, the founders hired development firms that disappointed them. Plan A’s stated purpose was to create the engineering partner they had wanted to hire themselves. A supplier’s sales presentation had too often proved a poor rehearsal for the actual performance.

Today the work includes custom software, modernization, data architecture, systems integration and AI. Kulik’s experience gives him two views of a request: what it would take to build, and what owning the result might mean. That combination helps explain why Plan A sells technical advice alongside engineering capacity.

His description of the service also leaves the spotlight with the client. In October 2022, he reported that Plan A operated in 17 countries on five continents. Geography made the ghostwriting metaphor more literal: teams spread across the world, working on products that would be known under other companies’ names.

The attraction is continuity. Kulik has described careful technical screening followed by deliberate efforts to retain the people hired. Every handover costs somebody time. A working relationship carries knowledge that a replacement team has to acquire again, often while the customer is waiting for something to be fixed.

When growth changes the unit of time

By April 2022, Kulik was describing a hiring problem that his first two startups had not prepared him for. Those businesses had generally added one or two people a month. At Plan A, he said, the pace was one or two a day. Experience was useful, but the old calendar had become a rather misleading instrument.

He also reported that Plan A had reached eight-figure revenue within a year and a half of launch. These were his figures at that point in the company’s life. Their significance is the pressure they put on the organization: a business that wins work quickly must also find enough people to deliver it.

Kulik’s response to success is more interesting than the number itself. He acknowledged having to discard expectations formed at the earlier companies. A third startup could still surprise him. Growth had created a new operating problem, and recruiting had become part of the engineering challenge.

His literary taste offers a small corrective to the financial excitement. He has named The Great Gatsby as a book he admires, reading it as a warning about money pursued without a worthwhile purpose. It is a fairly severe selection for an entrepreneurial reading list. Fitzgerald supplies very few reassuring bullet points.

Who signs for the difficult decision?

Kulik’s rule for leadership is compact: “Make the decision, own it”. In his account, judgment can be imperfect and still earn respect. Passing the consequences down to colleagues corrodes the trust that makes leadership possible. The person with the authority has to remain present when the result becomes inconvenient.

He credits mentors with helping him progress, while arguing that a leader eventually has to develop independent judgment. Advice can inform a choice without relieving the decision maker of responsibility. That is a demanding arrangement for a technically minded person: many business decisions arrive without a clean answer waiting to be discovered.

His former colleagues describe a recognizable working style. Keith Michel has praised his logic, mentoring and willingness to accept a practical compromise. Allison Johnston has highlighted precision and attention to software that can be extended later. These are observations from people who worked with him, and they put detail behind the executive vocabulary.

Kulik’s own public writing about motivation follows a similar line. He describes breaking large goals into smaller steps, staying close to people who challenge him and keeping the reason for the work visible. The emphasis is on arranging conditions in which action is easier to sustain. Inspiration, evidently, should not be given sole custody of the schedule.

“Make the decision, own it”

Slav Kulik / on leadership

A broken system rarely gets younger

His advice on aging technology is similarly unsentimental. Software can appear to run adequately while its risks accumulate. A postponed update becomes easier to postpone again, until an outage or security failure makes the decision on everyone’s behalf. The apparent saving has bought a more awkward deadline.

Kulik advocates knowing a system’s lifespan, reviewing technology regularly and modernizing in phases. He also wants end users involved. Their experience can reveal whether the team is improving the right thing and flag problems while changes are still manageable. The person clicking the button deserves a vote in the design of the button.

This is where his engineering background and his advice about responsibility meet. Maintenance requires someone to keep asking what needs attention before an emergency answers the question. The discipline lacks the theatre of a rescue, but a functioning business has excellent reasons to prefer a quiet afternoon.

More AI, with someone still answerable

In November 2024, Kulik described robo-advisors as useful support for human financial advisors. His point concerned the division of work: software can analyze information quickly, while clients may still want a person to explain choices and talk them through complexity. Technical capacity and a trusted relationship serve different needs.

By September 2026, that division had become part of a new Plan A acquisition. The company bought a stealth AI assessment tool to support technical due diligence in mergers and acquisitions. Its creator, Serhii Melnychuk, joined as an architect to lead integration and further development.

The intended task is to help experts examine large, fragmented technology environments and connect signals that are difficult to gather manually. The business question is consequential: which technical problems can be repaired routinely, and which could change what an acquisition will cost? A longer list of defects does not automatically produce a wiser purchase.

“AI is not a substitute for senior technical judgment,” Kulik says. It is a useful place for his story to arrive. The programmer who became a founder is now selling tools that help other experts inspect software. Across the changing titles and technologies, his preferred arrangement keeps a person close enough to the work to understand it, and close enough to the decision to answer for it.