ukrainian-american
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Julia Kisla Taylor Knows Who Should Be in the Room
From Poltava to The Lions, Julia Kisla Taylor has built a career connecting creative people to opportunity. Her work with models, Ukrainian designers and Indigenous women artisans asks who gets seen - and who gets a say.
Vlad Shmunis and the art of being almost ready
A teenage immigrant learned to code, taught Windows one chapter ahead of his class, and built RingCentral around a monthly phone bill. His career turns on a surprisingly difficult judgment: when to ship, and when to wait.
Mark Platosh Built a Career Around the Questions Nobody Knows to Ask
A three-month software review taught Mark Platosh that the costliest business problem is often a missing conversation. He has spent the years since turning that lesson into Maven Research.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Vadim Vladimirskiy is the co-founder and CEO of Nerdio, a Chicago software company that automates and cuts the cost of running Microsoft cloud desktops for thousands of organizations across more than 50 countries. He emigrated from Ukraine at 13, started his first IT consultancy in high school, and spent fifteen years running an MSP before turning his internal tooling into a product. In March 2025 Nerdio raised a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic at a valuation above $1 billion, and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
Max Levchin
Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, where he served as CTO and helped build one of the world's first large-scale digital payment systems. He later founded Slide (acquired by Google for $182M), Glow (women's health app, 25M users), and most prominently Affirm - the publicly traded buy-now-pay-later leader with $3.22B in FY2025 revenue. Levchin is also a cryptography advocate (creator of the Levchin Prize), early Yelp investor and chairman, and co-founder of SciFi VC with his wife Nellie.