Yevhen Donets and the business of taking your time

Yevhen Donets has a story about selling software that involves sending paper letters. With stamps. In an industry fond of imagining the future, his team found a useful instrument in the stationery cupboard. He says HELSI won business by addressing institutions in a form they recognised, while competitors chased digital marketing. There is something pleasingly inconvenient about this anecdote: the customer gets a vote in how modern the future is allowed to look.

It also offers a way into Donets, the Kyiv-based co-founder who has led HELSI as CEO since 2019. His public accounts of building the company return to practical questions. Can people use the thing? Can the team deliver it? Can the business afford the time required? His answers tend to include work that a launch announcement would leave out.

The paper-letter episode sits beside a later admission that HELSI itself had outgrown spreadsheets. An executive can accept both propositions without inconsistency. A stamped envelope may open a door; a spreadsheet may eventually make it impossible to remember who walked through it. Donets’s operating problem is deciding which tool belongs where. Fashion provides surprisingly little assistance.

A parliament before a company

Donets’s LinkedIn profile lists Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture between 2005 and 2010, and identifies him as chairman of the student parliament. The institution and the extracurricular job make an interesting pair: one concerns structures, the other concerns people who may have strong opinions about them. Asked what shaped his management style, he points to his career in student self-government.

That is a more revealing answer than a favourite business book. A student parliament is a place to practise representation, argument and coordination before a corporate title supplies any authority. Donets credits that experience himself. Years later, the management questions he talks about still involve bringing people into a decision and giving them a reason to participate. University was an early opportunity to practise that work.

His professional network also places him among other Ukrainian technology operators. A Techosystem event shared on his LinkedIn brought together product companies, founders and advisers to discuss partnerships, fundraising and international markets. It is a reminder that the apparently solitary job of chief executive comes with a great many conversations. Donets’s own description of useful work leaves considerable room for listening.

«Ноутбук і все.»

“A laptop, and that’s all.”
Donets on what belongs on his desk · translated from Ukrainian, 2025

The cable comes before the click

HELSI’s early experiment took place in Kyiv’s Podil district. The project began in 2016; the company dates its appointment-service launch in the capital to January 2017. Donets’s recollection of that period includes a much less glamorous prerequisite: some participating institutions needed help getting online at all. The team organised cable installation where internet access was missing.

There were also free, two-month computer-literacy courses, with a teacher visiting weekly. Consider what that does to the usual software-growth story. The product cannot spread merely because the interface is ready. Someone needs a connection, a machine and the confidence to use it. The demonstration is only the opening appointment in a much longer calendar.

For Donets, these details explain why adoption demanded attention to the environment around the product. A feature can be technically finished while the person expected to use it remains at the beginning. Training takes time; so does admitting that training is part of the job. The cable is an especially good corrective to abstract talk about friction. Here, the obstacle had to be physically installed.

An expensive plan meets three clicks

The original ambition included reaching a million users. Marketing calculations suggested that doing so through digital acquisition would require millions of dollars, and the approach changed. The team concentrated on a concrete user journey and on making its software easier to operate. Donets described the desired simplicity in terms of three clicks.

He became CEO in 2019, succeeding Artem Mykhailiuk. The founding story contains several people: Samvel Akobian, Mykhailiuk, Yaroslav Ivanenko, Yevhen Hubych and Donets. Remembering the whole group matters. A company’s public face can become familiar enough that the work of its partners disappears from view. HELSI’s story provides no reason to make that editorial shortcut.

The shift in approach is the interesting part of the early arithmetic. A big audience was an aspiration. The means of reaching it had to change when the costs became visible. Three clicks is a small specification to put beside a million people, but it forces attention onto the experience of one person at a time. That is where a growth plan has to survive contact with a screen.

The small experiment and the large obligation

One mobile-app experiment began with a suggestion from the technical director: bring in a junior developer earning about $1,000 a month. Donets recalled a working application arriving after three or four months, for an investment of roughly $10,000. He put the subsequent first-year download count at 3.7 million. These are his retrospective figures, rather than a promise that another small team could reproduce the outcome.

His interpretation is refreshingly modest. He treats the release as a step the business needed to take, even if the result had been disappointing. There was a large outcome, but he does not dress the initial decision up as an exquisitely calculated forecast. Good timing can sit quite comfortably beside useful work.

The obligations elsewhere were larger. Donets has said he personally covered a payroll shortfall for several months before the 2022 Kyivstar deal. Growth had created a business whose income could support most, but not all, of its team. That is a more personal measure of commitment than an executive biography usually offers: the difference between believing in a company and paying to keep it going.

The two episodes belong together. An inexpensive experiment and an expensive commitment belong to the same career. Calling both “risk” is accurate but incomplete. One buys information; the other buys time. A chief executive needs to recognise the distinction before the money leaves the account.

A bigger shareholder, the same operators

Kyivstar first signed its HELSI agreement in August 2022. In May 2025 it announced an increase in ownership from 69.99% to 97.99%, while explicitly retaining the existing management model under Donets and Hubych. The ownership had changed substantially; the two operators remained responsible for the company’s direction.

The announcement also gave a dated view of the organisation around them. Headcount had grown from 160 in December 2022 to almost 240 in December 2024. Shareholders had invested approximately UAH 240 million in development between the initial agreement and the end of March 2025. Those figures describe a particular period, and deserve to keep their dates attached.

For a founder, remaining after an ownership change creates a different kind of test from securing the transaction. There is a larger organisation to run, an established partner to work with and another working week arriving on schedule. A deal supplies resources and expectations. The management work continues the following morning, with fewer excuses for keeping essential procedures in someone’s memory.

The spreadsheet gets its notice

By September 2025, Donets was describing a familiar growth problem: company culture could no longer pass informally from established colleagues to every new arrival. As the organisation expanded, different teams could approach the same business customer without knowing the other conversation existed. When an employee left, the history of a relationship could leave with them.

His response involved introducing a customer-relationship system and bringing the people expected to use it into the selection. In his telling, colleagues needed to participate in the change from the beginning. Their involvement in choosing a system made the introduction easier to explain: the people expected to use it had helped decide what would suit their work.

There is an echo of those early computer lessons here. An organisation purchases software, then discovers that adoption still requires instruction, agreement and repeated use. Even a technology company can meet the future with a perfectly respectable “Why do we need this?” Donets’s account allows for that resistance. The people doing the work have to understand what the extra step gives them back.

An eight-kilometre birthday

Outside the operating systems and ownership percentages, there is a running club. Donets says he had not been a runner before working at HELSI; he became an ambassador for its club. For the company’s eighth anniversary in 2024, the team organised a public eight-kilometre run. It is an agreeable piece of birthday arithmetic: a cake requires rather less effort from the guests.

The anecdote supplies a glimpse of company life without requiring a grand theory about it. Colleagues have a reason to meet away from a task list. Donets participates. The photographs show a different register from the transaction announcements: shared activity, outdoor space and running numbers in place of job titles.

In October 2025, he was still looking for more speed in the business. He projected annual revenue of $7.2 million to $7.3 million and said he wanted to accelerate. That was a forecast at the time, not a reported year-end result. Patience, in his story, plainly coexists with ambition.

The useful tension is between that desire and the route he describes taking. Student representation. A district pilot. Lessons at a computer. An experiment small enough to try. A commitment large enough to hurt. A company that eventually needs firmer procedures. There is no neat shortcut connecting them. There is, however, a consistent willingness to do the next necessary piece of work, even when it comes with a stamp.