anvarazizov

Poland is our biggest and one of our best allies and friends. I liked Poland before, but now much more good feelings about this country and the Polish people.

I think no one understands Ukrainians better than the Polish people and people of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as we all suffered from Russian imperialism. Ukraine still suffers.

Actually, we started out as Coding Ninjas. My co-founder was testing the assumptions, and we started out with a descriptive name because, frankly, we weren’t sure it would work. Four years later we switched to a more fun brand name Lemon.io, punks in the world of freelance work.

It all started with building our brand persona, a guy who quit MIT to build his startup, so he’s mocking the success attributes. One of the final brand names was Space Lemon, and we kind of liked it, but it lacked simplicity, so we left Lemon, which plays into our role as startup sidekicks. Our logo has this masonic eye vibe, so it’s like a cult of good work, but an ironic one. It also means we’re keeping an eye on the development process.

It’s contract work, mostly full-time for 6+ months.

It’s a tough time to make these decisions, being both in recession and at war. We kind of try to cut down expenses, get scrappy and at the same time donate where we can. During war we donated USD $500k to Ukrainian charity, including 182k to KOLOUA.com, and I’m extremely proud of that. Which helped purchase one advanced fighting drone Leleka, four anti-missile complexes, 10 FLIRs (Forward looking infrared cameras), 14 quadcopters, and 28 radio sets for our brave defenders.

What it takes to be a CTO.

It depends on the company size and type, but for me, it is to be a Jack of all trades, master of none :) You have to combine in yourself a lot of roles and skills:  - hard skills to be able to create your product at the first stage - soft skills and management skills to be able to create and manage a good team - vision or strategic view to be able to plan the technological future of your company

So, you have to juggle with al of this and also you have to improve your knowledge all the time.