Ukraine, on the edge of something and somewhere

I am standing inside the exhibitor room of (what claims to be) Eastern Europe’s largest startup event, IT Arena{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://itarena.ua/” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”} in Lviv, Ukraine. All around me are booths of companies looking for developers to join them, many servicing overseas clients. Upstairs are a handful of scrappy local entrepreneurs explaining their ideas, generally, they are well executed, but early stage. IT Arena has great talks happening around us, attracting speakers from all over the globe with an impressive selection of technical, product and business topics. Despite this, a recurring thread running through the talks and conversations I had with attendees was that Ukraine wasn’t terribly good (yet) at the startup game. As a fan of highlighting newer startup and tech scenes (I will stick to ‘startup’ for the rest of this article), I wanted to know and understand why?