Salome Mikadze-Struk is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she built a software-development business as an undergraduate at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running despite the outbreak of war in her native Ukraine. Now, she’s drawing on her experiences to mentor tech-startup founders and speak publicly about the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship.

Mikadze-Struk was studying at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., when COVID-19 struck. Classes went online, and she moved back to Ukraine. In the midst of that disruption she saw an opportunity to develop her business idea, called Movadex, by tapping Ukraine’s pool of talented young engineers. Then Russia invaded in early 2022, during her final semester. Taking online classes from bomb shelters and helping employees evacuate to safer parts of the country was surreal, she says, but the team kept the company afloat and she graduated later that year.

In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took a hiatus from her business to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, which she completed this year. In her precious spare time she’s been advising startups and giving talks, using her unique perspective to promote the need for resilience in entrepreneurship—something she thinks is increasingly important in the software industry as AI coding tools upend old business models.

“You need to be okay with risk, you need to be resilient. You need to be okay with disruption and okay with uncertainty,” she says, “because this is inevitably going to be part of this industry for the foreseeable future.”

An Early Focus on Education

Mikadze-Struk’s parents had settled in Ukraine after fleeing conflict in the Abkhazia region of Georgia in the early 1990s. “They left everything behind,” she says. “You can look on Google Maps and zoom in on where their houses were and it’s all rubble.”

Despite this backstory, Mikadze-Struk says she and her sister had a conventional middle-class upbringing in Kyiv. Her father ran a small shop and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her parents placed an emphasis on education and encouraged her to study hard and take part in extracurricular programs such as Ukraine’s Junior Academy of Sciences, which introduces students to research.

“They weren’t rich, so they knew that our way to make it in life was not through investments, but through merit-based accomplishments,” she says.

When Mikadze-Struk was 14, her family discovered the newly launched Ukraine Global Scholars program, a nonprofit that helps talented students secure scholarships abroad. The program helped her win a full scholarship to the Emma Willard School, a private girl’s school in Troy, N.Y.

Discovering Tech

After graduating high school in 2018, Mikadze-Struk was accepted to Georgetown to study business administration. But it was outside the classroom that her career direction began to take shape. She won a startup competition with a medical device she had developed for a school project and, while the business idea didn’t go anywhere, it sparked an interest in entrepreneurship.

Ukraine’s software industry was booming, and she began attending startup events and competitions in her home country the summer before starting college. There she met her eventual cofounder Nor Newman.

Despite both being just 18, they saw a gap in the market. The pair noticed many founders had strong ideas but lacked the technical expertise to realize them, while talented engineering students often struggled to gain real-world experience. Newman had begun informally connecting startups with his college friends, but the pair soon saw commercial potential. “We realized we could actually create our own startup studio and help startups as a team, versus just connecting people,” says Mikadze-Struk.

Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, halfway through her sophomore year, it brought both disruption and opportunity for Newman and Mikadze-Struk. While travel restrictions and lockdowns made life complicated, there was also a surge of companies looking to move their business online. “COVID really skyrocketed everything we were doing,” she says.

Sensing an opportunity, Mikadze-Struk and Newman incorporated Movadex in Ukraine in early 2020. From the start, they decided to focus on not only providing engineering talent, but also helping startups with product development. Many times, says Mikadze-Struk, a founder’s vision for the software doesn’t line up with what users actually want. “What really helped us grow is not just the engineering or quality of code, but rather a holistic approach to creating a product and actually getting into the brain of the user,” she says.

Navigating Adversity

Back in Ukraine, Mikadze-Struk had to juggle this booming business with studying remotely—taking classes at night and working during the day. It was exhausting, she says, but it also allowed her to immediately apply what she learned in business classes to building her startup.

Having successfully navigated the pandemic, Mikadze-Struk was dealt another wild card. In early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and her life was again turned upside down. It was particularly traumatic for her family, having already been forced from their home in Georgia once by war.

In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took an extended leave from her company to pursue an MBA at Stanford.Christie Hemm Klok

“For my parents to experience their daughters going through all the same things they had gone through was really heartbreaking,” she says. “But at the same time, because I’d heard so much about their story of resilience I had power in me to not fully break down.”

On the day of the invasion the founders told employees to take the day off and emailed clients to warn of potential disruptions. The next couple of days were spent checking on staff and evacuating as many as possible to their headquarters in Lviv, in Western Ukraine.

By the following Monday the business was back up and running. Soon afterward, they partnered with the Lviv IT Cluster business association’s nonprofit arm to help resettle refugees from the eastern part of Ukraine, where strikes were focused, and offer job placements. Throughout this period, Mikadze-Struk was also completing her final year at Georgetown remotely. “Half of my senior year was actually spent in bomb shelters,” she says.

That summer, Mikadze-Struk graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and learned she had been accepted onto Stanford University’s MBA program. In 2023, she took an extended leave from Movadex and moved to California. She also gave birth to her daughter in 2024.

Balancing studies and parenthood was already a full-time job, but she continued to engage with the startup ecosystem by volunteering as a startup mentor and public speaker. Now, after graduating from Stanford, she is stepping back into a more active leadership role at Movadex, where she hopes to drive the company’s expansion into the United States. She also wants to develop a stronger focus on helping customers understand and implement AI in their businesses.

While AI is undeniably disrupting the tech industry, Mikadze-Struk, now an IEEE Senior Member, is fundamentally optimistic about its impact. “The way AI democratized access to building software and to prototyping…is just mind blowing,” she says.

But it will require a significant shift in mind-set for engineers, especially junior developers hunting for jobs. They need to “fall in love with AI” and embrace it as a powerful copilot, she says. As these tools increasingly take over the nuts-and-bolts work of coding, engineers also need to nurture higher-level skills like systems thinking and architectural design.

Perhaps most importantly, given the rapid pace at which the technology is evolving, engineers need to nurture their adaptability and resilience. “It’s both exciting and scary, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”