WashU Olin hosted entrepreneurs from across the region at the 2023 Startup Connection on September 20. The event provides a platform for new business owners to spread the word about their startups and network with one another—and for aspiring entrepreneurs to gain some inspiration and practical knowledge.
Among the nearly 50 startup businesses showcased at the event were many launched by current and recent Olin students.
One is Tossup, a platform offering a social approach to sports betting. Its four founders are WashU seniors, including two Olin students. Adam Haiken, BSBA 2024, said the team brought Tossup to the event to give it broader exposure. “We’re just launching now, and we wanted to advertise that we’re in beta testing,” he said. Their display included a QR code that attendees could use to access Tossup.
Haiken’s colleague, Max Williams, BA 2024, said the jam-packed event was a great showcase. “We’ve been set up for seven minutes and we’re really busy.”
At last year’s Startup Connection, Izzy Gorton, BSBA 2025, and Chiara Munzi, BA 2023, had just launched ChiChi, their chickpea-based breakfast alternative. “It was a month into our startup,” Munzi said.
This year, their product is available online and in local grocery stores. “We’re hoping to get more people to learn about it and test new product ideas,” she said.
The Startup Connection is part of STL Startup Week, a series of events to promote and encourage St. Louis’ entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Photo: Adam Haiken, center, BSBA 2024, talks to attendees at the 2023 Startup Connection about Tossup, a platform that offers a social approach to sports betting.
WashU Olin held its first Leadership Perspectives event of the new academic year on September 6. “Now what?” revisited two stories from WashU Olin’s On Principle podcast—one from a military general, the other from a talented junior executive.
Both of their stories converge on the ideas of belonging, well-being and presenting our full selves to others in the workplace. And both stories speak to the way good leaders create a culture that leads to better outcomes and productivity.
From left, Kurt Greenbaum, Olin communications director and event moderator; Kendra Kelly, MBA 2021 and marketing director at Lancome, L’Oreal; US Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan; and Hannah Birnbaum, assistant professor of organizational behavior.
Wilgosh is a management consultant based in Chicago. He’s a director with PwC, a leading professional services firm in 156 countries with more than 295,000 employees.
“These professionals flourish in the face of disruption and are quick with their strategic problem solving expertise,” the announcement said.
“As economic uncertainty surges, this year’s awardees are heavily relied upon to provide advice and direction to the companies and industries they serve. They are intuitive, skilled communicators with the ability to listen and evaluate the myriad of considerations when making big complex decisions.”
Wilgosh is a leader within PwC’s cloud & digital practice who guides Fortune 500 clients through complex business transformations. He digitizes their financials, supply chain, planning and budgeting, customer relationship management and human capital functions.
He serves on the Olin Advisory Board, the Dartmouth Hockey Alumni Advisory Board and the Oracle Cloud Planning & Manufacturing Field Advisory Board.
“My Olin MBA helped shape how I think about problems and opportunities,” Wilgosh told the Olin Blog.
“I continue to lean on Olin’s values-based, data-driven learnings, which cultivated a global-mindedness, coupled with experiential learning, analytical rigor and an entrepreneurial spirit.”
Olin prepared him to lead large, diverse teams, he said. “It’s more than just a myopic focus on improving the bottom line. Its about driving sustainable outcomes that adhere to our values.”
In addition to his MBA, Wilgosh graduated from Dartmouth College with an undergraduate degree in environmental studies.
Considering a career change? Olin Business School is excited to once again offer our free comprehensive Virtual Career Boot Camp this fall to assist working professionals and alums with navigating career opportunities and transitions.
This bi-weekly, seven-session series is designed to enhance fundamental career development and transition skills. Course leaders will provide content at each session. In addition, the sessions will be interactive and provide an opportunity for participants to share and ask questions, as well as get connected with other EMBAs, PMBAs, OMBAs and Olin alums.
You can sign up for the entire series or for individual sessions, depending on your interest.
September 20 through December 13
The series runs every other Wednesday at 6-7:30 p.m. from September 20 through December 13. When you register, you will be able to select the sessions you plan to attend. If you plan to attend the entire series, select all sessions.
September 20: Taking Charge of Your Career—Learn to set career priorities and objectives, the importance of a positive mindset and using a strategic approach.
October 4: Defining Your Personal Brand—Know who you are, your value proposition and how to differentiate yourself.
October 18: Communicating Your Brand—Create effective marketing messages and materials including your resume, networking documents and other visuals.
November 1: Leveraging LinkedIn—Learn how to use the power of social media, particularly LinkedIn, in communicating your brand. Learn how to be found by recruiters and hiring managers, improve your profile, expand your network and apply for open positions.
November 15: Building Your Professional Network—Learn how to use the power of networking to enhance your career transition efforts and create strategies and approaches to build and expand your relationships over time.
November 29: Acing the Interview—Prepare for and excel at job interviews, improving your chances of getting an offer.
December 13: Negotiating the Offer—Negotiate an offer that works for you and is consistent with your value, ultimately improving your compensation over your career.
With luggage in hand, a software developer based in Ukraine—working for a Chicago-based startup—fled with his parents through a Russian-occupied section of Irpin. They walked through a Russian checkpoint and over a makeshift platform at the Irpin River that substituted for a blown-up bridge.
Five thousand miles away in Chicago, in March 2022, Kyle Bank, BSBA 2014, anxiously awaited word as his colleague from Phenix Real Time Solutions escaped missiles and mortar fire in the wake of Russia’s campaign of aggression against Ukraine.
Kyle Bank, BSBA 2014, and COO of Phenix Real Time Solutions
“Getting out of Irpin was probably the most dangerous part,” said the programmer, who asked to remain unnamed. “We packed our things into suitcases. We had to walk through Russian-occupied territory. We had to walk fairly quickly.”
Since 2015, the programmer had worked out of his home in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv for Phenix, where Bank was the chief operating officer. He’d been visiting his parents in the suburb of Irpin when, on February 24, 2022, the missiles began to fly. Russia’s invasion began. Electricity and water failed. Air raid sirens screamed.
Twelve days later, he began the perilous journey with his parents—thanks, in part, to a decision by the Phenix management team back in Chicago. The company spent thousands of dollars to hire an extraction team to move the programmer and his parents from Kyiv to the relative safety of Lviv in western Ukraine.
“It didn’t take any convincing of our CEO or our founder,” Bank said. “Same with our board of directors. Not one word of hesitation.”
Startup newcomers
Bank originally joined Phenix in 2016 as its business development director, helping the startup with a focus on software to improve live video streaming. Phenix wanted to address the delay, or latency, that often occurs between the time a camera picks up an image and the time a viewer sees it.
For example, they wanted viewers of a baseball game to see a base hit fractions of a second after the crack of the bat rather than 60 or 90 seconds later. They wanted real-time video to mean what it says. When Bank joined, Phenix had one customer and seven employees.
One of them was the Ukraine-based software developer. The company had found him through an outsourcing agency. They hit it off immediately. Eventually, as Phenix grew, the company needed more developers.
“He was so talented and such a great employee, we said, ‘Why not build a team around him?’ This, of course, was way before the war started,” Bank said. Eventually, the Ukraine-based developers numbered seven, joining a Phenix workforce that included people in the United States, Switzerland and France.
Then the invasion began.
Apologizing for not working
Hours after the war began in February 2022, Bank started an emergency support channel on Slack for people affected by the invasion. “With the ever-changing and escalating events, we want you to know that we will do everything that we can to assist you and your families in your efforts to remain safe,” Bank wrote that day.
He started getting messages from teammates. “People were apologizing to us,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t work today. People are bombing. I’m in a shelter.”
Bank and his colleagues sent word back. Don’t worry about your jobs. We’re not letting you go. “The software code they were generating was inconsequential relative to their safety,” he said.
While Phenix’s developers were all based in a country at war, their lead developer and his parents—who were in their 70s—were stuck in a location that was under particularly heavy siege. His location was central to the Russian’s early strategy as they tried to encircle Ukraine’s capital city.
What’s now known as the Battle of Irpin raged from February 27 to March 28. Russian tanks advanced into the town while Ukrainian forces battled back. Two Russian missiles struck a residential building, killing a child and injuring a woman.
“We were considering leaving by car, but in the first two days, the bridges leading out of town were destroyed,” he said. “We lost broadband early because the cable ran along one of the bridges. We lost electricity and water. We filled our bathtubs to have drinking water.”
Payments and the extraction team
By late February, Bank and the leadership team decided to drop $1,000 into each Ukrainian-based developer’s account to use for transportation, lodging—whatever they needed, no strings attached, no receipts required.
For their lead developer, however, it was clear he and his parents needed help escaping. He sought out another Phenix colleague, Andrew Weiner, manager of technical operations. Weiner was an Army veteran who served in special forces—the Green Berets. Bank wondered: Did he have any connections who could help?
“I started asking around to people I know, friends and family,” Weiner said. Eventually, he connected with a guy he went through training with. “He introduced me to another guy who had already been doing these sorts of missions in Ukraine. He was also a former Green Beret.”
That was March 3, 2022. The “personnel recovery” firm couldn’t get the programmer and his parents out of Ukraine—the government barred fighting-age men from leaving—but they could move the trio to a safer location.
Within days, arrangements were made with the company. Phenix paid half the fee upfront, with the remainder due “upon delivery of a successful mission,” Bank said. While reluctant to share the specific amount, Bank said it was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
On March 8, 2022, the extraction mission went into motion.
A 13-hour drive to safety
At 10 a.m. that morning, under sunny skies in the cool of early spring, the programmer and his parents set out toward Ukrainian-controlled Irpin. They had to be out of Russian-controlled territory before noon, when a ceasefire would expire. There, they could connect with volunteer drivers who would hustle them to Kyiv.
“It was relatively easy for me, but for my parents, it was quite difficult,” he said.
In Kyiv, the extraction team—really a single driver connected by cellphone to his headquarters—would pick them up for the rest of the journey. They waited in Kyiv on March 9. The next morning, the driver loaded the trio and their luggage into a hatchback and headed toward the western city of Lviv—a drive that should have taken six or seven hours.
“Kyiv at the time was turning into a fortress,” the programmer said. “There were military checkpoints all over. Just getting out could have taken an hour or more as we traveled through different checkpoints.”
He watched the driver as he communicated with a network of other drivers to determine the best route to avoid blown-out bridges or bombed roads. “The safe way to go was changing rapidly, so he had to stay on top of that,” the programmer said. “The guy was extremely solid. It was a pretty heroic effort on his part.”
They took brief stops at gas stations to grab bites to eat and didn’t need gas until late in the day while driving through territory relatively unaffected by fighting. Meanwhile, Bank was keeping watch in Chicago. “I was absolutely glued to the computer screen all day trying to find out if he’d made it,” Bank said. “It was a nerve-wracking day.”
Thirteen hours after they left, at around 9 p.m., the foursome rolled into Lviv an hour before the government-imposed curfew. After they arrived, the programmer posted a note in the Phenix Slack channel thanking a colleague for putting him up.
“It’s impossible to find a vacant apartment now due to all the demand,” he wrote. “Also, major thanks to everyone at Phenix who was involved with organizing the transfer. The support and kindness I received was truly invaluable.”
An unexpected challenge
Today, Phenix Real Time Solutions has 37 employees—including their lead developer and his colleagues in Ukraine. The company is benefiting, in part, from a boon in the sports betting market, where access to real-time video without a tremendous delay is incredibly important.
During the crisis, Bank said Phenix still had work to do. “We put the Ukrainian team on our backs and did what we had to do,” he said.
Since its founding in 2013, the company has raised more than $33.3 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. One of those funding rounds closed in March 2021—about a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“As an earlier stage company, we are always focused on how we spend our capital,” Bank said. “You don’t join a startup thinking you’re going to spend money helping someone escape a war zone.”
For his part, the programmer has returned to Kyiv. His parents are back in Irpin. They stayed in Lviv until late April or early May, returning after the wartime violence receded from their hometowns. He remains optimistic that his countrymen and women will be able to repel the Russian threat and return peace to his homeland. And he remains grateful for the efforts of so many.
“I feel privileged,” he said. “There was a pretty significant volunteer operation to evacuate people out of the war zones. I was very lucky to be able to rely on these people to do what they did—the people at Phenix, the volunteers, the evacuation company.”
Pictured above: Local people try to evacuate from the Irpin, Ukraine, on March 6, 2022, under a bridge destroyed during shelling by Russian troops. This scene was like what the programmer from Phenix and his parents experienced in the early hours of their escape. (Credit: Shutterstock)
