Time of peace and time of war - about Ukraine and MacPaw with Julia Petryk

Krystian: Hi Julia, I'm sorry we are talking under these circumstances. As you know, I love Kyiv, which I try to visit as often as I can. I admit that I fell in love with this city since my first visit to MacPaw in 2015. Importantly, in the following years Kyiv became more and more beautiful and Ukraine became stronger. I know what a positive impression the capital of Ukraine and its surroundings made on my wife, with whom I had the opportunity to visit you last August. How do you assess the changes that have taken place in Ukraine since the 2014 revolution?

Julia: The Revolution of Dignity changed many things in Ukraine, it changed people and values first of all. During the Revolution, Ukrainians understood that they have the power and the right to define the future of their country. In 2014, we chose democracy in a loud voice and declared Ukrainian choice to be a European country.

The Revolution and its results have given impetus to the whole nation and stimulated positive transformations on different levels undergoing up to this day. I’d say that the events of 2014 resulted in the rise of patriotism and the strengthening of self-consciousness. From urban life to the cultural scene to the tech industry, the people's desire to contribute to the development of the country reached an unprecedented level. And if you’d come to Kyiv before 2014 and five years later, you’d have noticed the difference. Since 2014 there has been a feeling in the air that everything was possible in Ukraine.

During the last years, the tech industry was also booming. Ukraine got its own Unicorns, such as GitLab, Grammarly, People.ai, etc. Since 2014, many great products from Ukraine have earned world recognition. From my own observations, it was the time of the rise of small and medium businesses

More importantly, during the post-revolution years, the civil society in Ukraine consolidated. I’m sure that when Ukraine wins this brutal war, started by Russia, we’ll become even stronger. We’ll rebuild our country, and Ukraine will be even more beautiful and successful.

Krystian: For years, I have been observing MacPaw's activities not only in the business but also pro-social sphere in Ukraine. What has MacPaw done for Ukraine over the years, and I know that it did a lot, from supporting the Antarctic station to cleaning the Carpathians. Can you introduce us a little more about MacPaw's involvement in the development of Ukraine?

Julia: In 2018, the company was celebrating its 10th Anniversary. I came up with the idea not to get presents for the anniversary but to give presents instead.

Thus, we decided to celebrate by making something meaningful for Ukraine and its people, and to drive positive changes in Ukraine.

We started with launching 10 different social and charity projects, and this is how MacPawCares was born. Now MacPawCares united eight directions of the company’s social responsibility projects, including education, tech and science, support for children and older people, animal charities, green projects, and others. Everyone at MacPaw can join, volunteer, or initiate a social project in any mentioned direction.

Some of the projects are local, but others have an impact on the state level and sometimes even go far beyond Ukraine. For example, the social project supporting the Ukrainian scientists on the Antarctic Vernadsky Research Base was one of our global initiatives. In 2020, MacPaw bought and sent to scientists a satellite antenna that significantly improved the Internet connection at the station. This allows scientists to quickly communicate with their colleagues all over the world and make video calls to their loved ones at home. We also supported scientists with protected laptops for extreme conditions in Antarctica, Wi-Fi components for the computers, and research equipment. Among other problems, Ukrainian scientists at the Antarctic Vernadsky Research Base explore the problem of microplastics in the oceans. Few people know that the ozone hole was discovered on this station when it belonged to the UK, and now Ukrainian scientists are constantly measuring the level of ozone as a part of their job.

The company donates to the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program, an academic training fellowship hosted by Stanford University.

MacPaw software engineers teach children to code in their native schools as a part of the hello.code() educational project.

MacPaw city projects aim at developing Kyiv and making it a better and more comfortable place for living. In Kyiv, we started the #CleanMyCity movement. Every year we choose a location that needs a clean-up, get together, pick up trash, and call other companies to join us. In the last few years, we also organized #CleanMyCarpathians and #CleanMySea to spruce up other beautiful places in Ukraine.

As a social project, MacPaw engineers developed a free app Sortui (“Sort It”) that helps thousands of Ukrainians sort and recycle trash.

In 2019, MacPaw initiated the project of night illumination for St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Cathedral, one of the most beautiful buildings in Kyiv designed by Vladyslav Horodetskyi. Since that time, Kyiv citizens and guests could enjoy its stunning view at any time of day and night.

There are many more examples of our social work, and I’m proud of all of them. Only in 2021, MacPaw brought to life 30 social projects. Last May, we announced the opening of MacPaw Space, a platform for creative people to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and find peers for bringing those ideas to life. Even though the official opening of MacPaw Space is yet to come, it has already hosted meetups, lectures, conferences, and other important for the country events. I’m happy that you were among the first people to visit it.

Through our social activities, we want to show that if someone is willing to change the country or even the world — start doing it, and others will follow the lead with other great and valuable projects for Ukraine.

From the beginning, MacPawCares projects were financed with the help of a special MacPaw Development Fund. During war times, the Fund has shifted its focus to providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians in war zones. Since day one of this war, the Fund has been sourcing medical supplies and distributing them to hospitals, financing the production of protective gear for the Ukrainian Army, supplying the military with tactical first aid kits, cell phones, and computers, supporting children, etc.

If you are looking for opportunities to support Ukraine, please consider donating to our Fund. Our Fund can quickly source and deliver large quantities of food, medical supplies, hygiene products, and other humanitarian aid directly to people in need in Ukraine.

Currently, ​​we’re in urgent need of help from the international community. Any donation is valuable and brings us closer to saving as many lives as possible.

Krystian: However, the situation in Ukraine has changed dramatically since my last visit to Kyiv. We are all with you here in Poland. We support you as much as we can and we try to make our guests from Ukraine feel at home here. We know that you will win, in fact you have already won this war and you have defended your country, what is more, you have defended us as well. Of course, it's easy for me to write it while in a city where there are no missile attacks, anti-aircraft alarms, and although we have first-hand information about the war here in Poland, I would like to ask you how do you personally perceive everything that is happening? I also hope that both you, your family and all members of the MacPaw team are safe?

Julia: I want to thank you and your country for all that help and support you demonstrate. While one neighboring country pretending to be a “brotherly nation” attacks, bombs, murders, another neighboring country rescues, gives shelters, and support. We’re beyond grateful for that. Poland, дякуємо!

I believe that there are no places in Ukraine where a person can be 100% safe. This is a screenshot from my phone with an air strikes alarm. For those, who can’t read in Ukrainian, I’ll explain that the strike sirens notifications are country-wide. Sometimes every 10-20 mins.

We have a tradition in family chats to ask family members at 6am if they are OK in different regions in Ukraine and how their night was. We are all scattered through the country and there is almost no place where our relatives are not in danger. As for MacPaw, there are people who are still in Kyiv (Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO and Founder, Vira Tkachenko, CTO), other team members are in different parts of the country and the globe. Someone got stuck in Asia, Mexico when the war broke up. Nobody expected it to be come so abruptly.

Krystian: How does work for MacPaw under war conditions. Did the restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic to some extent prepare you for this, after all, much more difficult situation?

Julia: Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the team was well-prepared for the fully remote work. In 2020, the company switched to a hybrid work format because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees had a choice where to work from: home, office, or even abroad. Thanks to this arrangement, some MacPaw team members were safely outside of Ukraine when the war started.

Before the Russian invasion, there were many talks about the possible escalation. The MacPaw team used this time to prepare emergency procedures to ensure the safety and support of the company's employees, products, and infrastructure. As they say, hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Of course, we hoped that we would never need any of those plans, but you know what happened on February 24.

The situation hasn’t affected the work of our products as we had prepared all the processes. MacPaw products have been working with no disruptions since the first day of the war.

Today, the work of the team is organized and well-coordinated. We all are staying in touch, and our newly released Together App helps us understand whether all people in the team are safe.

Despite work, MacPaw team members are volunteering, providing assistance to Ukrainian charities, supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukrainians stranded in war zones, and actively spreading the word about the situation in Ukraine firsthand in all possible channels.

Krystian: I have read that one of the safest places to work in your apartment is the bathtub. What does your working day look like under the current conditions?

Julia: We stayed in Kyiv as nobody expected it would last longer than a couple of days. We distributed our roles in the family: my husband is responsible for food and water supply, our daughter is responsible for keeping in touch with family all over Ukraine (almost all of them aren’t safe as their cities are in danger), and I'm volunteering in the PR army. A bathtub and a hallway can be the safest place in the apartment during bombardments. So I worked there.

My day looked like that. At 5 AM, after I returned to the apartment from the bomb shelter, I checked my phone to see if my family is still alive. After that, I volunteered till dawn. A lot of Ukrainians do. One of my friends coordinates refugees in Europe, another one bakes bread because their town is massively shooted and there is no bread supply, another one developed an app to rescue pets in Ukrainian cities. We have to cope with it as we know for sure — Ukraine will win.

After 2 weeks of spending nights in the bomb shelter, I understood that it’s very exhausting and I should provide proper rest and safety for my daughter. We moved to a village not far from Kyiv to get some rest. We’re lucky to sleep in a bed now and that’s the place where I can be more productive. Back to work and volunteering again!

Krystian: In August last year, I had the opportunity to visit the MacPaw office in Kyiv again. This time it was a part prepared for the museum you are planning. What is the situation in your office in Kyiv? Does anyone currently work there?

Julia: Most team members had left Kyiv by this time, but there is a group of people staying at the office, with Oleksandr Kosovan, the Founder and CEO of MacPaw, among them. Every day they source and deliver supplies to people who are staying under difficult conditions in Kyiv, deliver medical supplies to hospitals, help the Ukrainian military, and rescue animals. I can’t stress enough how grateful I am for their incredible work. I admire their courage.

Speaking of the museum, we haven’t changed our plans. MacPaw is going to open a museum with an exclusive collection of vintage Apple hardware after Ukraine wins the war. The interactive exhibition will showcase 323 Apple products, and we’ll be open for everyone who wants to enjoy the collection in MacPaw Space. I’ll be happy to invite you to the opening!

Krystian: It is known that people are the most important, but here in Poland we also help animals that come from Ukraine from areas affected by hostilities, so I can't help but ask about your cats (the MacPaw office is known, among others, for the fact that its hosts are a couple cats - Fixel and Hoover)?

Julia: Thank you for asking. Fixel and Hoover are staying safe in Ukraine. As some teammates spend days and nights in the office, pets are in good hands all day long. I hope that the sounds of bombings won’t cause any stress and they will continue enjoying their measured lifestyle.

Krystian: I know that apart from everyday duties, the same as before the war, both you and other team members are involved in many activities aimed at supporting civil and territorial defense and the Ukrainian army. I have read that you personally have engaged in a wider campaign to coordinate activities related to communication and information transfer on the situation in Ukraine and the fight against Russian disinformation. Can you say more about it?

Julia: The PR Army is a team of 300+ comms volunteers that spread the truth about the current events in Ukraine on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the Russian propaganda machine is still working and the enemy is much bigger than we can imagine. The struggle starts with proper wording and ends with the victory of ratio over brainwashed minds by Russian propaganda.

Nobody is paid for participating in the PR Army, all the members join the community voluntarily and help with journo requests by international reporters, comments and shedding light on the events happening now in Ukraine.

Krystian: MacPaw, in turn, has just released new applications. One of them - Together App - is used for communication within teams in conditions of various crises (such as the current war caused by Russian aggression), and the other, SpyBuster for Mac, allows to detect which other applications are sending user data to Russian or Belarusian servers. How do these programs work?

Julia: After Russia invaded Ukraine, the MacPaw team started to think about ways to support Ukrainians in these hard times. Along with volunteering, humanitarian aid, and support of Ukrainian military forces, we put effort into creating new products as building software for Mac users is what we do best at MacPaw.

As Oleksandr Kosovan said in one of his recent interviews, ‘I can use my brain and technology in order to try to stop the war in any way possible.’

So MacPaw engineers released a few new products aiming to help the team and Ukrainians in war times.

One of them is Together App, an app for Slack where companies and organizations can organize daily check-ins for the team to ensure that everyone is in a safe place. The app has an interactive map displaying the current location of all checked-in people in the team. Together App helps understand if employees are safe and discover if anyone needs help. The application is now available for free on Github.

Recently, MacPaw developers released SpyBuster, a new macOS app to secure personal data from Russian cyber threats. SpyBuster identifies apps and websites originating from or communicating with servers in Russia and Belarus and highlights potentially unsafe connections in real-time. This is important because, according to Russian law, their security service FSB can have access to any data stored on servers in Russia putting users' data at risk. However, users decide on their own whether to block such connections.

A MacPaw engineer also created Siri Shortcut, which helps save the battery power on iPhones. Keeping your mobile device alive as long as possible is crucial in days of the war.

We also put lots of resources into beating Russian propaganda on an informational level. With the help of MacPaw products, such as CleanMyMac X, The Unarchiver, Setapp, and ClearVPN we try to spread the truth about the war in Ukraine.

Krystian: I also know that you provide Ukrainians with your ClearVPN service and application for free to ensure safe access to the Internet. In turn, journalists describing the war and Russian aggression in Ukraine are provided with an annual subscription of CleanMyMacX for free.

Julia: Yes, we are. By providing free CleanMyMac X licenses to all media representatives who cover the war in Ukraine, we wanted to support and thank journalists for their tireless and important work. If you’re writing about events in Ukraine and need a free license to ensure the flawless work of your Mac, please let us know at pr_team@macpaw.com.

We also provided free access to ClearVPN for all Ukrainians to help secure their online experience. For the international audience, ClearVPN has launched two free shortcuts urging everybody to stand with Ukraine and support Ukrainians while they are fighting for freedom. A Stand with Ukraine shortcut presents information on trusted ways to support Ukraine, such as fundraising campaigns, petition-signing activities, and links to trusted media outlets covering the war. Feel the Ukrainian Vibes is another special shortcut that helps users dive into our culture, watch Ukrainian movies, TV shows, and listen to Ukrainian music.

Krystian: I also read that the CEO of MacPaw, Oleksandr Kosovan, makes his Tesla available to the self-defense troops in Kyiv and that electric cars work great in a fuel shortage situation.

Julia: Oleksandr provided his Jeep for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and his Tesla is available for MacPaw team members who volunteer in Kyiv. Electric cars turned out to be of high value in wartime with its constant fuel shortages.

You can find a picture of the Tesla with potatoes for Ukrainians in need.

Krystian: As you know, my fascination with Ukraine is also associated with the enormous potential that lies dormant in the Ukrainians. Ukraine is full of great technology companies. Are your friends from other companies and startups also involved in this type of activity?

Julia: I think that everyone is doing what they can to help Ukraine win the war as soon as possible. From the first days of the war, communication specialists united in the PR Army to spread the truth about the situation in Ukraine. We help reporters from around the world get firsthand comments from witnesses of the horrible Russian crimes committed in Ukraine.

While Ukrainian soldiers defend us from the Russian invasion, IT specialists have joined their forces and do their best on the information front. Engineers, marketers, designers, copywriters, traffic managers, and other specialists fight against Russian propaganda, disinformation and share trustworthy news globally.

Many Ukrainian tech companies updated their products to inform their users about the war in Ukraine. Ajax Systems, the Ukrainian company manufacturing anti-theft and security devices, released an app that alarms Ukrainians about air and missile attacks, so those who can’t hear sirens can quickly get to bomb shelters and safe places.

In the first days of the war, the Ukrainian startup community has written an open letter to the international tech community. We called global companies to stop running their services and operations on the territory of Russia and condemn Russian aggression.

Some of my friends are struggling to survive in occupied cities. I’m trying to stay in touch with them and can’t stop tears when I receive text messages saying they are alive.

Krystian: As already mentioned. I am convinced that Ukraine has already won this war, although the price your country pays is very high. After the victory, it will be time to start rebuilding the cities, infrastructure and economy. Do you already have ideas on how you at MacPaw can support these activities?

Julia: Unfortunately, the price is shockingly high. Since the beginning of the war, I have a dream to adopt a kid. That will be my personal contribution to the future nation. So far, all the efforts are directed towards the victory.

Krystian: And how can we help you here in Poland?

Julia: Poland has been helping Ukraninans a lot since the start of the war. In Ukraine, we know it, we see it, and we’re are very grateful for your support. Please continue doing what you do, keep taking care of Ukrainians and our children who come to Poland in search of a safer place for living. Help them settle and provide the needed support to anyone in need.

Please continue sharing trustworthy news about what’s happening in Ukraine. I’d also ask you to consider donating to MacPaw Fund and help us ease the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

Ukrainians know what they’re fighting for, and I have no doubt that Ukraine will win this war. We’ll defend the human right to freedom and democracy, and we’ll always remember the kindness and support of people who helped us live through these dark times.