I’m taking a risk to build DreamProIT, and team members are taking a risk to join. We’re putting together a world-class team of software and systems experts, working remotely from cities across Ukraine. There are the costs – expenses pile up before revenue – and it seems each day brings another must-have: GitHub, Jira, Google Workspace and a myriad of other subscription software; professional services (lawyers, accountants); insurance. There’s also the strain on time and the risk that things fall through the cracks.
And then there are Russian missiles – attacking people and basic infrastructure: water and electricity. Building a company is a risk at any time and in any environment. But in some ways, doing so at a time of war has its own way of putting things in perspective.
The day-to-day risks of a startup pale next to the necessary risk of daily life in Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Kharkiv – any Ukrainian city. The risk of sending your kid to kindergarten for the first time, knowing that the class may soon be seeking shelter.
This experience of relative risk – taking smaller risks in an environment of much larger, sometimes life-threatening risks – must have a name in human psychology. I’m not the first person to discover it, and it’s not even the first time I’m discovering it. When my father got melanoma in 2012, it made my other anxieties – work, success, small personal interactions – fade away as I focused more clearly on what really matters to me.
This blog post is my attempt to articulate that same feeling that I remember or realize every few years. Life comes with risks – some that we take on and others that are forced upon us. The risks we don’t choose can help light the way for the risks that we do.
Our growing team at DreamProIT is taking professional risks by joining a new venture. We hope that this new venture becomes a place that rewards risk-taking and bold thinking while providing some shelter from the unwelcome and unavoidable risks around us.
And to you, who are reading this and thinking whether to hunker down and accept the status quo or to take on that risk of your own (to create that new academic department, write that book, quit that job), consider the relative risk of your new undertaking against the greater risks we see in the world today. If you can buy into this paradoxical thinking, it may help you worry a little less and wager a bit more on your own future.