An
entrepreneur, an incurable
optimist.

Padova, 2007.

I started officiating with the Associazione Italiana Arbitri in 2007. I was fifteen. The kit cost more than I made in a month of doing it. What it taught me, that no one teaches you on a course, was how to stand in front of twenty-two grown men who don’t want you there and make a decision you can defend an hour later, a week later, a decade later. Football is the only profession I know where the quality of your work is measured in how little anyone noticed.

For a long time I thought refereeing and business were two different careers. Now I think they’re the same one: read the game, see five seconds ahead, make the call, take the heat, do it again. The scale changes. The work doesn’t.

Kyiv, January 2014.

I was born in Ukraine but raised abroad, mainly in Italy; as a child I came back once a year, for a week at most. EURO 2012 — I was lucky enough to work at it — kept me here for nearly three months. By 2013 I was returning almost every month. In January 2014 I took a one-way Rome–Kyiv flight, right as Maidan set the capital ablaze. People asked me: why now? Because the greatest opportunities are born in moments of transformation.

What I found in Ukraine was a country full of people who could build things — beautiful, exacting, complicated things — and almost no infrastructure for selling them outside the post-Soviet trade corridors. Buyers in Berlin and Milan didn’t know which factories existed. Factories didn’t know what European buyers wanted, what compliance looked like, how to invoice in a currency that wasn’t hryvnia. The gap wasn’t product. The gap was plumbing.

Lviv, OK Factory.

That same year I found an 1882 Austro-Hungarian book factory in Lviv and turned it into OK Factory — an innovation hub, and a company in every respect: IT development, e-commerce, consulting on entering Eastern European markets. On the main wall, an LED sign: “Everything Will Be OK.” In 2016 a favour for some Italians in town turned into Ernest Airlines. Step by step our whole team ended up running most of the airline’s non-flight operations in Ukraine — partnerships, advertising, events, ticket sales — through to the one-millionth passenger. Then the licence was revoked, and in March 2020 the pandemic closed the skies.

Faktorist.

We didn’t wait passively: we turned an aviation team into experts in international e-commerce. A B2C shop for Ukrainian products sold nothing for weeks, so we pivoted to B2B, and the first prototype of the Faktorist marketplace came out of the pandemic. In February 2022, on a hotel terrace in the Canary Islands, an English investor heard the idea and said: “That’s Alibaba of Ukraine.” Two months later the business model fit on a single A4 sheet, which I keep framed. Today Faktorist connects Ukrainian producers with buyers all over the world — and suppliers register on it from every corner of the globe. More at faktorist.com.

2022.

At 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, an air-raid siren shattered the silence. My first thought was surprisingly mundane: I would probably lose the weekend in Rome I had planned for 8 March. We kept planning, building, living — not out of naivety, but by deliberate choice. When the attacks on the power grid brought blackouts that lasted entire days, we turned a closed nightclub in Lviv into BRAVE: a hub with generators, Starlink and a bunker. It opened on 1 December 2022, full from the first day, and it is where Faktorist took its full form.

The book.

Everything Will Be OK: Building Bridges Through War, Crisis, and Chaos tells that decade. I wrote much of it during blackouts, by candlelight, between one air-raid siren and the next, and I signed it as Alex Fox. It is where War-Life-Balance comes from — infrastructural, emotional and strategic resilience (warlifebalance.net). And it doesn’t end: Chapter 16 keeps writing itself online. The eBook has been on Amazon since 28 September 2026; the official launch is on 13 October 2026, my 35th birthday — in Lviv, at OK Factory, where it all began; in Milan; and on a global stream. Everything is at everythingwill.be/ok.

UPL, 2022.

That same year I started officiating in the Ukrainian Premier League. Working the top flight while running a company that ships software during a war on your home country is a logistical problem with a useful side-effect: you’re forced to be efficient with attention. You can’t bring the company onto the pitch. You can’t bring the match into the board meeting. The compartmentalization makes both jobs better.

I’m not retiring from refereeing any time soon. After nearly two decades on the pitch — Padova, the Italian leagues, now the UPL — it’s still the thing I do that has the cleanest feedback loop. Most weeks I get a verdict on my own performance within ninety minutes. Most of the rest of my work takes years.

Made-in-Ukraine.

We launched Made-in-Ukraine in 2024 — a magazine and podcast about the people, products, and culture coming out of Ukraine right now. It started because the international press kept writing about Ukraine in the past tense or the future tense, and almost never the present. There are companies here making things you would buy from anywhere in the world. The magazine exists to make that obvious.

FTR, 2025.

The newest piece is FTR — a utility token built around the Faktorist trade network. The aim is specific and limited: settlement and embedded credit for verified trade receivables. Not speculation, not yield farming, not a metaverse. Trade finance has been digital for decades; the bottleneck isn’t technology, it’s trust between parties who’ve never traded together. A token governed by the network’s largest counterparties is one way to bootstrap that trust.

What I’m building toward.

One company. One book that doesn’t end. One magazine. One token. One ongoing refereeing career. I write essays when I have something worth saying. The line that runs through everything is the same one: Italy → Ukraine → Global. Padova taught me to read a room; Ukraine taught me to build the room; the world is where the work is supposed to go. The brand on the cover is Oleksandr Kalonov; the byline on the book is Alex Fox. They’re the same person at different volumes.

If any of this overlaps with what you’re working on — inquiry, partnership — the fastest line is the contact form.