ParentSounds 09: Ivan Kychatyi
A Ukrainian startup founder talks business, teaching your kids to make a sales pitch, and being present with your family when you can't take your mind off work.
Hello and welcome to 2024. Can we still say Happy New Year? Whether you’re reading this issue of ParentSounds as an email in your inbox, or checking it out later on via our homepage, we're happy you're here!
In case you're new to ParentSounds, or missed any of the past few newsletters, you can catch up on all of our parent profiles and podcasts from 2023 in our ever-expanding archive.
We ended the year sharing a fun roundup of our favorite recent parenting essays from parents writing on the Substack platform, which you can find here.
Although the color of the Berlin winter sky hasn’t changed that much since the last week of December, the calendar has, and with that we’re going to be trying some new things here in these first months of 2024.
In addition to our usual parent profiles, you’ll notice a growing amount of new ParentSounds formats aimed at furthering our goal of celebrating parent creativity in all its forms. We hope to publish more guest posts, personal parenting essays, and other content that highlights interesting creative work while also encouraging real talk about the challenges and joys of juggling personal passions within the experience of having a family.
Regardless of whether you consider yourself a “creative” person, the mission of this publication has always been to inspire parents to embrace our parent identities simultaneously with all the other parts of our adult selves. And to show how different parents go about weaving these overlapping worlds together.
I hope that some of the content we plan to roll out will help us continue to do that in new and interesting ways.
Thanks again for being a part of this community. Our first parent profile of the New Year is waiting below, so let’s get into it!
Founding father
This week’s parent profile is of Ivan Kychatyi, who in addition to being the founder of multiple tech startups, is also the father of a 7 year-old. Ivan and his family are from Ukraine, and although they arrived in Germany years before the Russian invasion, the war brought a big change to Ivan’s working life.
Shortly after Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Ivan pivoted from his previous startup to co-found UATalents, a platform helping displaced Ukrainians in Germany to find work.
The platform is now evolving toward more of a focus on various career and recruitment products (initially with a cool and very useful AI cover letter generator) — but Ivan is as busy as ever. In our conversation, we talked a little bit about Ivan’s business, but spent most of the time discussing his broader approach to work, family life, people management, and how it all fits together.
Keep reading to hear Ivan tell his story in his own words. You can also check out the extended version of our conversation on the latest episode of the ParentSounds podcast:
Let’s turn it over now to Ivan Kychatyi.
ParentSounds: Ivan, thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit more about who you are and what kind of work you do.
Ivan Kychatyi: I’m an entrepreneur and co-founder of multiple startups. As of now, I'm focused on a project called UA Talents, which helps employers in Germany to get connected with Ukrainian candidates who fled from the war. I've been engaged with this project since the spring of 2022 when the war hit Ukraine. Now we’re developing UA talents into more of a product company rather than just a talent platform and yeah, this is my core focus at the moment. In addition to my family, of course.
PS: You moved from Ukraine to Germany with your family in 2018, when your son was a baby. And you’ve been a founder since 2019. What’s it like for you juggling family life with startup life?
IK: In our case there is sort of a parallel with how our family was structured when we moved to Germany. Basically, my wife had to finish her studies in architecture. And while we were getting married, she got pregnant, and she put on hold her master's degree. Then when she finished it, I had to support the family and work full-time and do all those duties. After she finished her studies it was important for her to get job experience in Germany. So, we thought this might be a really good moment for me to stop doing my full-time engagement because around that same time I had my 10-year anniversary of work experience and I was thinking anyway that I want a change. We decided that as soon as she finds a permanent job, I'm gonna quit my full-time engagements, and I'm gonna start looking at what I can do in the startup field. So we can support the family financially but also pursue our journeys as we'd like.
PS: Has working for yourself made it easier for you to also fulfill your family duties at home?
IK: I would definitely say yes, in some ways you're the master of your own time – which means that when your family urgently needs you, you can be there. On the other hand, in many situations when you feel that the family is taken care of, it's super tempting to “steal” the time from your family life and work even more than you need to on your venture. In retrospect, looking into my previous two ventures, I'm thinking that probably I could have spent less time and still achieved the same results.
So, it gives you flexibility. But it also steals from your family a lot. When you do the entrepreneurial journey, it's not like a normal job where you come home, relax, drink a beer, and think, "hey, it was a good day. I'm gonna chill." The thoughts about what you're doing are constantly chasing you and not letting you go. That means there are times when it can definitely feel like stealing from you really being at home even when you are at home.
PS: In what ways do you think differently about life as a business owner now compared with before you had kids?
IK: I guess everybody understands that once you have a kid, you realize that before you became a parent, you actually had plenty of time, right? Haha. I started to understand that this is also the parallel between raising a kid and doing entrepreneurship. You start to understand that time is not the key metric to measure.
Time is something you can quantify, but the real measure is energy and focus that you can dedicate to a certain action in a certain moment. When you’re trying to work and your kid is around, you might have time in the moments that they’re keeping themselves busy, but you can’t really focus. You can have a call, write messages, be reactive, but if somebody is running around you and pinging you every couple of minutes to show a picture or ask a question, it's hard to do anything proactive.
For me, the currency now is my energy and focus, and I started to schedule everything around that. How can I structure my day to peak energy and prioritize my activities to peak focus for certain activities? For example, talking to people, making calls, is something easier for me. I'm more extroverted, so I put it after lunch when my energy is lower. I can go into a bunch of calls and be in my natural flow, spending energy when I don't have a lot of focus. Then I try to spend my earlier part of the day on more focused activities when I still have a lot of energy. My morning routines are all structured around optimizing for energy and focus.
PS: How do you think about the importance of developing yourself personally while also staying connected to your family life?
IK: Whether in your family life or in your career, you cannot isolate your personal journey. Everything you do around your life, in your family, on your job and in your company, this is developing some part of you, right? And then you have different versions of yourself.
There is you when you are with yourself, there is you when you are with friends, there is you when you are with your family, when you are with your kid, when you are doing your job, etc. Those are all different versions, but they originate from one place. Which means that anything you do to develop yourself personally, they add value to all of those things that are around you.
Just to use a simple example: almost any situation where you're dealing with a kid, you can transfer it into the business world. Take motivation. It’s hard to push a small kid to do things they don’t want to do. So you can either motivate them or like, they would not do anything. And in that way people are all the same, right? We all want to get motivated.
Zooming out to when I’m dealing with my employees, I always try to think, okay, how do I position this thing? So that my team thinks about this as some sort of like, exciting thing for them to own rather than just a super hard task I put on them and they have to perform the way I say. Because just like kids, adults don’t perform so well when they are stressed.
So it’s like, you cannot split this, right? You have the same basis. You have different versions of yourself, but eventually you're gonna behave more or less the same, whether it’s with the family or within your business. And you just have to make it happen all along together.
PS: What’s the hardest thing for you about trying to balance parenthood with something else you created (your company) that you really care about?
IK: For me the most challenging thing is to detach from one activity and switch to another. Because my mind is restless, and normally the thoughts are galloping in my head for another couple of hours after I leave my work.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest currencies for me right now is focus. And I notice that sometimes when I'm spending time with my family, I'm not really there. So detaching from that is still an ongoing journey for me. But I've learned that if I can really be focused on my work during my work time, really give it everything during those hours, then it's much easier for me to detach in the evening. Because I know that I've given it my full effort during the day, and now I don't have a lot left.
So this is my biggest learning, and I'm trying now to give a bigger push during the workday to do as much as I can. And then having this uninterrupted time to spend with the family. It's an ongoing battle, and one I still feel that I sometimes lose. But I'm happy that I’m trying.
PS: Are there any other strategies you use at home that you feel are relevant to your businesses?
IK: I don't have a list, of course. Some things you do unintentionally, many times during the day. But I mean, the first thing that comes to my head is like the no drama approach, right? When the kid cries, my partner and I have tried to teach him to convert his emotions into explanations, meaning to be constructive about what he wants from us, and what he wants us to do. To express himself. And from the perspective of understanding his emotions, he would be able to express them to us and then ask something from us. I think this can apply to a lot of situations in business.
But then the second thing is like, making it a win-win, right? Sometimes kids are like, “I just want this.” So I always say to my kid: “look, I understand you want this, I understand why this is awesome. But why should this also be awesome for me? Can you explain in my language what I am going to get out of getting you this?”
And at first he didn't get it, of course. But now he's getting pretty smart. And now sometimes he'll be like, “hey, can I watch this extra cartoon for 20 minutes? Because we've talked about with my friend in school, and I really want to watch it. I know it’s not cartoon day today, but if I watch this cartoon, you can actually work really calmly, and I'm not gonna bother you.” He’s starting to place those things in my language.
Sometimes it’s becoming so twisted that during those first couple of minutes, I'm not even getting that he's selling me something! But then eventually I’ll get it and I’ll say “oh I see, you actually want this toy, and that's why you're telling me this whole story about how cool that time was when we watched Star Wars.” And I'm already bought in because I remember those beautiful moments when we were watching Star Wars together and we were all excited, and then I realize he's actually telling me this story just to get another toy from Star Wars. In those moments I'm thinking, “wow, this is actually quite a clever and complex sales pitch”.
PS: These skills are going to serve your child well when he gets older.
IK: I really hope so! Like, you always have to sell something, right? Even as an employee, you still have to sell your ideas. So I really hope he can pick this up and continue learning to think not just from his perspective, but from the perspective of the people that he's speaking to and how to get those people excited about what he wants them to be excited about. So I guess this is one example of combining my business experience and my family experience.
Thanks to Ivan Kychatyi for a great interview. Another reminder that you can listen to our full conversation with Ivan at the podcast link below:
If you want to support Ivan, the best way is to check out his new product! It’s intended to allow any job-seeker to write customized cover letters for job applications based on inputs from the person’s resume. You can check it out at the link below:
https://career.heero.ai/cover-letter
We’re going to leave it there this time, as our usual article recommendations will be migrating to a new standalone format which we’ll roll out soon.
Until then: thanks for reading, best of luck for the year ahead, and see you again here soon.