Global Courant
Boosteroid’s founder and CEO, Ivan Shvaichenko, is an excellent example of how Ukrainian private companies play a vital role in David vs. Goliath’s battle against Russia’s far superior military power, and whose inherent dynamism allows them to defeat conglomerates like Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. innovation and applied technology.
Boosteroid founder and CEO Ivan Shvaichenko speaks with Capitol Intelligence/CI Ukraine along with Vladyslav Kosmin, the company’s general counsel, in Kiev and Kharkiv, Ukraine)
In just over seven years, Kharkiv-born Shvaichenko, 40, built his Kiev-based Boosteroid cloud game hosting company into the third largest in the world after XCloud and Japan’s Sony PlayStation Cloud Gaming, with operations in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Boosteroid’s 85 employees – like everyone else in Kiev and Kharkiv – come to work every morning, despite nighttime air raid sirens and spoken warnings of incoming Russian ballistic missiles and drones. The streets of Kiev and Kharkiv are as busy and vibrant as they were before the war, with the only difference being that the locals are as grumpy as young parents with colicky babies.
Boosteroid’s success recently culminated in the signing of a 10-year partnership agreement with Microsoft, which was pushed through by no less than the President and Vice Chairman, Brad Smith.
In addition to its market share in North America and the European Union, Boosteroid is opening in the Central Asian markets of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan; Africa’s most populous nation Nigeria; and the growing consumer market of mineral-rich Indonesia.
In fact, Shvaichenko’s stated goal is to bring Boosteroid, now with a market value between $500 million and $1 billion on a fair market value basis, to Nasdaq.
“It’s not if but when,” Shvaichenko said of a US Nasdaq listing of his company that he describes as the Netflix of gaming.
Even with daily missile strikes, Shvaichenko and his legal team led by Vladyslav Kosmin and Artem Skoryi played a key role in persuading EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to give the green light to Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which U.S. Trade Commission Chairperson Lina Khan backhanded together with Sarah Cardell of the UK Competition Market Authority to block on monopoly grounds.
Amazon owner Jeff Bezos speaks with Capitol Intelligence through CI Glass at the National Press Club. Washington, DC. September 17, 2014
Microsoft will certainly appeal the decisions of the FTC and CMA, including on constitutional grounds, in the US Federal Court and the UK Supreme Court.
“We have contacted EU Competition over 21 times about the Microsoft/Activision deal and explained why the merger would help increase competition, not hinder it,” said Kosmin.
Japan’s PlayStation has spared no expense in lobbying the FTC and CMA to block the merger between Microsoft’s Xbox unit and Call of Duty maker Activision, even though the combined Xbox and Activision would be half the size of PlayStation.
Khan, the UK-born chairwoman of the FTC, is linked to anti-corporate, far-left “progressive” Democrats led by US Senator Elizabeth Warren, as opposed to the more bipartisan and regular chairperson of the US Senate Subcommittee on antitrust, Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Another example of a dynamic Ukrainian company is Kyiv-based Nova Poshta, a combination of eBay, Amazon and Alibaba that shut down all air freight operations after the Russian war and hampered traditional mail.
Nova Poshta has beaten all its competitors, such as FDX Corporation of Memphis, Tennessee, United Parcel Service of Seattle, and DHL, owned by Deutsche Post, and has rejected multiple takeover bids from the aforementioned rivals and e-commerce giants.
Colonel Alexander O, a logistics commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), said the military and private sector were forced to work in parallel to overcome unprecedented obstacles posed by the war.
For military logistics, Ukraine not only teaches the Pentagon how to supply and feed an army using decentralized logistics, but also shows Amazon owner Jeff Bezos how to use drones to deliver critical supplies to frontline fighters.
What also made the Ukrainian military so effective against their Russian foe was its ability to adapt innovation and technology at a pace not seen since World War II.
Colonel Alexander O said he was very interested in adapting hyper-ledger distributed technology (blockchain) developed by market leader Digital Asset Holdings and used by companies such as Dutch shipping giant Maersk.
“Right now we use paper for orders because the Russians can’t hack it, but secure communication via blockchain would be ideal,” he said.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation and Innovation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov filmed by Capitol Intelligence/CI Ukraine using CI Glass during the presentation of the e-government platform Diia in Washington DC on May 23, 2023
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation and Digitalization Mykhailo Fedorov recently traveled to Washington to demonstrate how his country has developed the world’s leading e-government system with its Diia platform.
It provides 360-degree civilian services for everything from real-time health records to passports and driver’s licenses, fines and tax payments, and even allows civilians to report enemy movements.
The Diya platform was developed by Ukraine-based programmers led by Igor Dubinsky using open-source software and aiming to match or exceed Estonia’s and Lithuania’s leading e-government platforms.
Peter Premk, an adviser to Slovenian Finance Minister Klemen Bostjancic, said he proposes that his country adopt Diia’s e-health system.
Fedorov, touted by many as the future president of Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelensky, was completely unaware that his Ted Talk-esque presentation of the groundbreaking Diia platform to a standing-room crowd of government officials and corporate lobbyists added fuel to the bitter struggle for influence between the CEO of the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Scott Nathan, and the administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, who will lead the non-military support for Ukraine, and the $400 billion up to $500 billion needed to rebuild the country.
In fact, the battle between aid and investment is currently being waged within the US DFC by the agency’s chief of staff and former State Department official Jane Rhee, who wants the agency to become more of a “social impact” development organization rather than of carrying out its congressional mandated mission as a lender of last resort to private companies in geopolitically important countries such as Ukraine.
Shvaichenko has also managed to unite opposing political forces, such as regional chairman Tatyana Yegorova-Lutsenko and mayor Ihor Terekhov, in his native Kharkiv to work together to bring US business investment to Ukraine’s industrial heartland.
Yegorova-Lutsenko, the highest elected official in the Kharkiv region, said she will involve the participation of major Ohio-based companies such as Procter & Gamble of Cincinnati, Goodyear Tires of Akron and American Electrical Power of Columbus in a soon-to-be-completed partnership agreement between the Kharkiv region and the state of Ohio, negotiated directly with Governor Mike DeWine.
Tatyana Yegorova-Lutsenko, President of the Harkiv Region (Oblast), speaks to Capitol Intelligence/CI Ukraine using CI Glass during her talks with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to forge a partnership agreement between the Kharkiv Region and the state of Ohio
The partnership will also unite Ohio State University with Kharkiv University and follows a previous Sister City agreement between the Kharkiv and Cincinnati.
Mild Kharkiv Mayor Terekhov said it was local and regional authorities who should take the lead in promoting and facilitating foreign investors, not the central government in Kiev.
“I will do everything I can to help companies establish themselves in Kharkiv and all we expect in return is new tax revenue,” he said.
Not only has Shvaichenko pushed Yegorova-Lutsenko and Terekhov to the same page regarding foreign investment in Kharkiv, but also to agree to rename a street to mark the birthplace of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to the former US president Jimmy Carter and Cold War architect who was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union.
Shvaichenko said no one should be surprised that Ukrainian companies can operate and even gain market share because war makes everyone focus on “results and not processes”.
Peter K Semler is the editor-in-chief and founder of Capitol Intelligence. Prior to that, he was the Washington, DC, bureau chief for Mergermarket (Dealreporter/Debtwire) of the Financial Times and headed political and economic reporting for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
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