Spring break is usually when they go to Hawaii, but this year is different.
Instead of taking their annual trip to island beaches in the Pacific, the Kurtzigs are heading to the Ukrainian border to deliver supplies and meet with refugees. And if it’s safe to do so, Andy Kurtzig will cross into Ukraine to meet with his employees.
Kurtzig, 49, is the CEO of JustAnswer, a San Francisco company he founded more than a decade ago to help connect people quickly to experts like lawyers, doctors and mechanics. Today, the platform has 12,000 experts answering questions around the clock in 192 countries.
Around one-fifth of JustAnswer’s 1,000 employees are located in the Bay Area, and about half are based across India and Manila.
The company also has had an office in Ukraine since 2012; it employs 262 people who work in engineering, HR, finance and customer service. Some have either enlisted in the Ukrainian military to fight against Russian troops or volunteered to support the war effort in other ways. Many others have continued to work remotely within Ukraine or abroad.
As of early April, 14 of their employees in Ukraine were on PTO or sick leave, 32 have moved abroad to other countries in Europe and 19 have relocated within Ukraine. More than 4.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country since Feb. 24, according to the UN Refugee Agency; around half of those have settled in Poland and millions of others have gone to surrounding regions including Romania, Hungary, Moldova, Russia, Slovakia and Belarus.
Kurtzig and his family know a trip like this is risky but decided as a family that it was the right thing for them to do. Their children are 12, 13 and 17 years old, the oldest of whom has Type 1 diabetes. They all lived in Ukraine for six months in 2019. For them, this mission is personal.
"We've been uneasy about and unsure about what we wanted to do for spring break for a while. My mom has been encouraging us to go to Hawaii. She lives there," Kurtzig told me. "My brother and his kids are going there. And that's where we would normally go. I always wear Hawaiian shirts. I love Hawaii."
But a few weeks ago, Kurtzig sat down with his family to talk about where they wanted to go.
"We just couldn’t bear the idea of going somewhere fun and hanging out on a beach and sipping Mai Tais when our team in Ukraine is suffering and when the people of Ukraine are suffering. And so, we decided as a family that we would go and help," Kurtzig said.
They’ll be delivering supplies for the war effort like night vision goggles and body armor, as well as medical supplies like basic first aid supplies, tourniquets, trauma kits and insulin. Many of these items were bought directly from Amazon, Kurtzig said.
The family has also been collecting notes from around the Bay Area that they will hand deliver to Ukrainian refugees.
Kurtzig has been vocal about his support of Ukraine since Russia’s invasion near the end of February.
"We’re not going to run away," Kurtzig told Bay Area Inno in February, just days after the invasion began. "We stand with Ukraine and their fight for freedom."
The company is continuing to pay employees half of their salary if they’ve joined the war effort. During the first days of the invasion, it also organized buses to help employees relocate and paid for hotel stays while they looked for more stable, temporary housing.
Andy Kurtzig and his wife, Sara, are also the executive directors and co-founders of a nonprofit foundation, the Arizae Foundation, that has been raising funds to aid Ukrainians.
They have raised more than $300,000, over two-thirds of which has already been transferred to partners working locally in the country, the foundation says. The funds have been used to support shelters, deliver medical supplies, transport humanitarian aid to the war zones and buy military supplies like bulletproof vests, night vision goggles, patrol drones, sleeping bags and shoes.
Some of the funds have also been used to purchase Starlink receivers from SpaceX to support internet services and keep digital infrastructure running. The foundation also says it is helping local law enforcement set up facial recognition systems "to detect all saboteur groups and criminals, prevent crimes and find fugitives asap."
Working during a war
Ahead of the invasion, JustAnswer had been preparing for the worst.
Russia had been building up a troop presence near the Eastern border for months but nothing had happened yet, despite specific warnings that an invasion could commence on certain dates.
They made hard copies of important documents. Moved data to servers in the US. Updated employee contact lists. Procured backup power generators. And set up emergency satellite communications. Staff also stockpiled food at the offices in case the buildings needed to be used as temporary shelters. And they developed a threat analysis system with five levels — level one being the lowest threat and level five being the highest.
The team would also check in with executives back in the Bay Area every 24 hours, even on weekends, to make sure everyone was safe.
A few days before Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, JustAnswer implemented its plan for threat level five.
The morning of Feb. 24 seemed relatively normal, though.
Most people had already gotten used to working remote due to the pandemic, and the office was just starting to reopen a bit.
Pam Webber is JustAnswer’s executive vice president of the international division. Ukraine is 10 hours ahead of the Bay Area, but she had a scheduled meeting to check in with their staff via Microsoft Teams. Everyone was going about their usual routines — preparing for work and getting kids to school — until the first sirens went off later in the day.
"We had a directors meeting scheduled for later in the day and we actually decided to scrap that," Webber said, and instead pulled their San Francisco-based employees into a meeting to prepare them for what to expect, as well. Overall, the priority was, "what do we think our employees need right now? And let's just give them the opportunity to feel safe."
JustAnswer gave all employees in Ukraine two paid days off in the immediate wake of the invasion, and offered five more days off that they can use as they wish.
Iryna is a quality assurance manager in one of JustAnswer’s Ukrainian offices. The Business Times is only identifying her by her first name. She is one of the company’s employees who decided to stay in the country and continue working.
"The first days, I was in a panic," Iryna told me via Zoom. But "right now I'm not ready to go abroad. Right now I still want to stay."
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered all men to stay within the country's borders, and her husband left home to help.
Iryna took their children to a safer location for a week before moving them back home in western Ukraine.
Her youngest child knows what to do when the sirens go off, even without quite understanding what's going on. But she wants her oldest child to know the truth about the war so that he can retell this history many years from now.
Iryna, like most of her colleagues, continues to work remotely from home. They have offices in the country, but staff are working remotely — either at home or abroad — where they can stay close to family members.
They even launched a new product since the war started that the engineering and marketing teams collaborated on: a Tax Chat service for people in the U.S. that will be free through the end of tax season.
Microsoft Teams is their main form of communication during the week, and they also use chat apps to check in with each other on weekends.
Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Viber are popular chat apps in Ukraine but they've been warned that Viber isn't secure, Iryna told me.
The Ukrainian government has also prohibited its residents from posting any photos or critical information online until after it has been announced through official channels in order to protect defensive tactics, she said.
Telegram is the No. 1 app on the Google Play store in Ukraine, and the No. 2 app in Apple's App Store as of April 10, according to Similar Web.
Ukraine x Bay Area
JustAnswer isn't the only Bay Area startup with employees based in Ukraine. The country is a popular location for tech talent.
People.ai had also prepared for a potential Russian invasion for months. The Redwood City-based software startup started planning for employee relocations back in November. CEO Oleg Rogynskyy is from Ukraine, where family and friends still live.
"As a business, we are ready for this. As a Ukrainian, frankly, I am not," Rogynskyy told Bay Area Inno in late February, after Russia invaded.
Less than two weeks into the war, Palo Alto-based search engine optimization startup SE Ranking solemnly announced that its chief accountant, Tatiana Perebeinis, and her two children were killed by Russian forces in an attack on civilians as they tried to flee an area near Kyiv.
JustAnswer says that all of its employees are safe thus far. It has even hired 15 new people since the war started.
"We made some offers before the war started and we've honored those," Kurtzig said. "We're committed to Ukraine and we stand by our Ukrainian team, and that includes staying in Ukraine" and growing the team there.
The Covid-19 pandemic prepared them for remote work, but the war has disrupted their lives, and rebuilding can't even begin until the war, which is stretching into its seventh week, is over.
"At the beginning, I thought the hardest moment was when the war started but it's not," Iryna said. "The hardest moment is right now and when the Russian army leaves Ukraine and what they leave after themselves. It's just insane."
