A referee, an
operator, a stubborn
optimist.

Padova, 2007.

I started officiating with the Associazione Italiana Arbitri in 2007. I was nineteen. 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, 2015.

I moved to Ukraine for what I told myself was a year. The plan was to work on a trade project that connected Italian SMEs with manufacturers in Eastern Europe. The project lasted six months. The country kept me.

What I found in Kyiv 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.

Faktorist, 2018.

We started Faktorist as a catalog and a chat thread. Three buyers in Poland, eleven factories near Lviv, one Telegram group, a lot of translation. By the second year we were doing real GMV and the chat-thread architecture was about to collapse under us, which is a problem I’ve come to recognize as a feature: the only software worth building is the one your customers are already overpaying humans to do badly. We built the platform around what they were doing manually, and they didn’t need to be convinced to use it.

Today Faktorist is the operating layer for wholesale trade across multiple emerging markets — catalog, orders, credit, logistics, all in one place, all syncing from the systems suppliers already use. We make money the boring way: a take rate on transactions plus a margin on embedded credit. The thesis is that the next great economies — Ukraine, Uzbekistan, parts of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia — will need this layer before they can grow into what they could be. We’re building the layer.

2022.

The war started two thousand kilometers from my office. Within a week half my team had moved countries. Within a month, our biggest customer was gone. We didn’t shut down. We didn’t pivot. We kept shipping. #EverythingWillBeOK is the book I wrote about that — not as a war story, because I’m not the one to tell that, but as a field guide for builders in unstable times. Most business advice assumes the world holds still. Mine assumes it doesn’t.

The book sold better than I expected. It became the reason a lot of conversations started. It also taught me that publishing is its own craft and that the people who do it well are worth listening to.

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 did its work. One magazine. One token. One ongoing refereeing career. I write essays when I have something worth saying. I take a few keynote slots a year. 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 — press, speaking, partnership — the fastest line is the contact form.