On the morning of February 24, 2022, I was in my office in Kyiv when the phone calls started. By noon, half my engineering team was on the road. By the end of the week, our largest customer — a distribution group whose entire operations sat in occupied territory — was gone. By the end of the month, we had moved our primary data center to Warsaw, opened three new contracts with European suppliers, and shipped a feature.
We did not pivot. We did not pause. We kept building the same company, on the same plan, with the same product. The only thing that changed was the planning horizon. It collapsed from a quarter to a week.
The planning horizon
What people who haven’t run a company during a war don’t appreciate is that the work doesn’t stop. Customers still need invoices reconciled. Suppliers still need orders confirmed. Engineers still need PRs reviewed. The work is the same; what changes is the time you have to think.
Before February 2022, we ran on quarterly OKRs and a roadmap that spanned six months. After February, the roadmap was the next week. Then the next two weeks. Slowly, over the course of 2022, we got back to monthly planning. We are still not at quarterly. I don’t know when we will be.
The discipline you have to acquire is the discipline of finishing anyway. You finish things in seven days because that’s the horizon you can see. You finish the small thing you committed to even when the news cycle is screaming that the small thing is irrelevant. The small thing is not irrelevant. The accumulated weight of finished small things is what a functioning company is made of.
What to drop
We dropped four things in the first six weeks. We dropped strategic planning — the kind that depends on three years of stability — entirely. We dropped any feature we couldn’t justify with a customer name and a date. We dropped recurring meetings whose only purpose was alignment. We dropped “nice-to-have” as a category.
The thing we did not drop was the morning standup. Five engineers, fifteen minutes, every day, even when half of them were on trains or in basements. The standup is the company’s pulse. If you cancel it because of an air raid, you have signaled that the company runs on conditions you can’t guarantee. So you don’t cancel it. You run it from a phone, or you run it in five-minute asynchronous messages, but you run it. Every day.
What to keep shipping
The temptation, in March of 2022, was to ship a war pivot. A donate button. A free-for-Ukraine plan. Solidarity content. Some companies in our space did this and got significant attention for it.
We didn’t. The reason was not that we didn’t care — every person at the company cared in ways that took years to process — but that a war pivot would have been off-strategy. Our customers were distributors trying to keep food in their warehouses and pay their staff. What they needed from us was not solidarity. It was the credit module. We shipped the credit module that quarter.
Eighteen months later one of those distributors told me that having Faktorist working in March of 2022 was the only reason their company didn’t collapse. They didn’t need a banner. They needed an invoice they could send to a German buyer in the right currency on the same day the order was placed. That’s what we shipped.
People
The thing nobody prepares you for is HR. By the end of week one we had fifteen different conversations going about where people were, what they needed, whether they could keep working, whether they wanted to. The right policy turned out to be very simple: keep paying everyone regardless of output for three months, give them the equipment to work from wherever they ended up, and let them tell us when they were ready to ship again.
We lost no one to attrition in 2022. Three people couldn’t work for between four and ten weeks. Everyone came back. Some moved countries. Some changed roles. The team that came out of that year was tighter than the team that went into it. I have heard stories about other companies losing half their staff in the same period. I believe the difference was the three-month grace policy.
Optimism as discipline
I wrote the book to make one argument: that optimism in unstable times is not a feeling. It is a discipline. You don’t wake up feeling optimistic; you wake up and decide to act as if the next small thing will work. Then you act that way. Then, often enough, the next small thing works.
The opposite of this is not pessimism. The opposite is paralysis. Paralysis is the actual failure mode in unstable times — not the catastrophic event, which is rare, but the slow accumulation of unfinished work because the planning horizon is too short to plan.
Discipline beats paralysis. Specifically, the discipline of doing the small thing you said you would do today, even when the news says today doesn’t matter. The news is wrong. Today matters because tomorrow is built out of today.
What I would tell a founder on day one of a war
Three things, in order. First: pay people for at least three months without expecting work. Cash conservation comes after this. Second: keep the standup, even if it’s asynchronous, even if it’s five lines a day. The standup is the company. Third: keep shipping the same roadmap. The roadmap may compress, but it does not pivot. Pivots in the first 90 days of a crisis are almost always wrong.
Beyond that, the work is the work. You do it on a shorter horizon than you used to. You finish anyway. You ship anyway. Some weeks you will do it from a hotel in Lviv. Some weeks you will do it from a basement in Kyiv. Some weeks you will do it from an Airbnb in Warsaw or a borrowed desk in London. The location is not the company. The work is the company.
Things kept going. Things kept going because we kept doing them. That’s the whole formula. That’s also the title.