Life’s self-fulfilling purpose.

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”. Isn’t that what Einstein once said?

Every one of us, at some point of the journey, has questioned the purpose of our life and our role in the greater world. It’s the lifelong puzzle of forming your list of priorities. The process of answering these questions to ourselves never really stops, it forces us to rethink our values and to build our vision of a happy existence, brick by brick.

In my personal worldview, life is its own self-sufficient (and self-fulfilling) purpose.

I’m not trying to be high-minded here, nor am I the finder of some special new truth. The philosophy is simple: my happiness lies in being able to experience the day-to-day moments, to interact with others, to improve myself, my relationships and the surrounding world. This has been a constant drive for as long as I can remember. It motivated me to choose the pharmaceutical industry as a place to build my career. It inspired me to help others gain access to quality care and medicine.

This drive moved me to organize volunteer medical assistance during the revolution, to create a mobile hospital for those embroiled in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The exact same motivation, the necessity to improve the world around me (and as a result — to enrich myself), enabled me to establish a company whose main purpose was the timely identification of the vast majority of heart risks.

The idea to create new technologies that would save millions became the unifying thought for an entire team of enthusiasts that would later call themselves Planexta Inc. After only a few months of research and development, we moved on to testing our first solutions, and soon after — we started receiving offers to move to other countries with supposedly better conditions for our work. But the team shared the same qualities and values: the proximity to our families, friends and loved ones always remained a deciding factor. So, we stayed.

At the same time, I always knew that to create something more than another unstable startup, we needed a sustainable environment.

We established our first lab in the beginning of 2016. It was a solitary building, but with its own quaint “back yard”, so that we could take our breaks in the fresh air beyond our four walls. Even a slight change of scenery and atmosphere does wonders to clear your head. The lab itself had all the necessary equipment for fast prototyping and metrology of microelectronic devices. Time passed, and the place turned from just a building to almost a second home for 18 people (12 of which are biomedical experimental physicists). After a year of hard work and truly inspiring discoveries, we created the world’s first ECG sensor for one arm (with two modifications), the world’s first one-arm sleeveless arterial pressure monitor, and a cloud service for automated interpretation of ECG data. But the most important result was that we proved our capabilities and self-sufficiency as a research and development company.

I won’t list all the details that allowed us, in such a short period of time, to create a company with a unique technological portfolio and a capacity to tackle even global healthcare issues. Maybe someday this could be a good lecture topic for 3d year university students. Nevertheless, patents for amazing technologies, awards from a prestigious international competition, papers published in the world’s leading scientific journals, exceeded crowdfunding goals, satisfied investors and endless partnership offer from all over the globe… it was all a bit too much at first, yet we couldn’t help but feel proud of the team’s achievements.

Credit where credit is due, it was a great start and gave a wonderful feeling of unity for us all: knowing, based on objective results, that we had established one of the best creative units in the entire industry. But we also knew that a plateau had been achieved: if we continued working in this environment in the coming years, we would probably encounter the same problems as others in our professional sphere. This is exactly why I started developing the ARK project.

The idea of creating an autonomous settlement in Ukraine that would be replicated via new economic tendencies isn’t new per se. Such initiatives did spring up here and there in the past, but most developer firms never went much further than co-working spaces. This was, likely, due to not having a stable business model to draw from.

The process of defining ARK’s concept was not a simple one. Essentially, it went through numerous stages of growth, just like a biological organism. We started from the simple question of “what do we do once the armed conflict stops defining the daily agenda?” and we ended with a concrete foundation for a community that shared humanitarian and scientific values.

The first seeds were sown when the president of Ukraine decided to reward the country’s troops that fought in the East by providing them with priority land privatization rights. At the time, I was the head of the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PFVMH) and I wanted for our medical volunteers to also receive some sort of tangible reward for risking their lives on some of the most dangerous zones of the frontline. So, we began working to breathe life into that desire. I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of the matter, but in several months, we were looking at the map of the Kyiv region, deciding which land plots to focus on. It must be noted that, traditionally, the land closest to the capital itself was considered the most prestigious, based on the idea of driving to work each day from the suburbs. This was the basis for the design of most gated communities and similar settlements.

The true value of having property out in a pristine natural environment was largely overlooked. So instead of the stereotypical options, we went in a different direction: by choosing the much less “prestigious” settlement area, yet one that was undoubtedly superior in terms of clean air, water and other environmental factors. It was in the immediate vicinity of the Zalissia natural reserve, yet it also enjoyed close proximity to all the modern lines of communication.

Imagine my surprise when, during the process of mobilizing the future “settlers”, I discovered that many were quite disinterested in the idea of moving to a new residential location. Ironically, I now had to pitch the full concept of the project to convince the very people I was trying to reward for their selfless efforts.

PFVMH anniversary group photo.

As the anniversary of our mobile hospital was fast approaching, I decided to invite the entire work family to a restaurant for a celebration, and to simultaneously offer my vision of the future “town” to everyone present.

Fortunately, the presentation changed everything. The land itself had little commercial appeal, yet it was the facilities, shared values and dedication that became the deciding factors. The first few dozen families came to me with new enthusiasm and the process was underway. The first group of “colonists” had formed: the very same people that were saving lives together during the war.

However, as the project was meant as a full-scale settlement, we were still lacking quite a number of future residents. I turned to draw people from my other work environment. Thus, the second wave of settlers appeared: this time — comprised of professionals from the biopharmaceutical, healthcare, medical IT and related industries.

ARK had now arrived at its implementation stage, and it was an arduous process: some lands needed to be privatized from the government, some bought out from farmers. I won’t describe all the intricacies of the bureaucratic hell Marina Moskovko and her team went through to receive the property rights. Suffice it to say, in a year we had the necessary documents for the first 78 land plots. Simultaneously, we received new data from the R&D team of Tetiana Botsva and it became clear that our technological prospects were good, so the project was given the go-ahead.

As such, the third wave of tenants for our town came from our scientific researchers and lab employees. After considerable deliberations, the team arrived at a consensus: we would also try to make this our corporate campus.

Currently, the ARK project (and yes, the play on the term “ark” is quite purposeful) unites 128 families. Today, it is a humanitarian and technological resource that can drastically change how we perceive the value of a clean natural environment and its benefits. We hope to break stereotypes and boundaries, and as ever — to improve the world around us.

Photo from the construction site of the house of our future sheriff — Pavlo Bilous.

The road towards completion continues to be long and difficult: sometimes we lack funds, sometimes we encounter new barriers of red tape, yet we continue to make steady progress, as the dream of a few has become the goal of many. And the reason behind it all? That reason remains both simple and fulfilling: to enjoy life for its own sake. Nothing more, nothing less.

To be continued….

author Eugene Nayshtetik President Planexta Inc., Technological Portfolio Officer of Vanhealthing