Pivoting Edvice through the war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine started three weeks into my job as CPO at Edvice. The company I had just finished architecting — product vision, business model, the first hires — suddenly had a completely different set of constraints to plan against.

The first three weeks

The decisions that mattered most were the ones we made quickly.

1. Relocate the people who needed to relocate. This is logistics before it's strategy. Not every team member was in the same position; not every position was equally urgent. We moved the ones who needed to move, and kept the rest stable where they were.
2. Assume the previous business plan was gone. It was. Markets closed, payment rails changed, team capacity was going to be lumpy for at least a quarter. Planning off the old numbers would have been a waste of the quarter.
3. Keep delivering what we'd committed to. The Xsolla accelerator program was mid-delivery. Finishing it — on time, at the quality we'd promised — was non-negotiable.

Rebuilding the plan

I rewrote the business plan from scratch in about two weeks. The shape looked different: different target geography, a more conservative growth curve, a smaller team for longer. Investors saw the new plan, not the old one dressed up. That was important. Dressing up a plan everyone knew was broken would have been a credibility tax we couldn't afford.

What held up

Three things held up remarkably well through that period:

• The B2B motion we'd built with Xsolla. It was the clearest signal we had that the product format worked, and we didn't lose that thread.
• Customer success. Churn stayed low.
• Internal trust. Relocating people before you know exactly what comes next is a strong signal about what the company actually values, and that bought us a long runway of patience from the team.

What I'd tell a founder in a crisis

Don't try to preserve the previous plan. The plan's gone. The people, the product, and the relationships are what you're actually preserving — and those you preserve by being unusually clear about what comes next, even if "what comes next" is smaller.