The opening pages of the Preface of Everything Will Be OK — a book written largely during blackouts, by candlelight, between air-raid sirens. Click the corners, use the arrows, or your keyboard.
“Everything Will Be OK” is not an expression of blind optimism.
It is a declaration of war against the impossible.
At 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, an air-raid siren shattered the silence.
The sound came before anything else. That piercing wail that gets into your bones and never leaves you. Then the explosions in the distance — flashes on the horizon lighting up the night like silent lightning. And finally the roar of aircraft, a low, metallic drone that seemed to come from everywhere. Impossible to tell whether they were ours or the enemy’s.
As I checked my phone, flooded with worried notifications from all over the world, my first thought was surprisingly mundane: “I’ll probably lose the romantic weekend in Rome I’d planned for 8 March.”
This seemingly insignificant thought reveals something profound about what I learned in over a decade of living in Ukraine: even in the face of the unimaginable, we keep planning, building, living. Not out of naivety, but by deliberate choice.
“Everything Will Be OK” is not an expression of blind optimism. It is a declaration of war against the impossible.
Looking back on that night — many of these pages I wrote in our very own BRAVE hub — I realize that mundane thought about travel plans held an essential truth. In that moment of absolute chaos, my mind had instinctively clung to normality, to the future, to building something beautiful.
I didn’t yet know that this war would accelerate Faktorist’s growth beyond all expectations. I couldn’t imagine that the blackouts would push us toward innovations we would never even have considered in normal times.
My story begins with a divided identity. Born in Ukraine but raised abroad, mainly in Italy, I always lived between different worlds. As a child I would return to Ukraine once a year, for a week at most.
Growing up between two worlds leaves you with a curious feeling: that of never fully belonging to either one and, at the same time, of belonging to both. In Italy I was “the Ukrainian one”; in Ukraine, “the one raised in Italy.”
For years I experienced it as a small fracture. Only later would I understand that it was exactly the opposite — it was a bridge.
Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the concentration camps, observed that in the darkest moments, neither the pessimists nor the naive optimists survived. Those who endured were the ones who found purpose in the immediate, who transformed uncontrollable circumstances into controllable actions.
This principle has guided every business decision I’ve made.
During the war, when the blackouts paralyzed the city while rockets and drones terrorized the population, we built BRAVE — a hub equipped with generators, Starlink, and a bunker where we could keep working even under bombardment.
This is only the opening of the Preface. The full story — OK Factory, Ernest Airlines, the night of 24 February, BRAVE, and the War-Life-Balance framework of chapter 11 — is in the book. eBook available now; official launch 13 October 2026.
A true story of building bridges through war, crisis, and chaos — and of the approach it produced: War-Life-Balance. Alex Fox · Published by Factory FZE.