Numerous businesspeople have fled the United States for Ukraine, where they are providing military, assisting civilians with evacuations, and collecting content for blog postings.
Antonio Garca Martnez, a Nevada-based writer and former employee of Facebook and Apple, crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border on Sunday.
Garca Martnez spent four days in western Ukraine, including the city of Lviv, where he tweeted, “Wartime Lviv is cleaner and more organised than [San Francisco] on a good day,” before leaving his body armour and supplies to the Ukrainian military and returning to Poland.
“Western Ukraine is not particularly hazardous,” Garca Martnez told The Post shortly after reaching the Polish border. “At times, missiles are launched… However, the city has not been harmed in any way.”
He said that he went to Ukraine to collect information for his Substack blog and an article for a magazine. He visited a burial for numerous Ukrainian servicemen and pondered continuing east with his interpreter, but decided against it “in light of the current situation in Kyiv.”
Garca Martnez, who previously authored the contentious memoir “Chaos Monkeys” about her time at Facebook, continued, “I have a huge media hit coming up next week, and I need to get back in the US in a hurry.”
After the conflict began, another techie, former Uber executive Andrey Lisovich, returned to his birthplace of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.
According to TMZ, Lisovich is assisting in the coordination of supplies for the Ukrainian troops, including clothing, food, and shoes.
“I couldn’t sit idly by while awful events unfolded in my own house,” said Lisovich, who previously served as CEO of Uber’s on-demand hiring segment, Uber Works. “I’m here because I’ve seen Zelensky’s will to fight, and his tenacity is infectious.”
Zaporizhzhia is located in southern Ukraine, near Russian bases at Kherson and Melitopol. It is named after a neighbouring nuclear power station that Russian troops bombarded and seized earlier this month.
Lisovich, who did not immediately reply to a request for comment, informed TMZ that he had created a will on his laptop in the event of his death.
A third tech entrepreneur, the former Facebook product manager Dwight Crow, was photographed last week in the besieged Kyiv suburb of Irpin, wearing a helmet and body armour and assisting in the evacuation of residents.
“When I learned about the invasion, I immediately purchased an airline ticket and flew here,” Crow told CNN. “This is the greatest struggle for liberty I have ever seen in my life.”
“It’s frightening, you know when the bombs go off, but there are people far closer to the action than we are, and they are really the ones in danger. We’re just doing our bit to evict them “Crow said.
Crow, who did not reply to a request for comment, is presently the co-founder and chairman of the board of Whisper.ai, a Sequoia Capital-backed business developing hearing aids using artificial intelligence.