a tale of indomitable strength and spirit

Justin Petrone • Dec 03, 2024 • 10 min read

After being caught in the middle of war, American-European entrepreneur and Estonian e-⁠resident Thomas Knapp is rebuilding his business from scratch

Thomas Knapp, CEO and founder of MediaMagic, speaking at Wolves Summit

Thomas Knapp is an American entrepreneur and Estonian e-⁠resident with roots in the Bay Area and a taste for adventure. He has extensive experience in the software industry and went to Ukraine to build a business there. He moved there in August 2021 for business as well as to return to his roots in Europe. A few months later, he happened to find himself in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on a wintry morning. It was 24 February 2022. It turned out to be the same day that the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of the European country. The alarms and explosions began at around 5 am near his apartment in the city center.

Like millions of others, he had every reason to flee. One easily remembers the shock of that day, the scenes of the traffic jams outside of Kyiv. Many Ukrainians fled to the Polish border. The staff of most Western embassies had already relocated to the city of Lviv in the weeks prior.

But Thomas decided to stay, if only for his love of Ukraine. He even decided to take up arms and joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defense (TRO) battalion in Kyiv in the city center.

"I never thought I would wind up in an armed conflict, a horrible genocidal war," says Thomas. "I moved to Ukraine as part of a five-year plan for me as an entrepreneur," he continues,

"I'm a software startup guy, a business executive. I never thought I'd wind up in the middle of a war."

Four days later, Thomas Knapp joined a volunteer battalion sworn to defend the city of Kyiv. He was directed to a park by a friend and enlisted. He was given a 30-year-old AK-47 with a wood stock. He had fired a pistol before but never an AK-47. "I wasn't a soldier, but everyone in my volunteer battalion was a volunteer. We were just normal people defending Kyiv side by side with the ZSU (Ukrainian Armed Forces)."

"It was terrifying, crazy, and chaotic," says Thomas of the ordeal. "Someday I will write about it."

Idea after idea

Thomas refers to himself as a hybrid American-European. Born to a Californian father and a West German mother, he spent his childhood split between both worlds, growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and Dortmund. "My values are based in both cultures," says Thomas. He's also been influenced by the other places where he has lived, including Ukraine. Thomas has, as he is keen to note, distant Ukrainian and Polish ancestry, from the Prussian Wars of the 17th century. Perhaps because of this, Thomas says he's felt comfortable with and close to Ukrainian culture.

As a child, he was always entrepreneurial, selling sharpened, black, obsidian rocks he found to schoolmates as "authentic arrowheads." Every class has at least one such precocious pupil with get-rich-quick schemes.

"I've always been a hustler," says Thomas. "I wanted to build something, have a vision and not just sit around watching cartoons all the time. Though I do love my Saturday morning cartoons."

He got a master's in business administration from San Jose State University, but he also obtained a master's in literature, his other love and passion. He continues to write poetry and music, and brought a whole shelf full of books by Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac to Europe. Thomas adds that there is an overlap between innovation in the literary and entrepreneurial worlds.

"I've always kind of been this way," he says, "idea after idea."

He describes his professional life up until the move to Ukraine as "the typical California Silicon Valley thing," but what that adds up to is about 25 years of dizzying activity, from building and selling startup companies in the software-as-a-service sector to working for giants like IBM. Thomas spent 11 years at IBM, where he held executive roles and worked in cloud computing, SaaS, and enterprise software. Thomas later held a position focused on business development.

This trajectory continued until some of life's big changes rerouted him, leading him to Ukraine.

At midlife, he entered a period where he focused on his spiritual and physical health. He decided to return to Europe, where he felt more at home than in pricey California. A business partner encouraged him to set up an office in Kharkiv. "At this time, it had a great quality of life," he recalls of the city. "There was no war then and no constant rockets." It was August 2021. Thomas decided to set up his digital transformation and digital marketing firm MediaMagic there on Sumska Street in the city center.

Ukraine has long been known as a hub of software engineers who can get any job done right.

It all made sense.

"Everything was going great," says Thomas. "The company was growing by 700 percent," he says. "And the whole country was being encircled by 150,000 troops from the Russian Federation in December 2021 and January 2022."

A strategic point

From entrepreneur to soldier: Thomas Knapp in Ukraine

Needless to say, MediaMagic is no longer operating from Kharkiv. The city has been under bombardment for almost three years. Thomas joined the volunteer battalion, dubbed the Brotherhood Battalion, and, in his words, "saw things you can't unsee." He was at Bucha, a site of mass killing of civilians by the soldiers of the Russian Federation. He lost his best friend. But during his time in uniform, he never gave up, encouraged by the resilience of the Ukrainians.

Much of MediaMagic's team is Ukrainian, but given the pressures of the war, many are now working from other countries. About six months after he enlisted in the volunteer battalion, during which time he saw action all over Ukraine, Thomas continued his service by leading five missions to Kherson with humanitarian aid to the front-line hospitals two kilometers from the Russian army on the other bank of the Dnipro River.

More recently, he set up a new home base in Przemyśl, a city of 60,000 people in southeastern Poland just over the border from Ukraine, and about a two-hour drive from Lviv. From Przemyśl one can take a train to anywhere in Europe. It also happened to be a hub through which millions of Ukrainian refugees passed on the way out.

"This was actually a strategic point from a military perspective in World War I and World War II, between East and West Eurasia," says Thomas, noting the town's many ancient fortifications.

He also loves it.

"Oh, it's absolutely beautiful," says Thomas. "The downtown city center is gorgeous," he says.

Here he has acquired an apartment and set about the time-honored European tradition of remonte, or renovation. He has also been working to rebuild MediaMagic, At the start of the war, he gave 100 percent of his clients away to other people and companies. Doing business in Ukraine also proved to be difficult, given the endless attacks on the domestic energy infrastructure in Kyiv and rolling blackouts.

Knapp on a humanitarian aid mission in Kherson

Returning to the business has been therapeutic in a way, after living through the hell of war. While the conflict itself made the day-to-day struggles of the entrepreneur seem trivial -- HR or cash flow problems -- it also made Thomas hungrier in a way to return to his roots in digital marketing, transformation, and SaaS.

In his Silicon Valley days he had built a life for himself as a SaaS entrepreneur -- he holds four software patents as a chief product manager. He still is into design, user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX). Within MediaMagic, he has worked to create tools and features that resolve issues for partners. Customers are SaaS companies and tech brands, ranging from medical device makers to consumer electronics. One partner is a NASDAQ-listed US AI robotics firm called Knightscope.

Clients are typically in the US, Canada, the UK, or the European Union. And this is where Estonian e-⁠Residency became vital for MediaMagic, as clients wanted to work with an EU firm.

E-Residency opportunities for your business in the EU

Access the world’s largest single trading bloc, a pool of investors in tech and growth businesses, and a supportive start-up ecosystem in Estonia.

A newly minted e-⁠resident

Thomas could have made MediaMagic a Polish venture, but it would have by his estimates taken about two months. Some sleuthing of his own pulled up Estonian e-⁠Residency. He says he was drawn to the program's streamlined nature and how everything involved was digital. This aligned with the decentralized way MediaMagic and its team have been operating since the war. He was encouraged by its ease of doing business and Estonia's digital ecosystem of services.

"There was almost no need for a paper component at any point of the process," says Thomas.

Of course, he did have to give his fingerprints and signature at the Estonian consulate in Kyiv when he picked up his card.

All together, he has found the program to be well thought through. He was able to find an accounting service using e-Residency's online marketplace and credits not only the design, but the program's team with assisting along the way. "If I could give it five stars, I would," he says.

Problems only arose from the ongoing drone and ballistic missile attacks over Kyiv. In the morning he had to go pick up his e-⁠Residency card at the Estonian consulate, and there were air raid sirens and more drone attacks that very morning.

"I managed to get in and out of there," he says, "but it was right in the middle of a war zone."

From zero

Supported by e-⁠Residency, Thomas has returned to building his business as part of his plans as an entrepreneur. He continues to travel to and do business in Kyiv, often driving eight hours in a car he had shipped from California when he arrived before Russia's invasion three years ago.

"I'm building my business from zero," he says. "Russia scrapped my plans and everyone else's."

Currently, MediaMagic has been focusing on business-to-business programs for clients. This allows partners to go out and win over more clients of their own and to drive up their own share prices. It relies on a variety of marketing approaches, including B2B growth marketing email and minimal viable product (MVP) charter customer programs, LinkedIn, Google Ads, and technical SEO. The company has also developed an internal tool it will soon turn into an SaaS product. Thomas was taught also by the "Father of the MVP," Frank Robinson, in Silicon Valley in 2014 at a $17 million Series A-funded startup where he was senior director of technical sales.

MediaMagic also aspires to have other Estonian startups among its clients, helping them to get into other EU markets, as well as the American and Canadian markets. Slowly, the business is shaping up.

As Thomas gets back into the game after his life was turned around by an imperial war, he's been drawing upon his own spirit as an entrepreneur, as well as what he has learned from the Ukrainians, to propel things forward. "They are incredibly innovative and creative," he says of his team and his adopted country, noting that when faced with an impossible war, they managed to create new classes of drones to take out ships on the Black Sea or sites in Crimea. He also sees the heart of the Ukrainian nation, of which he now considers himself a part, as indomitable.

"This is the strength and the spirit of the Ukrainian people," says Thomas. "We never give up."

For any Ukrainian entrepreneurs reading this article and interested in becoming an e-resident, learn how you can get your application and company registration fees fully reimbursed:

Set-up fee reimbursement for Ukrainian entrepreneurs

E-⁠Residency supports Ukrainian entrepreneurs financially to help them deal with the consequences of war, and promote the development of the Ukrainian and Estonian economies.