From Ukraine to Marin County: A straight ‘A’ student’s journey to global software CEO

Nataliya Anon was born and grew up in the Lviv region of western Ukraine.

As a teenager she attended the Moscow Financial Academy, where she was a straight “A” student in the international economic relations program after passing a qualifying entry exam based on her knowledge of English.

While at the academy she met visiting professors from the U.S., and one asked if she would like to attend Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

Going to college on a scholarship that covered tuition, she lived with the professor’s family for a year. While there, she wrote to another professor she had met in Moscow from the University of Kansas. He accepted her three-year study program in Moscow plus the one year in Oregon, advancing Anon to the Kansas master’s program. She graduated in 1995 with a degree in accounting and information systems.

Her first career position was at Ernst & Young’s office in Washington, D.C., where she worked in the firm’s international tax planning department. She later transferred to New York then to the London, where she continued to work in that practice.

In London she applied to Stanford University Business School, was accepted and graduated with her second master’s degree in 2001.

During her time at Stanford, she wrote a business plan that won a class competition and launched her first enterprise, called Lohika — Ukrainian for “logic” — with financial help from angel investors with Ukrainian backgrounds.

Lohika provides engineering services and agile teams for complex core development. It was sold to Altran Solutions Corp. in 2016.

In 2003 Nataliya formed her current firm using organic internal funding. Svitla — “bright” in Ukrainian — is based in Corte Madera and specializes in custom software, web design and development, and information technology consulting.

Last year, the Tiburon resident became a co-founder and an investor in Hireterra, a discrete, anonymous job-search platform for tech professionals. It’s designed to remove gender and race bias often found in the recruiting process.

Recruiters register for this service and see privately submitted profiles without photos or name disclosures, a technique Nataliya says shifts power to the candidates.