Marin woman moves from Soviet citizen to CEO of global software firm Svitla Systems
You wouldn’t know it from its small office tucked away in a Marin County bayside town, but Svitla Systems is a global software development company with hundreds of employees in multiple countries.
In 17 years, Nataliya Anon has built the Corte Madera-based firm from a few programmers in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv (formerly Kiev), into a company with over 600 employees in production offices in five other Ukrainian locations plus one each in Krakow, Poland, and Guadalajara, Mexico. It also has sales offices on the East Coast and in Berlin.
While Anon wouldn’t reveal revenues for the privately owned company, she said sales growth has averaged 35% annually in the past eight years. Revenue has climbed 160% in the past four years, 122% in the past three and 66% in the past two.
The latter two growth achievements, respectively, qualified Svitla to debut on this year’s Inc. 5000 list at No. 3,145 and on the Women Presidents’ Organization 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/-Led Companies list at No. 50.
Female executives stand out in the tech world
“Being a woman, I think, is actually an advantage in the high-tech world, because there just aren't that many women founders, women senior executives,” Anon said. “You stand out from the get-go.”
And sometimes, that attention comes with prejudice. In one case, a banker she dealt with would insist that her husband accompany her to each meeting.
Another example came as Svitla was establishing its Mexican subsidiary in 2016 to cater to customers who wanted developers in the same time zone and within a few hours by plane to Silicon Valley.
While Anon and a colleague were meeting with partners of a firm there, a senior attorney initially posed all her questions to Anon’s colleague, a tall man. After about 10 minutes of his repeatedly looking to Anon for the answers, the attorney realized who was actually in charge.
“That was an interesting dynamic,” Anon said.
Overall, she feels the light of fortune has shined on her as an immigrant and a female entrepreneur.
“I still think that immigrants and nonimmigrants in this country, as long as they work hard and live their dream, they can still achieve what they want to achieve,” she said.
Iron will to overcome the Iron Curtain
Anon, 47, credits her entrepreneurial drive partly to her family’s unsanctioned children’s clothing business when the Soviet Union reigned over her native Ukraine. She saw her mother make the items surreptitiously at night, then her grandmother would take them to the market.
But to get the education she wanted to run a business effectively, she would need to leave the Soviet bloc countries.
“It was easier for me to imagine that one day I'm gonna fly as an astronaut to Mars, than one day I'm going to come here to the United States to study,” she said with a laugh.
But then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. At that time, Anon was studying for an undergraduate accounting degree in Moscow.
One of the first delegations of U.S. business leaders and educators after the change-over visited her institution, and among them was a professor from a small community college in Oregon. He arranged for her to get a full scholarship there and to board with a nearby family. In 1992 she arrived in the U.S.
After a year at the college, the same instructor encouraged her to go for a master’s degree then helped her convince the University of Kansas to accept her Moscow and Oregon education as the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. She graduated with a master’s degree in accounting and information systems.
“When I came to this country, I needed a job,” she said with a chuckle. “I was told that accounting was an easy path to get a job.”
With the graduate degree in hand and after passing a certified public accountant exam, she went to work for Ernst & Young, first in Manhattan then in London. The entrepreneurial drive accelerated while she was working with companies in the firm’s international tax consulting practice.
In 1999 after four years at Ernst & Young, Anon applied to Stanford Business School’s MBA program. While there, she made connections, both back to her home country through co-founding the campus Ukrainian student association and by networking with budding entrepreneurs around her.
‘Bright’ idea for Svitla
In her second year of the MBA program, she wrote a competition-winning business plan that would become Lohika Systems.
Meaning “logic” in Ukrainian, that company leveraged the country’s science and technology culture to create hubs of programmers that would take on software projects for other companies, following the trail blazed by Indian tech hubs a decade earlier.
