Five stars. Would hide from missiles here again

It is 4am in Lviv, West Ukraine. I am on a green foldable sleeping mat in the bunker of our apartment complex. TripAdvisor: "Five stars. Would hide from missiles here again. Wi-Fi is decent."

We are hiding from Russian ballistic missiles. The air raid siren went off 20 minutes ago. Simba, my Shiba Inu, has decided this is a personal attack on her sleep. She is judgementally glaring at me like I owe her money. I can almost hear her think: "I need my beauty sleep, you piece of ****."

In five hours, I have fundraising meetings with some angels. And a meeting with the Partner of a world-famous VC firm. My wife and I are on Telegram tracking the missiles and Shahed drones. Trying to figure out when we go back upstairs and sleep.

I am mentally visualising my pitch.

"So, about our Neurosymbolic AI…"

The Partner could not make it. So instead I am explaining the future of enterprise AI to a 24-year-old associate who graduated last spring. He is quietly Googling "neurosymbolic" while nodding. But he is British, so he says "fascinating."

Fast forward to 2030. Pebbles Ai goes IPO. The Partner at a dinner party reminiscing with someone that they "almost invested early" in a category-defining startup. The associate, now a barista, occasionally Googles "neurosymbolic" between orders. Still has no idea what it means.

Anyway, the actual pitch went well. Nothing says product-market fit like a founder who has not slept since Tuesday.

But the occasional missile attack is easy-peasy compared with building a category-defining AI company.

That is a whole new level. To compare apples to apples, it is like sitting in the same bunker. But with 20 devoted Hare Krishnas singing the same $%^&*% Hare Krishna song for five hours straight.

Nothing reminds you more of your mortality like Shaheds. Except building an AI startup. That takes the cake. Ever sold a Beta to a customer? I actually prefer the Shaheds.

Very different than running a strategy consultancy in London. Back then, I was making 7-figures in gross margin in my first year with excellent work-life balance. Hell, I even had a pilates teacher. How posh of me.

But darn my pattern recognition brain. I saw what was coming on the horizon. Two things, actually.

First, the opportunity. The Scrooge McDuck in me wanted to capitalise on it. Clearly a perfectly fine, healthy reaction.

Second, something that terrified me.

I saw a future where AI systems that cannot reason replace the professionals who can. Marketing and sales hollowed out by automation that produces volume without results. Millions of white-collar jobs evaporating. Not because the work stopped mattering. Because everyone believed that mechanical tools and general-purpose AI were better than human reasoning in complex verticals.

I knew that the answer was a Neurosymbolic AI built into an operating system that anyone could use. This was way back in 2021. And just the right time to have that idea. So I spent 18 months writing the scientific blueprint of our AI today.

After that, I thought I would just build the product, open a company, gather a team. And raise £20m. Then I remembered I was in Europe. And in Europe, people see problems, not possibilities. "Here is a baby unicorn." "Hmm… not sure about the size of that horn."

So I did what any rational founder with a 2,000-page scientific blueprint and no funding would do. I moved to a war zone.

But I knew that I would find my people eventually.

Ukraine has real generational STEM talent. The best engineers in the world outside of Silicon Valley are here. A culture that takes pride in technology. Values that run deeper than a mission statement on a wall. And the quiet ritual of sharing good borscht after a long sprint. There is something romantic about being in it together.

Power cuts. The buzzing. You learn to work through both.

Fast forward to now. I found my team. An all-star squad of A-players with IQ pouring out of their ears. Lion-hearted courage. Relentless intellectual curiosity. And the kind of grit that investors dream of.

Here is one story that perfectly illustrates my team.

A Shahed drone detonates 400 metres from the Pebbles Ai office. First time since the start of the war that one hits that close. The team goes to the bunker. Nobody logs off. They are just annoyed they left their fancy keyboards and curved monitors upstairs.

So they do what any sensible team would do. They close some Jira tickets on their laptops.

One of them submits a pull request from the bunker. Cleaner than anything I have ever seen written. Even in my old Google office with central heating.

That is a Tuesday for this team. A normal Tuesday.

That is not culture you manufacture in a WeWork over a flat beer and hipster sneakers. That is culture literally forged under fire.

Personally, I could return any time. London. The Netherlands. But I do not go back. Because leaving would mean leaving my team. And my team is everything to me.

That is not noble. It is actually selfish. I need them more than they need me. Having them around makes this journey worthwhile. Do not tell them I said that.

But the loneliness never leaves. Nobody wants to talk about this part. It is not very sexy or "manly." But very much a daily reality.

It is profoundly, structurally, architecturally lonely. I use three adverbs to show you I have a rich vocabulary.

Your team cannot know everything. Existential threats appear on the horizon. Sometimes twice in an afternoon. If you told your team every time, half of them would walk out before you finished the sentence. Not because they are weak. Because they are human. Constant ambiguity is not a natural human habitat.

So you protect them. You absorb it. You sit with it at 11pm. Staring at a spreadsheet that says you have three months of runway left.

You Google "how to extend runway without selling a kidney." You close the laptop because the results are not as metaphorical as you hoped.

You do not sleep. You get up. Start calling angel investors. And buy enough oxygen for the team to keep building.

And then you go home.

Your family loves you. They want to understand. They genuinely cannot. Not their fault. It is a different world entirely.

My wife comes closest. She is hiding from the same missiles. She sees the 4am face working on our financial model. But even she cannot feel the specific weight of knowing that every person on your payroll trusted you with their career. And their livelihood.

You are one bad quarter away from betraying that trust. That weight has a texture. It sits in your chest. It does not leave.

Only other, older founders get it. The ones who look at you, nod slowly, and do not need you to explain why you have that specific look in your eyes.

Those people are rare, busy, and deeply precious. If you are lucky, you have one.

Assembling this core team is one of the most important professional achievements of my life. Protecting them is my daily obsession.

The siren has stopped. Simba has given up on me and gone back to sleep on the mat.

Making sure their belief was justified is the thing that gets me out of bed every morning.

That and a judgemental Shiba.

Written by Emin Can Turan, Founder and Lead Researcher at Pebbles Ai

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