(Editor’s note: This post on Business Nest is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of ou r highly skilled internationals are entrepreneurs and founders.)
What is Business Nest? The 10-Saturdays programme, organised by the Business Nest, is an in-person training programme which facilitates the meeting of other like-minded individuals, receiving coaching from experts, learning how to pitch for funding with a great many more tips along the way. Their services begin in Eindhoven, with plans to expand across other cities in the Netherlands in future.
Meet Dr. Kateryna Saprunova, Dr. Anna Ezerskiy MBA, Dilip Kumar Mulluri and Kris Smirnova, the four expats whose collective mission is to help solo-entrepreneurs build their business from the ground up. The team is very democratic, divides labour according to their expertise and there is good chemistry between the founders.
Meet Kateryna
Kateryna moved to Eindhoven from Ukraine with her family in 2016 for an an Industrial design EngD programme at TU/e. The course, Human System Interaction, was composed of a multi-disciplinary team working on a “project for industry.” It was a turning point in her career and shifted her focus from a technical perspective to user experience.
This was in fact Kateryna’s second PhD; the first was in “Multi-agent systems which, with help of AI, optimise the structure of microchips.” She was applying the evolutionary traits of the genome (DNA) to computing and was a designer of microchips. Her specialities were in improving lithography tools and other computer aided design tools used to model the chip structure to predict any potential risks. It was a kind of prototyping. But back then, Kateryna didn’t know the meaning of the word. At the time, there were only a handful of people working on the topic around the world and there were no electronic production companies in Ukraine who required her skills.
Kateryna worked as a software developer in Ukraine until her search for new career opportunities brought her to the Netherlands. She still faced trouble finding work. She searched for a job and registered as a freelancer before finding a stable job with an IT company. She worked there for three years, followed by another role at ASML before her entire team was laid off in December 2024. Once again Kateryna found herself back on the job market.
This time, she felt it was time to start her own business idea.
Kateryna began to organise meetups, first in Eindhoven, and gradually in other cities of the Netherlands. She listened to similar frustrations about the job market, amongst desires to start a business. Eventually, New York City-based social media platform Meetup reached out to her and offered her to take over the group, “Eindhoven Entrepreneurs”, which had already existed for about two years with around 200 members in it. Now the meetup community has 500-plus members and is growing steadily. Kateryna ensures that there is a monthly coffee meetup, as well as topic-focused masterclasses led by experts and collaborators.
Kateryna meets Kris
Kateryna met Kris at one of her meetup events and the two – both Ukrainian – bonded quickly. Kris fled to the Netherlands four years ago with no real connection to the country or anyone in it. Along with a single suitcase, she brought with her expertise in UX/CX research, market research, trend watching and more than seven years of experience in business media and consultancy. Entrepreneurs from micro-scale to large corporations were always her audience. She works closely with the behaviour of human customers, what kind of issues they have and how they go about solving them.
Kris is a sociologist by training, and did her bachelor’s in Kharkiv where she specialised in socio-cultural expertise and analytics. Her masters looked at “sociology of the public sphere and communication”. Both enhanced her ability to notice cultural differences in business and consumer culture. This perspective has helped her since moving to the Netherlands.
Kateryna suggested that Kris help her to organise workshops and see how they go. Their collaboration continued and ideation of the Business Nest and other workshops began…
In the Business Nest, Kris has the role of programme director. She is the script writer, deciding what content is important to cover during the 10-Saturday Programme. This includes the minimum necessary topics to cover and how to connect them on a timeline. Kris leads the conversation about customer segments and target audiences. Kris brings her own spark to the programme. For example, a typical business development programme wouldn’t include a session on “business lifestyle” or “stress management.” However, these are topics Kris saw as fundamental to the programme.
Photo by Marina Matusevich
And along comes Dilip
Dilip met Kateryna at the monthly event, Drinks, Pitches and Demos. Kateryna was pitching her plan for Business Nest to validate her idea and find collaborators. Dilip is inspired by new ideas and wants to use his expertise to help make them happen. He began to help Kateryna explore subsidy options and operations of Business Nest.
Dilip’s experience in the start-up world began in India in what he calls a “real garage start-up”. He worked from the founder’s garage and was the first full-time employee for six months. Despite the stress, Dilip knew he was attracted to this lifestyle. His second start-up was slightly more established than the first, however still small.
Later, he worked for Bosch in India. Projects included designing new products and applying for patents. It was through Bosch that he visited Europe for the first time. He sees his work-trip to Germany as a life-defining moment. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw how his German colleagues had their bags packed by 16:30 each day. By contrast, in India it’s normal to work a 12 hour day, work overtime til 2 or 3 a.m. and come into work on weekends… all for the reward of an applause and an Amazon voucher.
He joined a start-up in Eindhoven and worked there for three years until it relocated to Switzerland. Before meeting Kateryna, he worked at yet another start-up. At that point, he evaluated the experience gained from various companies in India and the Netherlands. He had met many interesting people which added to his joy of working with start-ups and decided it was time to take the risk and to do something of his own.
How Anna joined the team
Anna completed her PhD at Delft University of Technology between 2014 and 2018 where her research, “Skin spectroscopy and imaging for cosmetic and dermatological applications”, centered around measurement technologies and data interpretation. The approach shaped her later focus on advanced equipment development and applied research technologies. To complement her scientific background, Anna completed an Executive MBA in Entrepreneurship at Maastricht School of Management, enhancing her ability to translate deep technology into viable business models and sound funding strategies.
Now, Anna runs an independent consultancy which supports early-stage and first-time tech founders with a focus on hardware and equipment-driven startups. She helps founders use money as a tool to bring new technologies to life. With engineers as her main target audience, she tackles the issue of funding without prematurely sacrificing ownership, control or long-term mission.
Anna met Kateryna at Ehv Innovation Cafe, a monthly tech and design meetup, where they bonded over their experience witnessing talented but miserable individuals struggle to make the precarious leap into entrepreneurship.
Initially joining the team as a programme expert, Anna offered to help the team with the Business Nest’s own business model and development. She loves teaching as it connects her to first-time entrepreneurs’ real-world challenges, but is aware of the value of being at least 70-percent active in the industry herself. Anna’s mission is to make the Business Nest profitable for her collaborators, as well as helping participants build successful, lasting businesses. As she puts it, “If a business cannot sustain itself financially, even the best product will struggle to survive.” The team see her as the fourth wheel of their car driving towards the goal to create a positive impact in the Eindhoven startup community.
What can you expect from joining the 10-Saturdays programme?
“It’s a nest, you come here to grow. When you’ve grown you leave the nest but you know where your family is. Maybe you can come back as an expert to teach the younglings again.”
- Being part of a community
- Meet and work alongside other first-time entrepreneurs
- Share and exchange knowledge with like-minded individuals
- Sharing solutions across industries
- Place to share successes and struggles
- Recognising own short fallings and when to ask for help
- How to build a business that is enough for you
- Easy access to information as a non-Dutch speaker
- Meet with experts in areas such as marketing, scaling, UX, AI co-creating and much more
- By the end of 10-Saturdays you can start a business
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Read more from Zoë here on Dispatches.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
