Durham husband-and-wife entrepreneurs William and Galyna Tate left the Triangle in March to spend six months in their second home of Ukraine. They’ve stayed busy building their personal finance startup My Money Landscape there, despite the war raging in the nation. And in fact, Ukraine has become a key strategy for the young company.

As the couple prepares to head back to the Triangle in September, William Tate recently shared with ExitEvent some reflections on his time in Ukraine, and updated us on the startup idea he dreamt up after years in financial planning at Morgan Stanley.

Here are excerpts from our Q&A:

EE: You aren’t located where most of the conflict is occurring, so what is it like where you live and where you work?

WT: Galyna and I live in the same small city where she grew up, Alexandria, Ukraine. We bought a small, but comfortable, two-room apartment on the 8th floor of a very common Soviet-style, nine-story building.

Galyna’s parents still live and work in Alexandria. Our city is less than 200 miles west of the Russian terrorists’ activity in the Donbas Region. There is a military helicopter training base in our city. We often hear and see these choppers conducting their training just before they go off to battle the Russian Beast from the East. Sadly, several brave young men from our region have died protecting Ukraine from these ruthless Russian invaders.

But we live and work far enough away from the war that, except for the Ukrainian military soldiers and volunteers area funerals sometimes, life and work go on pretty much as usual. Our software development team, M.I.F. Projects, is in Kirovohrad, Ukraine. Kirovohrad is about 60 miles west of our Alexandria home. I am usually in Kirovohrad during the week working directly with our team there.

The full interview can be read at ExitEvent.

(Note: ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.)