Five years and 5,000 miles away, Jessica Rovello lifted her right arm off a conference room table in Arkadium’s New York City office to show the budding hives. Her company’s satellite office since 2004 had resided in Simferopol, a medium-sized Ukrainian city largely unknown beyond Eastern Europe. That was the case until spring 2014, when Russian soldiers invaded Simferopol, the de facto capital of the Crimean peninsula.
“I literally can’t even have the conversation even this many years later without it bringing a physical reaction,” Rovello, Arkadium’s CEO, said recently. “It was that much of a deep-seeded trauma.