Who is Who? Alex Zamkovoi— Project Manager (Market Analysis)

Interviewer: Hi Alex, thanks for taking the time to do a quick interview.

Alex: No problem, glad I can be of help.

Interviewer: So to start, why don’t we discuss some of your background before you came to Ambrosus. Let’s go back to the very beginning: where are you from, and what area do you specialize in or study?

Alex: No problem. So my name is Alexander Zamkovoi, and I am from Ukraine. Specifically, I was born in Odessa in Ukraine. My original bachelors — which I did in Ukraine — was focused on foreign trade operations. However during this time I also did an exchange at a Lithuanian University for a semester, where I was able to study some economics.

After I graduated with my bachelors, I then did my masters in Lille, France, where my focus was on Intercultural Management in agriculture. So really, I kind of have experimented with a whole variety of areas.

Interviewer: And at this time, after you graduated had you heard about blockchain or its use case in the supply chain?

Alex: No, so actually after I graduated, I did an internship as a business developer for an agricultural company. This was a really good experience for me as I learned to develop a lot of different things for corporates entering new markets. My focus was specifically on companies wanting to enter into Ukraine — I worked with business developers to evaluate the economic potential of certain markets. This has to do with agricultural indicators for Eastern European markets, agribusiness etc. And also other things like EU and Russian trade law, etc.

Then after my internship I returned to Odessa, and started working for a joint Swiss-Ukrainian venture called Palma Group S.A.. My job at that gig was to analyze the quality of performance of certain groups’ business activities and to look for new opportunities. I was involved with the internal auditing and financial documentation, as well as collecting information for decision making processes.

Overall, it was a lot of work with potential suppliers and business partners as the main field of the company’s activities was food supply chains and mostly food supplements and baby food products. But the focus here was really with the distributor, so not completely from its raw production to the table.

Interviewer: Well I think based on this background it is safe to say that you have substantial overlap with Ambrosus, and the focus of Ambrosus.

Alex: That is definitely true.

Interviewer: And how did you come to work for Ambrosus, and how long have you been with them?

Alex: So I have been at Ambrosus for about 2 months now. Basically, I saw that Ambrosus was looking for product managers, to find new clients to communicate with, and I applied, and was accepted. In terms of what I do, my job is focused on looking for market opportunities: researching and writing on the various supply chains and their business potential. This is my main field of work.

Apart from that type of research I also do market analysis, and often times take up the role of the sales or project manager. On the side I fill in the rest of my time researching blockchain, and how that functions. I think that it is important to learn as much as possible about the potential of blockchain in the supply chain, as it will definitely help us with what we can create for clients through Ambrosus. Needless to say AMB-NET is way ahead of the other solutions on the market, primarily due to its strong IoT part. This becomes a huge differentiating factor for the corporates we approach.

Interviewer: So more specifically, you mentioned project management — what does that entail?

Alex: Yes, so as project managers, we are visiting lots of different conferences and exhibitions to showcase Ambrosus at. At these exhibitions we network and provide more information about the Ambrosus project and company. Usually after these types of exhibitions we get a decent number of contacts, and then try to communicate with them.

Communication is really about trying to understand what their needs are, while also giving them more information about how blockchain can help improve aspects of the supply chain. In general, the clients really do not understand the technology very well, and they have lots of questions that I then send to the tech department to answer, in order to get the best answers.

Interviewer: And so how does it work; once you have an interested company you kind of stick with them until they decide on something, or do you pass on these companies to someone else after they get their questions answered?

Alex: No, no, so I function like an account owner. I am responsible for the clients that I meet during the different events, as well as the various clients we get from emails, on a website and everything else. The complexity in it is that there are very different clients with different particular use cases in particular industries.

So while I work with a decent number of clients, I also have to do a lot of research on understanding how these companies work and what kind of a supply chain they have.

Interviewer: You also mentioned that some clients contact you directly from email — how does that work out?

Alex: Yeah, so basically companies can find out about Ambrosus from the medium blog, or reddit, or by reading about us on one of the countless media articles published about Ambrosus, and they basically come to us looking for solutions to a particular problem that they have. This is how work starts.

We then do a web call and present the entire project to them. We go into deeper details and address these questions to the company’s business developers and technical departments. After the playing field is clear, we estimate the opportunity potential, and whether the company fits well with us or not. Sometimes, the clients have a small and specific use-case — sometimes they are very enthusiastic but very far away. A lot of it depends on what else is going on at Ambrosus, and where we are with our other clients.

Interviewer: Thanks for all of this information — it really is substantial to get an idea of what you guys are doing. One final question: Where do you see Ambrosus heading in the future based on the work that is going on right now?

Alex: So this year is really about enterprise marketing. What is really nice is that a lot of people around me working for Ambrosus are really active, and they really work hard, and do a good job with their clients. Also, from my experience, the roadmap that has been released is really 100% dead on — the company hits every deadline and milestone the set, and the time of their clients as well as their associates and employees is used efficiently. This is what a lot of our clients and partners love about our team. We deliver. Our CEO Angel Versetti has created a strong entrepreneurial culture where things have to be delivered, and this has resulted in Ambrosus growing and progressing at light-speed.

I personally feel that this year will be the ‘productive phase’. What I mean is that next year we will be looking at a much higher level of business operations and integration, as the blockchain testing, pilot projects and developments will be completed. This will allow us to devote much more time to working with more clients, and diagnosing more complicated problems.

Finally, I think it is really important to remember that this industry is very new. Because of this, the industry as a whole — of using blockchain in the supply chain –doesn’t really operate on super strict standards, because it really depends on the technological development moving forward. That being said, I think that the total amount of use-cases that a company can access through using Ambrosus has come nowhere close to being realised yet. Every day we discover new and new business cases and opportunities that can be built on top of AMB-NET, this is both exciting and daunting. So really, there is still a lot to do, and a lot of things to try out.

Interviewer: Thanks for the time Alex. Looking forward to hearing about some of your presentations in the future.

Alex: Thanks, it’s been a pleasure.