Ventures
Three businesses I founded, and still run every week.
A coffee pod that leaves no waste behind, a nonprofit teaching personal finance to Ukrainians, and a small Etsy shop that taught me how hard it is to stand out in a market that has 5.6M sellers.
Naturista
Co-Founder & CEO · Naturista Pods, LLC · Registered in New Jersey · EIN 42-4551380 · est. Dec 2024
A dissolvable, fully biodegradable coffee pod — made from pullulan, a natural water-soluble polymer, with no plastic and nothing left to throw away.
It is the commercial half of my packaging research. My co-founder and I started with no laboratory, ordering biopolymers online and casting films on a kitchen counter; roughly two hundred failures later, one formulation held. We now work with Prof. Kit Yam's Food Science laboratory at Rutgers University on the commercialization, sustainability, and regulatory pathway, with a provisional patent filed and utility patent 64/119,414 pending. The pods have been featured on Fox 66.
WON IN COMPETITIONS
$35,000+
REVENUE TO DATE
$5K
PUBLICATION
10.61340/fsj.2026.08PATENT PENDING
64/119,414
Invest2Empower
Co-Founder & CEO · Invest2Empower, Inc. · 501(c)(3) nonprofit, registered in New Jersey · EIN 42-4308434 · est. Jul 2023
A financial-literacy nonprofit I co-founded at 15 which has grown to three 15-person chapters, in Texas, New Jersey, and Georgia.
We have taught 2,000+ Ukrainians in Ukraine and the USA through hybrid bootcamps, with outreach through the ENGin network and bilingual training videos that have reached 10,000+ views. In our follow-up survey, 200 participants opened their first savings account and 400 built an emergency fund. The curriculum is written separately for each of them, because a lesson on compounding means something different to a family that has just been displaced than to a sophomore in New Jersey. We work with Ukrainian nonprofits including ENGin, where I still tutor.
IMPACT
2,000+
LANGUAGES
2
CHAPTERS
3
TRAINING VIDEO VIEWS
10,000+
Luminate Studio
Founder · Etsy shop · est. Dec 2025
My own small commerce business, run start to finish: listings, pricing, photography, fulfilment, and customer service.
It is the smallest of the three, and one of the most useful. Nothing teaches unit economics like packing an order at a loss and having to work out why. Half of the profits go to helping Ukrainians and funding Invest2Empower's workshops.
This shop taught me that it is not sufficient to create high quality products. What is important is how the market perceives it compared to other sellers in that product category!