Business Athletes: Kateryna Ushmaieva

Hello and welcome to Business Athletes everyone 👋 

Each week, we’ll explore the athlete-like habits behind a different business leader and provide you with practical tactics that you can quickly apply in your day-to-day.⚡️

This week, I sat down with Kateryna Ushmaieva, co-founder of Pera an AI relationship companion built to strengthen the bonds we’re quietly losing in the modern world.

Katya grew up in Ukraine in a family of entrepreneurs, running mini “businesses” from the age of 7. 

From selling lemons and cotton candy on the street to turning her living room into a supermarket and even a car dealership, complete with printed receipts.

Today, she’s channeling that same energy into building Pera: a tool designed to help you be more intentional with your relationships, not replace them.

What stood out to me is how clearly she sees the founder journey as a blend of ownership, discipline, and self-awareness:

• She refuses to outsource responsibility for outcomes.

• She builds her week like a training block.

• And she’s ruthless about balancing hustle with recovery so she can play the long game.

Let’s get into it. ⚡️

Pre-Game Preparation

A Week in My Life

As an early-stage founder, no two days look the same. You can plan, but reality always does its own thing.

So instead of obsessing over a ‘perfect’ day, I think in terms of the whole week. I know roughly which days are packed with calls, which days are for deep work, and which blocks I need to protect for content and strategy.

But I still need structure, otherwise everything becomes noise.

Morning Rituals: Movement and Structure

I really value my mornings. They set the tone for everything.

Most days I wake up around 6:30am, and from 7-8am I work out. Sometimes it’s home workouts, sometimes the gym, sometimes reformer Pilates. I ran a half marathon before, so I still love mixing in runs too.

That hour lets me turn off my brain and just be in my body. It stabilises my emotions, hormones, everything. And getting it out of the way early means the day doesn’t steal it from me.

After that, I sit down with two things I can’t live without: my calendar and my paper notebook. I’m honestly no one without those two. I plan everything in my calendar: waking up, lunch, work blocks, even sleep. It makes me sound very type A, but I think of myself as a creative type A.

In my notebook, I brain-dump tasks and then bundle them into a simple system I use every day:

• 3 non-negotiables

• 2 important habits

• 1 ‘annoying but important’ task

As a founder, you have so many things to do that you can easily fall into analysis paralysis. That 3–2–1 structure keeps me moving.

And then there’s LinkedIn. For me, LinkedIn is almost like public journaling. A lot of what I post starts as me clarifying thoughts for myself — fears, lessons, patterns — and only then becomes content.

Deep Into The Game

Ownership over Safety

I’ve always known I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I never really saw myself in a corporate box.

What attracted me most was this idea that I am responsible, for my actions and for the outcome. In a big company, you can do great work and still feel like a tiny part of a system you don’t control. For some people that’s perfect. For me, it never felt right.

I’m not building companies for the financial upside first. I’m building because I want to be fully in control of what I’m doing.

If I don’t work for a week and something goes badly, that’s on me. If I push, experiment, learn, and something good happens, that’s also on me.

That level of responsibility motivates me far more than a predictable corporate path ever could.

Once An Entrepreneur, Always An Entrepreneur

I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad has been building businesses his whole life. My sister was in the startup space.

So from very early on, I was told (in a good way) that: You can become whoever you want and build whatever you want from your life. You are the master of your destiny.”

It sounds dramatic, but that mindset really shaped me.

Honestly, I’ve been ‘founder-coded’ since I was a kid. At seven years old, I was starting small ventures. From selling lemons and home-grown nuts  to neighbours, to standing outside with a mini cotton candy machine my dad bought me, to turning our home into a mini supermarket/ hotel/car dealership. 

I even begged Santa for a receipt machine! While most kids wanted toys, I wanted the thing that printed receipts because it fascinated me. 

I thought a big printer made them, so I wrote ‘printer’ on my wish list. I think my parents read that and thought, ‘Okay… this child is a bit weird.’

Looking back, it’s obvious: my whole life since about six years old has been me creating little worlds and selling into them. This is just the most serious version so far.

The Championship

Long-Term: Stronger Connections in a Lonely World

On the big-picture level, our championship is clear: Help every person strengthen their connections in a lonely world.

There’s so much noise today with social media, constant content, endless feeds, but very little signal when it comes to real relationships.

We live in huge cities with millions of people, but it’s actually the loneliest it’s ever been. Dating apps are failing a lot of people. Many social platforms aren’t really serving their purpose anymore.

We want to build something completely different. We want to help you:

• Surround yourself with great people

• Nurture the relationships you already have

• Build a social circle that’s as strong and healthy as it can be

For us, Becca is not about replacing human interaction; it’s about fostering and amplifying it.

Even for me personally: I haven’t called my grandma in two weeks because I’ve been so busy. Every night at 11pm I remember, but she’s asleep. And I think: I had 30 free minutes at lunch, why didn’t I use them?

If Becca could nudge me in the morning: ‘Call your grandma at 1pm, I’ve added it to your calendar’ that would genuinely make my life better.

It’s a bit surreal to build something you know you need as much as anyone else.

Short-Term: Shipping Version One

On the shorter time horizon, the championship is much simpler: Ship version one.

We’ve been building in public, talking to people, getting comments and feedback. There is so much demand and anticipation. 

We’ve spent the last six or seven months building. Now we want to see Becca in people’s hands, helping them, even in small ways.

So the immediate ‘win’ is:

• Ship v1

• Watch how people use it

• See it actually bring value to their relationships

That’s what drives me the most right now.

Winning As A Team

We’ve been building Becca very publicly, listening to people’s experiences of loneliness, community, and connection, and then building as a team around that.

The work is intense, but what makes it sustainable is knowing we’re not just chasing metrics; we’re solving a problem that affects basically everyone we know, including ourselves.

The Coaching That Stuck

One piece of advice I got back in high school has stayed with me: Do your maximum on what you can control, and be proud of that, then let go of the outcome.

If you know you genuinely gave 100%, sometimes 120%, it’s much easier not to be paralysed by anxiety about results.

And the funny thing is, in 95-99% of cases, if you’re doing your best consistently, believing in what you’re doing, and staying proud of your effort, the outcomes are positive anyway.

That mindset is how I try to build Pera. 

Rest

Journaling as a Pressure Valve

Recently I got into journaling. I tried for years and it never stuck. Then a few weeks ago, it just clicked.

After work, on the tube or right before sleep, I open the Notes app on my phone and dump everything:

• Thoughts

• Feelings

• Worries

• Happy moments

• Dreams

I don’t overthink structure; it’s just thousands of words sometimes. It helps me unload my mind, put everything somewhere else, and shut off a bit.

Being a founder means holding so much in your head at all times. Journaling is how I put some of that weight down.

Romanticising The Small Things In Life to Refuel

When I’m not journaling, my reset is simple. I come home, cook something, talk to my family, and for an hour or two I try to genuinely turn off.

Weekly, I usually work Monday to Saturday, full days. But Sundays are my deliberate downtime. I go to different coffee shops around London, romanticise life a bit, dream, observe.

Those days are not ‘off’ in the sense of being empty. They refill my creativity. A big part of my work is creating content and thinking about growth strategies for Becca. I can’t do that well if I’m completely depleted.

I really believe 1) you have to work a lot to be a successful founder, but 2) you also have to know when to rest.

Hustle Culture, 9-9-6, and Feeling Your Body

I have a complicated relationship with hustle culture.

On one hand, I agree…you often do need to work like crazy. There are weeks where 100 hours is just what it takes.

But I think it becomes toxic when people treat slogans like 9-9-6 as religion. If you believe you must work those hours no matter what, you start ignoring your own body.

Some days you genuinely can’t. You’re exhausted, or your brain is fried, or something in life happens. Forcing yourself to sit at a laptop just to satisfy some internet mantra is pointless.

The founders I admire most are the ones who feel their body and mind. They know when to push and when to take an hour to go for a run instead.

People glamorise the ‘pizza, no sleep, 24/7 grind’ version of building. It might look cool short term, but in a year or two, it shows up in your business, your health, your happiness, your mental state.

If you can build wise practices from the start, you can maintain momentum for the long run. That’s what I’m optimising for.

The Business Athlete Ethos

What Business Athletes Means To You?

When I hear ‘Business Athletes’, I immediately think about how similar founders and athletes are.

To me, a Business Athlete is someone who:

• Has resilience

• Keeps their head up through setbacks

• Encounters challenges, messes up many times, but never truly gives up

The only reason some founders succeed is because they didn’t quit a week, a month, or five years earlier. That perseverance is the common thread.

What does winning the day mean?

Winning the day means following the principles I believe in.

Staying healthy. Working on something I love. Crossing a few things off my to-do list. Coming home feeling like I gave 120%.

It doesn’t mean everything went ‘well’. It means I can look at myself and honestly say: I did my best with what I could control today.

And then, on top of that, I try to appreciate the little things. Talking to family, eating good food, small nice moments. It’s easy to ignore them when you’re deep in startup mode, but they ground me.

Process vs Outcome?

I’m very much process-oriented.

You can always control your process — how much you put in, how you behave, how you show up.

But you can never fully control the outcome.

Living this way makes things easier mentally. If you chase outcomes without respecting process, you’re just constantly fighting reality.

Mind (Thinking First) or Body (Acting First)?

I see mind and body as deeply connected, but if I had to pick where it starts for me, I’d say mind.

Healthy habits for the body begin as decisions in the mind. If my mind is healthy, it’s easier to choose the workouts, the food, and the routines that keep my body healthy too.

On the action side, I do like to map things out. I’m a planner. But, I also deeply believe in momentum.

The hardest part is almost always starting. Be it post that first TikTok, or launching that first v1. 

You can’t think your way into perfection. You start, and you figure it out along the way.

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