Sofya is a serial entrepreneur with over a decade of experience building products and communities that empower creation. In 2011, Sofya co-founded Noun Project - a company on a mission to create, share, and celebrate the world’s visual language. Since then it has become one of the most recognized and loved brands used by millions of creatives, educators, and business professionals around the world. It’s strong following can be attributed to the company’s lazer-focus on staying true to its socially-driven vision of connecting people around the world through the medium of visual communication. Sofya has spearheaded initiatives to change outdated stereotypes in our visual language and raise the bar for equitable representation of women, POC, and minorities. She believes that visual language has the power to shape, reinforce, and change our perceptions about the world. Since symbols are some of the best universal tools to overcome language and cultural communication barriers, it’s more important than ever that they communicate in a socially conscious way.
As a leader, Sofya has focused on building a strong company culture from day one. She sees her employees as her number one priority, instead of the traditional approach of putting customers first. Sofya believes that if her employees are happy, healthy, and are given the space and opportunity to do their best work, they will excel at innovations that will keep customers happy and engaged. The company prioritizes efficiency and continuous optimization of its processes over working long hours, with employees regularly working 40 hours per week - an uncommon practice in the tech industry. This has served the company well - after securing funding from top investors like Collaborative Fund, Lowercase, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Belsky (among others), the company quickly turned profitable and has since expanded its business to include two product lines, adding a digital asset manager Lingo in 2016.
Outside of running Noun Project and Lingo, Sofya is highly engaged in social activism. In 2014, she started Kindred Collective - a dinner series that brings together extraordinary women leaders committed to creating positive social change. Hosted in multiple cities, attendees have included women founders of today’s most innovative companies like Tala, Ritual, and Parachute, C-level leaders from Reddit, Interpublic, and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s teams, journalists from NPR and TechCrunch, and top women investors. More recently, Sofya joined the All Raise steering committee for Los Angeles, helping support women founders and funders in tech.
Sofya believes the best way to create long-term societal change is to empower young people with a great education. She has served as a member of the Teach for America LA Associates Board since 2015, leading the board as President from 2017 through 2019. Under her leadership, the board grew to 24 members and doubled annual funds raised.
Sofya immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 11 years old as a refugee fleeing a post Soviet-Union Russia. Growing up in Des Moines, IA, she learned the value of hard work, tenacity, and perseverance while learning a new language and navigating a new culture. Her passion for the arts brought her to pursue her Master’s education in New York, where she worked at Lincoln Center until moving to Los Angeles in 2007. She is still enjoying the LA sunshine with her husband and two rambunctious toddler boys.
Sofya has written about her positive experience of starting a family while running a VC-backed company to shatter misconceptions and encourage other women to enter the industry. Because she believes that language has the power to shape how we perceive the world around, she has also encouraged changing status quo by discontinuing the use of gendered language like “girlboss”. Sofya has shared her experiences and lessons from starting and operating a company through Heroine, Growth Everywhere, Dorm Room Tycoon, and and other speaking engagements.