Code-switching in Central Asia

Nazerke Kalidolda’s journey from Google to start-ups reveals what women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan face—and what actually helps

Kazakhstan’s technology sector presents an uncomfortable fact. The country boasts 52.8 per cent female researchers, according to UNESCO—among the highest proportions globally. At the same time, however, 54 per cent of its citizens believe STEM careers unsuitable for women. Nazerke Kalidolda, whose path from competitive programming prodigy to venture capital investor at Sturgeon Capital charts this territory, has learnt which obstacles matter and which don’t.

Nazerke’s story begins with the unglamorous grind of algorithmic problem-solving. As a teenager in Kazakhstan, she competed in Olympiads for competitive programming. The medals accumulated: Eurasian Olympiads, world semi-finals of the International Collegiate Programming Competition. By her bachelor’s degree, she had published four papers in robotics, including at ICRA, the field’s most prestigious conference. During her second year at university, a Google recruiter’s email arrived.

“I thought it was phishing,” she recalls. Few Kazakhs receive cold recruitment from Silicon Valley titans. She nearly ignored it. She had started applying for the Anita Borg scholarship, uploaded her CV, then abandoned the application halfway through. Google extracted her CV anyway.

The entire process required one interview cycle, no desperate applications to a hundred companies. Years of competitive programming had rendered the technical interviews trivial.

Start-up success

Yet comfort breeds complacency, particularly for those brought up during the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. “We were kids raised when everything was unstable,” she explains. “Whenever we see a good job and stability, we’re very happy to be there.” During Covid-19, she recognised the trap. The vesting schedules, the stock options, the creeping inertia—all conspire to keep talented engineers indefinitely. She quit.

Her subsequent start-up venture taught through failure. L’accent, as it was named, deployed artificial intelligence to recommend clothing based on personal style rather than crude feature-matching. “Technically difficult at that time,” Nazerde remembers. But the real problem was elsewhere. “I had been coding my whole life. I was a software engineer. I had no industry knowledge about e-commerce. I think I was just the wrong person to solve this problem.”

The start-up failed swiftly. Forbes Under 30 recognition came anyway—accolades track trajectory, not outcomes. She pivoted to more familiar territory: Exponential, a career accelerator helping software engineers reach major companies, focused on women. “We decided to be a bootcamp for women, a safe space,” she says. “We also created a marketplace for one-to-one coaching with mentors.” The business succeeded well enough to be acquired—although Nazerde admits letting go was difficult. She then moved to her current employer, Sturgeon Capital, focusing on Central Asian investments.

Internalised inequality

The broader cultural landscape remains inhospitable. Kazakhstan’s tech sector is “very male dominated”, Nazerke says, though she adds with characteristic precision that her own experience may not be representative. “I was raised in a bubble”—the National Physics Math School, three girls among thirty students per class. These outliers never internalised the notion they couldn’t compete. But venture beyond that bubble and the stories accumulate. She crowdsources experiences through Instagram surveys, asking women to describe incidents of discrimination. “The stories which I hear—I’m shocked myself, even though I’m a woman from Kazakhstan.”

The problem transcends external prejudice. “One of the things that is most important is that women themselves think that they are not as good as men,” she observes. This internalised inequality proves more corrosive than explicit bias. “Women apply for jobs only when they tick every box; men apply with three qualifications from five,” she says. Overconfidence may be delusion, but it’s useful delusion in entrepreneurship.

Two pieces of advice emerge from Nazerke’s experience, both counter to conventional wisdom. First, co-founders matter more than commonly understood—not for complementary skills but emotional resilience, “when something is going wrong or if things are getting difficult.” The partnership functions as mutual maintenance, each founder preventing the other’s rational capitulation. Nevertheless, Nazerke adds that, “it’s better to have no co-founder rather with a bad co-founder.”

Second, and more provocatively: Men advocating for women matters just as much as women advocating for themselves, Nazerke believes. This observation, gleaned from practical experience rather than ideology, contradicts the preference for female solidarity. Male allies possess institutional power that self-advocacy cannot replicate. “Women advocating for women is powerful and I’m very happy to see it happening more and more. At the same time, men advocating for women can often have an even stronger effect—and I’d love to see more of that too,” she says.

‘Be more confident’

Regional cooperation offers another advantage. Central Asian founders help each other because success anywhere benefits the entire ecosystem. Recent victories—an 18-year-old dropout entering Y Combinator, a Kazakh founder building a unicorn with 50 million dollars in annual recurring revenue within five months—validate the region’s potential. “We probably won’t be visible on the map unless we are really helping each other,” Nazerke suggests. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia—the borders matter less than collective visibility.

The infrastructure supporting this ecosystem has improved substantially. More than 45,000 women from Kazakhstan and Central Asia have participated in She’s Next initiatives since 2021.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Nazerke Kalidolda’s narrative is its ordinariness. No dramatic discrimination blocked her path; no explicit barriers prevented her success. The obstacles were subtler: cultural expectations, the comfort of stability. Her achievements stem from recognising these forces early and refusing their logic.

 That refusal may be her most transferable lesson for aspiring founders. As she puts it, “women should definitely think highly of themselves and be more confident.”

The rest, if Nazerke’s experience is any guide, will follow.