I have traveled quite enough with my wife and children.
Different countries, different cities, different cultures — and always one ritual: we visit cafés and coffee shops everywhere we go. Every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And always searching for new places.
All the way back in 2017–2018 — long before COVID — this idea of opening a café began growing in me and Marina. We were living in Vancouver, Washington at the time and everything we visited felt… average.
Coffee was okay.
The food was okay.
Croissants were seldom good.
Service was usually close to none.
Interiors uninspiring.
Nothing came close to the level we kept seeing during our travels, and nothing that matched what we thought a café experience *should* be.
The First Attempt
In 2019, my company leased a new office at the Vancouver Waterfront, a brand-new building right on the river. We took the whole third floor and began building it out. Meanwhile, I met a couple of times with the developer of the whole project and pitched the idea of opening a cafe on the first floor of that building.
I remember those conversations as vividly.
He listened, but I assume he didn't believe.
He said he planned to open his own pizzeria there — he never did — and eventually the space became an ice cream shop. The reality was simple:
He didn't believe that something great could be made by an inexperienced person who has no clue how industry works.
It felt safer to pick an existing, proven brand.
The idea didn't die that day, it just went on the shelf. I didn't throw it away, just put it into storage until the right time came.
The Move That Changed Everything
Then came COVID. Lockdowns. Schools closed. Rainy Washington winters.
In 2020, we decided to spend the winter in Cape Coral, SW Florida - where kids could be outside, and life felt less restricted.
Living there, we stumbled upon Naples… and we decided to make the leap very, very quickly. We left behind projects, relatives, friends — everything. But in return, we found a place that finally felt like home from the moment we arrived.
Something unlikely happened nine months after I moved.
We met Daniel Razumov and Alexey Cheusov on 5th Avenue — literally within minutes of each other. Later I found out that Alexey was a specialty coffee expert. At our very first meeting at our home, I casually threw out the idea of opening a café.
Soon afterward, we actively started discussing it: Daniel, Alexey, and also David Namche, whom I have known for years. David worked on two projects of mine back in Vancouver and I invited him to Florida when we moved. And he said yes.
And so, the four of us started talking.
Then planning.
Then shaping a concept.
Once the concept was clear, we began our search for a location.
The Hardest Step: Finding a Place That Would Trust Us
This part looked exactly like my earlier experience on the Vancouver Waterfront.
We kept getting rejected.
Many new buildings simply said no.
Because we didn’t have name.
No experience in the café industry.
No track record.
But developers simply didn't want to risk it.
It took almost a full year of searching before we finally found a location — an old Italian restaurant. Ironically, the space ended up requiring far more work than a new shell space, as we had to gut everything and rebuild from a negative starting point.
And to even get it, we had to write a full business plan to prove to the landlord that we could handle the project.
That's how our first location was born-not because someone believed in us, but because we refused to stop.
What Comes Next In the next post I'll share what it really took to open the first café: real numbers, what went wrong, what went right, and what we learned. This blog is going to be a very honest record of everything we go through building Three Sixteen. The process. The pressure. The decisions. The mistakes. The wins. If this kind of transparency is interesting to you, subscribe and follow along on the journey. We're just getting started.
