About

In 2014, I was standing in Crimea, looking at blueprints for a seaport we were about to rebuild.

My partners and I had spent four years putting together a $1bn+ infrastructure deal—new airport, deep-water seaport redevelopment, roads, commercial real estate, and agricultural projects. We'd negotiated with Ukrainian government officials and some of the largest Chinese state-owned entities. We'd secured equity funding from UK investors and debt finance from a Chinese state-owned bank. We just signed a $200m+ term sheet for the first tranche.

Then, in 2014, the revolution in Ukraine happened. Russia annexed Crimea.

Everything we'd built—gone. Not because we made bad decisions. Not because we failed to execute. But because the world shifted in ways we couldn't control.

That experience broke something in me. And then it rebuilt something better.

The Long Road to London

I should back up.

I was born in Ukraine, when it was still part of the USSR. Grew up there, went to university studying economics, and spent seven years as a competitive boxer—won regional tournaments, competed nationally. Growing up in a post-Soviet state and fighting taught me things you can't learn in a classroom: how to stay calm when someone's trying to hurt you, how to prepare for chaos, how to get back up.

In 2004, I came to London with a few hundred dollars and a hospitality job (it was the only way to get a visa). I planned to stay a year. Met my wife. Still here.

Hospitality wasn't for me. Six months in, I moved to London and took a commission-only sales job selling insurance on the streets and in shopping centres. Cold approaches, all day, travelling all across Greater London in British weather. It was brutal. It was also the best training I ever received.

From there, I moved into recruitment, then executive search. Due to my language skills, I covered emerging markets, placing senior people at top investment banks and asset managers in Moscow, Kyiv, London, and New York, from VPs to Global Heads and CEOs.

It was a great time to work in the emerging market, as banks were willing to pay almost anything (including guaranteed bonuses) to get the right people. As a headhunter, I could make $200k+ by placing a mid-level VP in equity sales and placement fees for MD could be $1m+.

I quickly built a reputation as a top headhunter and started thinking about my own business.

But then 2008 happened, and despite being the top producer in the company, I was made redundant. I started on my own anyway at the time when literally no one was recruiting, and still made money in one of the most challenging market environments. But the opportunity I really wanted was bigger.

Building (and Losing) Something Real

In 2011, I partnered with two guys, one of them I used to spar with at the gym, to start an investment advisory firm. They had deep connections in China. I could originate deals in emerging markets (mainly Russia and Ukraine).

What followed was the most intense period of my life. We built relationships with Chinese state-owned enterprises and banks looking to fund construction and infrastructure projects globally. I brought in a partnership with the Crimean government by literally walking to the Prime Minister of Crimea at one of London's investment conferences and introducing myself.

Over four years, we structured a public-private partnership worth over $1bn and a 5-year development plan: new airport construction, seaport redevelopment, roads, and commercial projects (to pay for all the infrastructure).

We put together a deal where Chinese banks would provide debt funding, secured an equity investor to provide capital for the initial stage, brought in a leading UK company (part of a listed PLC) to oversee the delivery of the project and Chinese and Ukrainian contractors to build it.

We weren't just advising. We were operators. We had skin in the game, were heavily invested, and had an equity interest in the project holdco.

And then we lost it all.

The Ukrainian revolution in 2014. The Crimea annexation. The term sheet meant nothing anymore. Years of work, significant personal investments, relationships built across continents—all of it, gone, in a matter of days.  

It took me time to recover from that. Financially, yes. But more than that, psychologically. When you pour everything into building something and external forces destroy it, you learn certain truths about wealth that most advisors never understand because they've never lived it.

What I Know Now

Here's what losing that project taught me:

Concentration builds wealth. Diversification preserves it. I was all-in on one bet. That's how you build something big. But once you've built it, the game changes completely.

Structure matters more than returns. It doesn't matter how much you make if you can't keep it. Jurisdiction, asset protection, tax efficiency—these aren't afterthoughts. They're the foundation.

Tail (in my case, geopolitical) risk is real. Most founders think about market risk, business risk, and execution risk. They rarely think about the tail risk when the rules of the game change entirely - the Black Swan-type of events.

The only thing you truly own is what you know. Assets can be seized. Markets can crash. Governments can change. But the mental models and systems you develop, your experience, and your skills travel with you.

What I'm Building Now

In 2016, I joined an investment and wealth management group in London. Started on one project, joined full-time, and soon became a partner.

Today, we oversee around £2bn in client assets. We grow through acquisition, buying independent wealth management firms and making them better. We built the first-of-its-kind wealthtech platform in the UK that lets financial advisers run their entire practice online (think Shopify for financial advisers). We provide investment management to institutional and private clients.

So I'm not just someone who writes about wealth. We are building wealth infrastructure. We manage money. We work with private clients providing financial advice.

And that's exactly why I started CapitalFounders.io.

Why I Created This

When I talk to friends (many of them founders) or give lectures to students, I notice that many don't actually understand how investing, personal finance, and wealth management really work. They know some bits but don't have the complete picture or the real driving forces happening behind the scenes.

Things that seem obvious to me are entirely new to them. Who is doing what. How tax structures affect investment choices. Why jurisdiction matters before you sell. The second-order effects nobody mentions.

Not because they're not smart. They're brilliant. They built companies from nothing. But nobody taught them the game of wealth management. And most of the content out there is either too basic (save 20% of your income!) or too complex (institutional jargon designed to intimidate).

I wanted to create something different.

Capital Founders is where I share what I've learned, from building and losing a billion-dollar project (and most of my money at that time), and then building again, from years of working with founders and their capital, from operating in wealth management every day. I explain how things actually work, in plain language, without the bullshit.

I don't know everything. I'm still learning. So I share that too, what I'm discovering, what I'm questioning, where I'm uncertain.

This isn't about hot takes or stock tips. It's about building a resource that founders can actually use to make better decisions with their wealth. How to think about it. What is really important, and what is not.

Who This Is Really For

If any of this resonates, Capital Founders is probably for you:

• You've built something from nothing and have $5M–$50M in assets (or you're approaching that through an exit)
• You're operating a profitable business worth $10M+ or within a few years of a meaningful liquidity event
• You're high-agency and self-made, you take responsibility for outcomes rather than blaming circumstances
• You're sceptical of mainstream narratives and want to understand how things really work
• You don't trust advisers who've never built anything themselves
• You don't have time to become a finance expert, but you want to make informed decisions about your wealth

Capital Founders is for people who want to protect and grow their wealth with the same intentionality they used to build their businesses.

It's not for people looking for get-rich-quick schemes, hot stock tips, or magic formulas. And it's definitely not for anyone who wants to hand over control of their financial future to someone else and stop thinking about it.

What You'll Learn

Everything I publish fits into four areas. I call them the Capital Founders OS:

🧭 Life OS — The Inner Game

Mindset, decision-making frameworks, and personal operating systems. Founders succeed because of how they think. Wealth preservation requires the same intentionality. That is where we explore high-agency principles, strategic thinking, and how to design a life around optionality.

🚀 Build Mode — Creating Value

Business building, entrepreneurship through acquisition. You're a builder. You're not done building just because you have wealth. Here, we dig into how to keep creating value through new ventures, acquisitions, or proper structuring of what you already have.

💰 Wealth Architect — Structuring Capital

Tax efficiency, jurisdiction planning, asset protection, estate planning. Structure determines how much of what you build you actually keep. That is the boring stuff that saves you millions.

📈 Investment Office — Deploying Capital

Portfolio construction, asset allocation, private markets, alternative investment, asymmetric returns. That is where most wealth content lives. My angle is different. I write for builders who want to understand the game and play it well, not outsource it entirely.

Let's Go

Building wealth isn't just about having more money. It's about creating freedom, options, and security, no matter what the world throws at you.

I learned that the hard way.

If you want to learn from what I've figured out (and what I'm still figuring out), subscribe below. I'll send you my best thinking every week.

I'm not building a media brand from a distance. I reply to emails. I learn from readers. This is a conversation, not a broadcast.

And if you have questions or want to connect - Get in Touch. I read everything.