Lviv, 1990
I was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1990 and grew up between different languages, landscapes, and traditions.
At breakfast, my father would discuss the news with me in English, while my mother might remind me in Russian to put on another layer before going outside.
My childhood was shaped by two worlds. California gave me openness and possibility; Ukraine gave me memory, resilience, and an enduring understanding of where I came from.
Vienna
My parents' story always sounded like something from a film.
They met in Vienna in the late 1980s at a small charitable art exhibition. My father stopped in front of a painting of the Ukrainian steppe. My mother, volunteering as a guide, explained the story behind the work.
Their conversation moved from art to home, from Europe to California. Years later, those same subjects — culture, identity, movement, and belonging — would become recurring themes in my own life.
Roots
Ukraine was never simply a birthplace written on a document. It existed in stories, food, language, winter evenings, family memories, and the voices of older generations.
I remember returning to Lviv as a teenager and seeing snow falling beneath the streetlights like fragments of glass. Inside my grandmother's house, wooden floors creaked beneath our feet while the fire burned quietly in the corner. Family photographs, embroidered fabrics, bread, conversation, and old songs seemed to collapse decades into a single room.
Those experiences taught me something that financial education never could: inheritance is not exclusively financial. We inherit memory. We inherit courage. We inherit obligations to people we may never meet.
Learning Independence
My education became an important part of separating identity from inheritance. Boarding school taught me independence and, at times, the discomfort of being culturally different.
For a period, I tried to make those differences less visible. Eventually, I realized that identity becomes much more powerful when it is understood rather than hidden.
Debate taught me how to defend an argument. Economics taught me how incentives shape behavior. Living among people with radically different backgrounds taught me how little numbers can explain about a human life.
The Central Question
University expanded those questions. I became increasingly interested in the relationship between financial markets, institutions, sustainability, philanthropy, and long-term capital allocation.
The central question gradually became: can capital produce returns while simultaneously strengthening the world in which those returns exist? That question continues to influence my work today.
Some of my earliest memories are not of luxury or ceremony, but of quietly observing adults discussing decisions whose significance I could not yet understand.