“Give money to talented people and they will create a miracle”: a long interview with investor Dmytro Karpilovsky
11 December 2025 13:00
INTERVIEW
Dmytro Karpilovsky is one of the most famous investors in Ukraine, an entrepreneur and co-founder of the country’s largest investment community, UkrInvestClub. In 20 years, he has gone from an IT developer to an investor with a portfolio in startups, cryptocurrencies, real estate, and energy. In an interview with "Komersant Ukrainian", he talked about how small investments can turn into large transformational projects, and mistakes can become valuable lessons.
We also talk about how to start investing, which markets are the most promising right now, why a classic apartment for rent is not always the best solution, and how to survive reputational blows.
– How did you get into investing? How did you become an investor and turn it into a life’s work? And do you remember how much and where you invested for the first time? And was this attempt successful?
– It was roughly 2004. I was still very young, working as an IT specialist, developing software.
And at some point I came to the following conclusion: every developer has an executor. He is absolutely precise, absolutely reliable, absolutely predictable, but at the same time absolutely stupid. He needs to chew over every instruction.
I didn’t like this concept. I wanted to be able to just say something and have it move on by itself.
So I tried to manage people. And I realized that some of them don’t need management: you can give them money, and they know what to do with that money. That was the moment when I came to the conclusion that I could be an investor.
My first investments were literally a few thousand dollars. I started giving money, giving competence, not giving clear instructions, but just looking for talented people. This is how my investments in the IT sector began.
I saw that it could happen like this: you gave 2-3 thousand dollars, the person ran away, and in a couple of months something worth 20 thousand dollars was created. And this understanding that you can give advice, competence, mentoring, a little money, and get results instead of working with your hands, really fascinated me.
A few years later, I completely gave up active work. I became a serial entrepreneur, a serial investor. And then I tried everything: high-risk investments, conservative investments, crypto (for 14 years), startups, my own businesses, real estate.
My approach in life is that if I do something, I throw myself into it. I don’t know how to do a little bit.
– Can you name your biggest success and biggest/most expensive mistake as an investor?
– The biggest successes, if measured in terms of money, as well as the biggest failures, were in the field of cryptocurrencies. There were crazy ups and downs: I invested $1 and got $100, and crazy downs and losses in the millions.
But if we measure by experience, my biggest failure was an investment in the Optika 1st chain of optical stores. We invested a little – in just two stores. But we showed a positive experience, many people were fascinated, and the chain grew to 280 stores.
And then it turned out that the chain could not grow so fast. The owner falsified financial statements, took money from investors, and did not open new stores.
It was a big emotional failure for me. Because many people invested after seeing my example. And we all lost money. It was a blow to the entire investment ecosystem of the country. The reputational damage was huge.
– You mentioned that you started your career as an investor 20 years ago. Today, you are the founder of the country’s largest investment community, UkrInvestClub, and you know everything or almost everything about investments. Therefore, it is obvious that you are often asked questions: do you advise whether to invest here? Or where to invest money? In such cases, how often do you answer: yes, invest here, there are 100% guarantees?
– Never. Or very, very rarely. To ethically answer the question “where to invest?”, you need to talk to a person for at least two hours. To understand their financial situation, to draw their risk profile. So, in general, never.
The only exception: if a person says they are afraid of losing money and want to invest in something in Ukraine and in the hryvnia as safely as possible, then the answer is obvious – government bonds.
The only advice I always give is to invest time before investing money. To invest 1% of your wealth, you need to spend at least 15-20 hours studying the topic.
– In one of your videos posted on YouTube, you ranked business areas by investment prospects. For example, you gave the third place to tourist development in western Ukraine, and the first place to the energy sector. Could you repeat your top 5? Has it changed? And what is the basis for such estimates?
– I look for niches where there is an imbalance of supply and demand, or some other imbalance, in favor of the investor. That is, I don’t really like to just go like everyone else, into something that has been understood for a long time, where everyone plays by the same rules. Where the fact that I’m willing to spend more time and study the topic more deeply won’t give me any advantage over the market.
That’s why I try to identify industries where things are developing stronger, better, faster. I hope that by understanding this, I will be able to ride the wave and ride it.
So, if you take, for example, the recreational real estate niche, there are obvious external factors that are boosting this market to the maximum. One factor is that people with good incomes used to travel little in Ukraine. And now, due to logistics, restrictions, and various other factors, they travel more often.
Accordingly, there is an imbalance: there is a lot of demand with a high check for domestic tourism, but there is still very little supply. I see this imbalance, and I realize that now it is time to go and invest in good hotel complexes.
And we were probably the first in Ukraine to identify Apartel for ourselves. And today, Apartel is one of the three best resorts in Ukraine. It is the only hotel that received an official five-star classification during the war. So today it is an obvious mega-success.
But three and a half years ago, no one understood what would happen next. The war started, what investments?
With this approach, I made 10-15 investments in different regions. Specifically, in resort regions. The focus was on the fact that there would be an object that would be in good, interesting demand, where investors could make money. And it worked well.
In 2024, I had six exits, which means that I left the properties I bought six times, which is quite a lot for real estate. And my average yield was 35-37% per annum in dollars. This is a very high yield for real estate.
Today, one of my largest private investments is in recreational real estate. Kyiv region, for example, is where my largest historical real estate investment is, in the Mandra PETRICOR complex.
It’s a similar story with the energy sector. Our shunting generation is destroyed, we have imbalances in the system, and this is in favor of the investor. And among all the models, I have seen that this imbalance is particularly pronounced in energy storage facilities today. That is, you can earn a certain excess return. And this advantage will not disappear in the coming years until the system is fully restored.
We understand that we have several years to skim the cream.
– For me personally, and for many Ukrainians, I think investing in energy sounds like something too complicated. They say that everything is clear with a flat or an apartment: you buy it, rent it out, get the money, and eventually sell it. How does this work in the energy market? How can you make money by investing in energy?
– An energy storage facility is a huge power bank, 40 tons in weight. In Ukraine, there are hours when electricity is cheaper and hours when it is more expensive.
During the hours of cheap electricity, we charge ourselves, and during the hours of expensive electricity, we sell it to the grid.
In addition, we provide ancillary services for Ukrenergo, such as balancing the grid.
There are 3-4 different revenue streams. For an investor, this is somewhat similar to the hotel business: you find specialists, they build and manage, you invest and get income
– You are not a fan of the idea of investing in apartments. Are we talking about specific regions? Or in general, do you advise against it? And why, because having such a passive income is a dream for many Ukrainians?
– It’s not that I advise against investing. I am drawing investors’ attention to the fact that this real estate format has many drawbacks and that there are better offers on the market. Low yields, constant calls from tenants, repairs, check-ins and check-outs, search for new tenants, problems with neighbors. This is not passive income.
But there is another format – income-producing real estate designed for investors. These are residential complexes with standard repairs, standard furniture, and materials that do not wear out.
There are meters in the corridors, separate service rooms, and a management company. The tenant does not even have your phone number. Such properties yield higher returns and less headaches.
– Can you share your vision of investing in foreign real estate? An apartment in Spain, a villa in Bali? Are the risks/returns higher/lower here compared to Ukraine?
– The risks are neither higher nor lower. They are different.
In Ukraine, we have a lot of risks associated with war, with uncertainty, with economic unpredictability, with political instability. We have a bad judicial system, we have “black” notaries, we have some special effects of our own. But they are our own, and they are understandable to us.
And abroad, this set of special effects is different. For example, in Ukraine, it is hard to imagine that while you are on vacation, someone will break into your apartment, leave your suitcase and say that it is now his apartment, not yours. In Spain, this is possible.
In the West, the economy and laws are more stable, but we know nothing about them. In addition, abroad, it is most often suggested to invest in construction at the “pit” stage. And “pits” are risky everywhere.
The main idea of investing abroad is to diversify risks. So that any event in your personal life in Ukraine does not affect your entire investment portfolio.
– Can you draw/describe a portrait of a Ukrainian investor: age, gender, and what regions they come from?
– There is no typical one. But there are groups.
The first is IT people: 22-42 years old, mostly men, with a stable surplus in wages.
The second is entrepreneurs: medium and large businesses. They are more familiar with physical assets.
There are officials, but they are very few.
– Are there people among your clients, with whom your club or you personally work, who are representatives of our political elite or the apparatus of officials? What percentage of all investors in Ukraine do you think this is?
– We don’t work much with such friends, but they are usually not in a hurry to talk about their background, so it’s hard to say. I have witnessed several such meetings where it was obvious.
I will say that in our format it is a negligible percentage, because we still focus on this more mass-market segment. Of course, there are a lot of officials, bureaucrats, and representatives of the state apparatus. But they usually choose more private clubs, where there are not hundreds of thousands of people.
If we are talking about ordinary officials, then, in my experience, there are less than five percent of them. Most of them are classic private sector employees, middle management. There are a lot of entrepreneurs, IT people as well. But there are few civil servants.
– It is quite logical that, in addition to the question “where should I invest my money,” I assume that you often have to refute myths about the investment market. From your own experience, what are the main fears that hold back novice investors? And are these fears justified?
– I think that many Ukrainians have the idea that investing is extremely difficult. And I’d rather not deal with this right now. They say I have enough to worry about.
We refute such opinions quite simply: we show strategies that do not require any understanding at all. There are a lot of good, effective strategies that require a person to spend half an hour a year, and do not require any knowledge, do not require any deep immersion, or study of the topic.
The second myth, I think, is that all investments are extremely risky, and everyone loses money. But again, this myth is disproven in the same way. It’s when you show the wrong strategies that are widely reported in the press. For example, buy bitcoin and hope that everything will be fine. And when you can show something rather conservative.
The same government bonds. We don’t like bank deposits, but there are a lot of good offers, reliable offers, in the securities sector, even Ukrainian ones. There are many good stories in the Western markets. All we need here is education, there is no other way but to educate. People’s myths, fears and illusions usually come from the fact that they have not taken the time and have no knowledge of how all these markets work.
And when you show people some super basic things, it turns out that the devil is not so bad, and that everything is generally okay. That there are low-risk instruments, low-involvement instruments, instruments that are not hype, but reliable.
I don’t see any other way yet. As long as we don’t have financial and investment literacy lessons at school, and people at a fairly mature age still have a lot of fantasies about investments, what we are doing is probably the only way: telling a lot, giving a lot of examples. We have to make this market better, more transparent, more understandable for everyone. This is probably the only way.
– Recently, the media was shocked by the news of the suicide of crypto investor Konstantin Ganich. Allegedly because of a financial collapse and, as a result, huge debts. That is, we are talking about a model where a person managed other people’s money and, as a specialist, should have been able to multiply it to some extent. Do I understand correctly that this is also a certain model of earning money in the investment market? And is it a model or a trap?
– I can’t say anything about Kostya specifically. We weren’t close friends.
I will say this in general. The model of managing other people’s money usually does not involve responsibility for the financial result. Most professionals immediately “cut off” such responsibility at the stage of agreement.
That is, if we agreed that I would manage your portfolio and the stocks fell, it was your problem, not mine.
I used to work in similar models myself. When the crypto market hit rock bottom in early 2018, I probably experienced similar emotions. Many people lost money then.
If you are a source of information for a large number of people to make financial decisions, this is definitely a very big moral responsibility. And it is definitely a very big emotional swing.
We decided for ourselves that the big end goal was worth the swing. I don’t know… Maybe I have a kind of Prometheus complex. But if the end goal justifies it, I think it’s okay.
If you don’t have that end goal and you’re doing it for the sake of money… I wouldn’t do it for the sake of money alone.
