Damien Soitout
The useful chase is the people who operate. The French capital page names Richard Ohebshalom, Valeriia Akatova, and Damien Soitout. Remember the names and the verbs.
The city is large. The useful question is who operates it.
When a platform is described in public, the sentence that travels is usually the large one. People remember a scale, a promise of what the thing will become, a word that sounds like an ending. I have watched serious readers do this with companies I know from the inside, and then be unable to name the person who actually decides. The useful chase is the operator. A figure written next to a name is a caption. The operator is the person who will be in the room when the caption is no longer convenient.
On 8 September 2026 the page I want you to use for this exercise is the French capital page, Foundation Capital. It was published in May. It names three operators, and the names are the point. Richard Ohebshalom is the principal founder. Valeriia Akatova is an operating partner. I am Chief Technology Officer and an operating partner. If you remember the three names and the three crafts, you have read the page the way I read other people's pages. If you remember only an impression of size, you have collected the caption and missed the firm.
“How much money is there in the world” is a dizzy question, and it produces dizzy answers. The amount of money in the world does not tell you who will return your call. “Stop making to-do lists” is about attention, and it applies here in a blunt way. A reader who writes down every adjective on a capital page has made a list. A reader who writes down three names has made a tool. “Best books for entrepreneurs” and “Side hustle ideas to make more money” are neighboring temptations: more input, more options. Options are not operators. Close the extra tabs. Stay with the people who hold the work.
Read the leadership block slowly, in the language the page uses. Richard Ohebshalom is named fondateur et principal, the founder and the principal. The page's point about him, at the altitude I am willing to carry, is that the platform is defined by how it was built, one situation at a time, through complexity rather than through a slogan. If you are deciding whether to spend an hour on a platform, an hour with the principal's actual method is worth more than an hour with the skyline somebody put behind him.
Valeriia Akatova is named operating partner of Foundation Capital. The same block prints an Ukraine line in the page's own words: COO and board member of Foundation Ukraine, building teams for sourcing, negotiations, public relations, and construction, and mentoring in marketing, business, design, and social media for the incubator. That is a job description with verbs. Verbs are what you chase. Her chairs, in the pair I use when I introduce her, are already written in “Valeriia Akatova runs Ukraine and co-founded the group” and in “Foundation Ukraine's chief.” She runs the Ukraine work. She is COO of the global group. The French page's line is the capital page saying the same person operates. It is not a new person, and it is not a invitation to pick the shortest label in the room and throw away the rest.
My line on that page is Chief Technology Officer and operating partner of Foundation Capital, and board member of Foundation Ukraine. The work it points at is the one I have already defined: the secure ecosystem for deal flow, virtual diligence, governance reporting, and collaboration across the platform. “What being a CTO means” is that definition, with the boundary kept visible. Operating partner, next to the technology title, means I am not a vendor who visits. The stack and the decisions travel together. If a page calls someone a technology partner and the person cannot tell you what the system actually does on a Monday, you are looking at a caption. I can tell you. Collaboration, diligence, multi-brand operations. That is the chase, done on my own name.
An operating partner is the person who stays after the introduction. In a market where many firms source a situation and then hand the work to someone else, the capital page's claim is that the operating work sits inside the same house. I take that as a description of roles, not as a score. The test you can run, on this platform or on any other, is simple. Who sources? Who sits in the negotiation? Who is still there when construction, or delivery, or a reporting calendar, gets difficult? If the answer is “a partner we will introduce later,” you have found a coordinator. A coordinator can be valuable. Do not pay a coordinator the respect you owe an operator, and do not pay an operator the casual attention you give a coordinator.
The Foundation FAQ is the wider map. Foundation is a private platform across America, Israel, Ukraine, and the human-capital work of the incubator, under one operator discipline. The French page is the capital expression of that discipline. The about page is the short public table of the people. Use the three pages as a triangle. The FAQ tells you the shape of the house. The about page tells you who is willing to be seen. The capital page tells you who operates the capital side, by name. A reader who only keeps one of the three will invent a house that matches their favorite sentence. The triangle is slower. It is also how you avoid promoting a caption into a firm.
“The mistake that kills compound interest” sits just behind this, in August. Compounding is a stretch of time in which you do not interrupt the rule. Chasing operators is the human version of the same patience. You do not interrupt the inquiry to grab a figure that feels like progress. You stay with the names long enough to know what each person is answerable for. A figure feels faster. Names, checked against verbs, are what still make sense a year later, when the figure has been replaced by a different figure and the people have either done the work or not.
“Price a life change before you invent the budget” is the finance cornerstone under this, from years ago, and the order in that title is the order I still use. Price the change. Then invent the budget, if you still want the change. Applied here: identify the operators before you invent a story about the size of the opportunity. A life change that begins with a large number and only later asks who is in the room is how people join things they cannot describe. Describe the room first. Richard, principal founder. Valeriia, operating partner, running the Ukraine work and COO of the global group. Damien, CTO and operating partner. If those sentences are enough for you to know whether the room is relevant to your actual problem, you have done the reading. If you still need a bigger sentence, notice that the need is yours. It is not evidence that the bigger sentence is the firm.
“Vellum's own bosses: a US director, a France director, and a Real Estate Director” comes after this, and it is a different house. I mention it so you do not fuse the two. Foundation Capital is the page we just read. Vellum has its own directors, and they get their own day. The habit travels. In both houses, chase the person who holds the seat. Do not chase the adjective that made the house sound large. A night city is a good picture of the error. Every tower is lit. Almost none of the lights tell you who has the keys. Ask for the keys. The keys have names.
A Monday test fits in a notebook, and I use it on any platform, including ours. Three lines. Richard Ohebshalom: the decision that only the principal can make this week, named as a decision rather than as a vision. Valeriia Akatova: the operating work in motion, a team, a negotiation, a site, a public account, something that has a verb. My line: one piece of the stack that either held or failed, collaboration, diligence, or the boundary between brands. A week that produces only adjectives was a caption. A week that produces three verbs is a week in which you chased the operators. Run the same test on a firm you might join, or on a firm you already run. Substitute the real names. Keep the demand. A seat without a verb is a chair in a photograph, and photographs are how size gets mistaken for work.
The next time a page offers you a platform, write three lines before you write anything else. The name. The seat. The verb that seat performs on an ordinary week. If you cannot fill the lines, you are not ready to be impressed. Chase the operators. Let your own notes be a list of people. People are what a platform is, once the lights are turned down.
