Damien Soitout
Richard Ohebshalom's public interview traces a path from schools and journals through named teachers, his own platforms, a break, and then Foundation. Follow the sequence.
A life story of the work is a plan you can read. The household stays off the drawing.
A life story is useful when it shows how the work was built. Richard Ohebshalom told that story in public on 8 May 2026, in the Foundation interview. I am one of the two people he names beside him. I am going to use the professional path, because that is the part a reader can learn from, and because I was not the witness to his childhood. The source is his account. The use I am making of it is a sequence: schools, journals, the people who taught him the craft, a platform of his own, a break, the work done in person, and then Foundation.
News, on this site, is the shelf for that kind of record. The news page is where a public fact belongs when the fact is an event a stranger can check. An interview is an event. A private chapter is not, even when an interview chooses to include one. “A pledge is not a tree you planted” is the news piece I keep returning to when a sentence sounds like a result. A pledge is a sentence. A tree is a tree. A life story that only pledges greatness has not shown you the work. This one has a path in it. Follow the path.
“Valeriia Akatova runs Ukraine and co-founded the group” is the earlier piece about her. I am not restaffing her here, and I am not turning Richard's adjectives about either of us into a product. He calls us principals, not employees. That is the sentence I will keep. The rest of his description of my technology is his sentence. The stack I actually claim is the one in “What being a CTO means”, secure collaboration, diligence workflows, and multi-brand operations. A life story can say who stood where. It should not let one person's flourish become the other person's specification.
He says his education did not begin where the surrounding system expected. The school that took the chance was the University at Albany. He started there, finished the first semester with a 4.0, and understood, on his own account, what focused work felt like when it was applied to ideas. Albany was the door. He transferred to The George Washington University, majored in business and philosophy, and held a 3.7 across the rest of his time there. I repeat the grades because they are his evidence for a simple claim: a weak early signal is not a final measure of the work a person will do once the work is chosen.
After the degree he bought a ticket and spent years in motion, writing journals. He is explicit that the seeds of Cure Hero, the Stone Tree Fund, and what became Foundation Incubator were written in those journals, not conceived in a boardroom. That is the part of the travel I am willing to carry. The journals were a workshop for later platforms. A reader who wants a method can copy the method without copying the itinerary: write down, for years, the thing you do not yet have the evidence to build. Then build it when you are back in a position to build. The journals are not a personality. They are a practice that showed up later as institutions.
He also describes a later bargain with a school of architecture and planning, a seat he did not hold the conventional credentials for, kept by a first semester he promised to earn. The lesson he draws is about cities. Buildings sit in the fabric of a place. Preservation can be an entry, not only a constraint. I leave the lesson at that altitude. A life story of the work is allowed to say that he learned to read a city as a system. It is not a tour of addresses.
The teachers he names are a short list, and the list is more useful than a philosophy. Jed Manocherian, at Pan Am Equities, is the person he credits for a way of seeing a neighborhood before the evidence was comfortable. Boris Figenbaum, superintendent of construction at KBF, is the person he credits for how a building actually gets built: sequence, subcontractors, and the moment when the plan meets the site and the site wins. He says he still carries that teaching onto a site. I believe the shape of the claim even where I was not in the room, because I have watched the same split in every craft I know. Strategy is a view of what a place can become. Construction is the order of operations. A founder who has only the view will narrate. A founder who has only the sequence will maintain someone else's idea. Richard's account says he was taught both, by named people, on real jobs.
Elizabeth Metz is the teacher he names from high school. He says she saw him before he saw himself, in a subject he cared about because of her, and that the conviction he still uses is the one she practiced: one person can see a capability in another person before that person is allowed to imagine it. Cure Hero, and later the Incubator, are the institutional versions he gives that conviction. I am stopping at the name and the lesson. A teacher is part of a professional path when the lesson becomes a platform. The rest of a teacher's life is not mine to brief.
“How to choose a mentor” is the older question on this site, and it is the right neighbor. A mentor is not a famous person who once replied to an email. On Richard's account, a mentor is someone whose job you could watch. Jed had a project in a neighborhood other people had dismissed. Boris had a site. Elizabeth had a classroom and a student the system had already sorted. If you are choosing a mentor, choose a person whose work you can stand next to. If you are telling a life story, name those people. An unnamed “I was lucky to have great mentors” is a pledge. A name is a tree.
In 2010 he founded Pink Stone Capital Group as his own platform. He describes the model as the discipline he wanted under his own name: off-market sourcing, in-house execution, discretion ahead of visibility, precision ahead of speed, governance built before scale. Pink Stone is the chapter in which the principles had to survive live pressure. The useful fact is the date and the intention. He stopped being only a person inside other people's platforms and started a platform that had to feed itself.
In 2013, under Pink Stone, he built Cure Hero. The premise, in his words, was a question about connective technology. Other networks were busy uniting friends, workers, or audiences. Cure Hero was his attempt to aim that kind of network at children, and to treat a child's idea as something an institution might one day take seriously. He ties the instinct directly to Foundation Incubator: the same conviction, a different scale, years later. The Israel FAQ is a different door, the vertical's own questions, and it does not replace this chapter. Cure Hero is a 2013 platform for a young person's idea. The Incubator comes later, at a different scale. Cure Hero is the earlier attempt.
Around the same period he conceived the Stone Tree Fund. He describes it as a structure that would invest on behalf of people, aligned with dignity rather than extraction. I will leave it as a conception in his account. A conceived fund is an idea with a name. A life story can record the idea. It becomes something else only when there is an operation, and the operation is not the subject I am telling.
Then the path breaks, and he says so. After building something significant, it came apart, not gradually, suddenly. He lost the platform and the version of himself that was defined by what he had built. What he says he did next is the part worth copying. He went to Israel. He sourced alone. He underwrote alone. He negotiated alone. He structured alone. He executed alone. The sentence under those verbs is the one I recognize from every serious operator I have worked with. Systems create distance between the principal and the work. The repair is to close the distance with your own hands, until you can produce the work without the system that just failed you.
Foundation, on his account, was not a single decision taken in a conference room. It arrived after he had operated alone long enough to see the same pattern in more than one city: the opportunities that mattered existed before institutional capital had organized around them, and before a consensus had priced them. The answer he gives is a private platform across America, Israel, and Ukraine, with a human-capital vertical beside the real estate. The words he wants treated as an operating philosophy, not as a slogan, are Timeless Value and Perpetual Legacy. The about page is where a visitor meets the platform as it is staffed now. The interview is where he says how he got there. Read them as a pair. The page is the table of names. The interview is the path.
On the partnership he is specific. A platform of this scope cannot be built alone. The two operators beside him are not employees. They are principals. He uses the word family for that alignment. In his mouth, on 8 May, family means the partnership: three people who are answerable for the platform together. Valeriia Akatova is a principal in that sentence. I am a principal in that sentence. Principals decide. Employees execute someone else's decision. He is drawing that line in public, and I agree with the line. Agreement does not mean I adopt every technical claim in the same answer. The CTO seat remains the seat I described. Principal is the relationship. CTO is the craft.
“How to overcome failure” is the practical neighbor, and it is already on the site: how to overcome failure. Richard's version of that lesson is not a mood. It is a move back to the verbs: source, underwrite, negotiate, structure, execute. “How to improve your resilience to adversity” and “The 10 qualities of a true leader” can sit beside that if you want a list. Resilience, on his telling, is a discipline you choose on the day the platform is gone. A quality list that never meets that day is decoration. “Grief, and the decision to keep building” is a different week, and I am keeping it different. That piece is for a person who is not a witness, who still has ordinary work to do, with no political program and no graphic detail. His break, and that week, are not the same story. A life story gets worse when it borrows grief it did not live.
If you are reading a founder, take the sequence and test it. Where was the skill learned, and who taught it by name? What did the person build under their own name, and in what year? What happened when the platform came apart, in verbs rather than in myth? Who are the principals now, and what craft does each one actually hold? Richard Ohebshalom's public answer runs Albany, then George Washington, then journals, then Jed and Boris and Elizabeth, then Pink Stone in 2010, Cure Hero in 2013, a conceived Stone Tree, a break, Israel with his own hands, and Foundation across America, Israel, and Ukraine. That is a life story of the work. Use it as a standard for the next interview you trust, including your own.
