From Brooklyn to private equity

My parents came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1993. When we first moved to Brooklyn, four households shared one two-bedroom apartment: my grandparents, my two uncles and their families, and my parents and me. My dad worked day and night shifts and still found time to help me with my homework. My mom became a self-employed hairdresser.

I learned to sell before I learned finance. At John Jay College I worked mornings at an AT&T store, then went door to door for Verizon, where I earned my first six figures. A conversation with a retiring lawyer talked me out of law school, and a professor I respected suggested I apply to the FBI. I trained at Quantico and served as a special agent for nearly three years.

When I left the Bureau, I started over. I earned a master’s in accounting at Brooklyn College, passed the real estate license exam, and went to every investor event I could find. At the beginning, I lost every deal to seasoned investors. My first deal, a nine-property portfolio in Newark, closed in 2015. A 140-unit apartment building in Akron, Ohio, became the start of Krainert Group.

In 2019 I founded KVLR Capital to invest in healthcare, with a board of executives who had run the kinds of companies we wanted to own. I wrote The Art of Private Equity to share the lessons business schools don’t teach: how investors actually think, buy, build, and sell.