How Pragma Assets was born
"My way"
Hi everyone.
My name is Stanislav. I was born on August 31, 1986, in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine (back then it was the USSR). In a Soviet family. There were four of us: my mom, dad, my sister, and me. My mom was the chief engineer in the railway administration. She is now retired. My dad was the head of a restaurant, and after the collapse of the USSR, he became a private entrepreneur. Since 2007, he is no longer with us. My sister — sadly — is also no longer with us. War took her in 2023.
From early on, I absorbed two very different — but equally powerful — influences. From my mother, a deep respect for science, knowledge and discipline. From my father, the spirit of freedom, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance. I graduated from a high school with a focus on mathematics and computer science — and that was totally my thing. It came naturally. After school, I entered the University of Internal Affairs, majoring in “Security of Computer and Information Systems.” I studied for three years, but by that point, life had already started to teach me lessons no university could.
Between 2007 and 2009, I went through a difficult personal chapter. I won’t go into detail — but it was a time of crisis, reflection, and ultimately transformation. That period changed me deeply. When I came out the other side, I wasn’t the same person. I had clarity. Focus. A sharper sense of who I was — and who I wanted to become.
In December 2009, I officially became a private entrepreneur. That decision wasn’t spontaneous — it was the result of everything I had been through. I knew I didn’t want to build someone else’s company. I didn’t want to climb someone else’s career ladder. I wanted to create something of my own — and take full responsibility for it.
But I also understood something else: to build a real business, I needed to understand how businesses work. Not from books. From the inside. That’s why, in parallel, I made a deliberate choice to work as an employee. I wanted to see every level — from the bottom up. I wanted to understand the rhythm, the pressure, the logic behind every process. Those four years gave me that depth.
I started in a service center: assembling, fixing, configuring computers. I liked it. I felt like I was finally doing something that made sense. After about a year, I realized I had reached a financial ceiling — and I was ready for more. I moved into the sales department in the same company. There, I discovered something fundamental: I loved the game of results. The numbers didn’t lie. I worked hard, sold a lot, and after a year I was promoted to head of department.
That experience opened new doors. I got an offer from another company — an outsourcing contact center — to lead their sales team. I accepted. It was a new level of responsibility. I worked with dozens of different businesses: insurance, education, real estate, logistics. Each had its own rhythm and demands, but my job was always the same — to build teams that could sell. And I was good at it. But again — after about a year — I hit a ceiling. And this time, I knew what to do.
In 2013, I launched my own outsourcing contact center. That was the true beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. It was difficult, of course. I went through everything — the first office lease, the first hires, the first mistakes. Layoffs, breakdowns, restarts, moments of growth and failure. But it was mine. I had made a vow: I would never go back to being employed. Not for a day. I could have partners — maybe. But the business had to be mine or at least partly mine.
From 2013 to 2019, the contact center was my main business. Most of our projects were local, in Ukraine. But one key project came from Israel. I was managing sales of accounting services and insurance products for the Israeli market — and it was a completely different world. Different expectations, different pace, different communication style. That experience taught me a lot about trust, precision, and how to sell across borders.
Then, in 2018, something unexpected happened. We signed a contract with a company that produced and sold dietary supplements. It started as just another project — but it drew me in. I got deeply involved, and in 2019 I launched my own business in that field. It grew. It had real potential. And before the war began in 2022, it was on a solid path.
But then — the invasion came. And in a matter of months, both my businesses collapsed. Clients disappeared. Logistics were broken. Payments froze. I fought hard to rebuild, to adapt, to find new paths. But the reality was harsh, and many doors closed.
That’s when I turned fully to the thing that had always been growing in the background — my passion for investing.
It all started back in 2015, when I finally had a little free capital. I didn’t want it to just sit. I wanted to invest. To build something long-term. For myself. For my family. I started exploring everything — real estate, crypto, bonds, startups. But nothing fascinated me like the stock market. Especially public companies from the U.S. — open, transparent, with history, scale, and logic.
I dove in. I read hundreds of books. Listened to hundreds of hours of speeches and interviews. And one name stood out: Warren Buffett. His philosophy resonated with me like nothing else. Long-term thinking, rationality, principles over hype. Next to him was Jim Simons — a different world entirely, but equally impressive. His results were phenomenal. His logic — fascinating. I didn’t yet know how to follow that path, but something clicked.
As I went deeper, I had a moment of realization. A kind of quiet revolution. I saw that most of what’s called analysis — even fundamental analysis — is still based on opinion. Interpretations. Assumptions. Sometimes smart ones — but rarely scientific. The models felt outdated. Beautiful on the surface, but hollow inside. And I asked myself a simple question: what if we applied actual science?
Not market "science". Real science.
Chemistry. Physics. Systems theory.
These three disciplines don’t just describe the world — they explain it. They uncover cause and effect. Interdependencies. Structures. And so I began my own journey. I started researching, experimenting, exploring how to apply those frameworks to company analysis.
It took years. I spent over 25,000 hours. I built, broke, reworked, and rebuilt my model from scratch — again and again. I invested over $60,000 of my own money in data, services, testing. But honestly — that’s just the surface. While others scaled their businesses, I said no to money, no to comfort, no to shortcuts — because I believed in something bigger. I was building not a product, but a foundation. A new way to understand companies at the atomic level — literally. I learned how to break a business into its fundamental building blocks. How those blocks interact. How invisible forces create visible outcomes.
I started to see companies the way a physicist sees a system. The way a chemist sees a reaction. The way a systems theorist sees feedback loops and flows. Not just numbers on a report — but structures, energies, catalysts, resistances. Living, complex entities.
This became the work of my life.
In 2022, I launched my first investment company. I thought I wanted to create indices and package them into ETFs. But by 2025, I realized — that wasn’t it. That was someone else’s model. Not mine.
That’s how Pragma Assets was born.
I didn’t want to sell my approach anymore. I wanted to manage capital myself. I wanted full accountability — and full clarity.
Warren Buffett proved that the S&P 500 beats 99% of hedge funds.
And I beat the S&P 500.
So if that’s true — why sell the model? Why give away the best?
I kept testing. Dozens of backtests. Then blind tests. Then real-time performance. And every time — the model worked. Three years in a row, it consistently outperformed the market in real time. Not by luck. By science. By structure. By design.
That’s when I made the hardest decision of all.
In 2024, I went all-in. I let go of everything else. Closed the doors to the old businesses. Took my last savings — my final cushion — and invested it into Pragma. All of it. With a family. With a small child in my arms. It was terrifying. But necessary. Because if I didn’t believe enough to go all the way — then what was the point of any of it?
And yet — I still had to survive. I still had to feed my family.
To this day, I continue supporting my family through a combination of two things: a small but growing income from Pragma, and the dietary supplements business I built earlier. I no longer operate it as a full business — I simply work with a list of loyal clients I’ve built over years. I pick up the phone and personally call them when they’re ready to reorder. That’s it. No marketing, no scaling — just relationships.
And in the future, I plan to hand that business over to my wife — so that when she finishes her maternity leave, she can grow it further in Europe, not just in Ukraine.
But my heart, my mind, and my time — they belong to Pragma.
Some people ask: “Do you have a financial degree?”
The truth is — I do now. In 2022, I enrolled in a university program in finance. Not because I needed it — but because people often ask about it. But let’s be honest: my real education didn’t happen in a classroom. It happened in life. In risk. In research. In obsession. In loss. In belief. In every hard “no” that I turned into a deeper “yes.”
Today, I’m not building a fund.
I’m building a paradigm.
A new way of thinking about companies, markets, and value.
Not based on emotion. Not based on trends. Not based on noise.
Based on science - chemistry, physics, and systems theory.
Based on causes, structures, and interconnections.
Pragma is not a shortcut.
It’s not hype.
It’s not a forecast.
It’s a map of how things truly work.
And I’m finally ready to share it with the world.
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Stanislav Donets
Founder, Pragma Assets
