When private equity associates prepare to defend their families
Until this week, Petro Kocherhan seems to have been an average high achieving finance graduate with a job in private equity.
Kochernan, who attended the prestigious Warsaw School of Economics, completed a Masters in Management at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. When he graduated, he got a job as an analyst at Horizon Capital, a Venture Capital and private equity fund with $1.1bn in assets under management. Horizon's portfolio companies include an IoT manufacturer and a provider of workflow automation solutions.
In this way, Kochernan is similar to any other 23-year-old working in private equity. But Horizon Capital is based in Kyiv, and in a post on social media today, he explained how his life has pivoted overnight.
"My family is equipped with weapons, in recent days we signed up for the territory defence unit in Lviv, also completed a couple of shooting trainings," he explains in the Instagram post below. In a separate post, he says that as his family are not militarily-trained their intention is not to go to Donbas (the Eastern region at the heart of the crisis), but to "protect our own cities, our houses and families." - "We are 4 brothers and 5 sisters and a dozen of my siblings’ children," he adds.
The photo below shows Kochernan with an assault rifle, posted on Instagram today. One year previously, he was wearing the same jacket skiing in Switzerland.
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