Here is the updated guest profile with the requested links inserted:
Dana Pavlychko is the Founder & CEO of Dana Pavlychko Academy and the Chief Impact and Partnerships Officer at Tokarev Foundation Ukraine. In these dual roles, she helps ambitious professionals navigate career transitions through her educational platform while simultaneously designing innovative finance mechanisms to support health and ed-tech organizations in Ukraine.
Background
She began her career at Osnovy Publishing, Ukraine’s most prestigious independent publishing house, founded by her mother, Solomiya Pavlychko, in 1992.
At just 22 years old, when the business was on the verge of bankruptcy with no prior business experience, Dana made the decision to take it over and transform it. She later expanded the company’s reach by pioneering photography and art books in English, creating the successful Awesome travel guide series that sold over 60,000 copies internationally.
Throughout her 14-year tenure, Dana navigated multiple crises, including the Euro-Maidan revolution, employee financial fraud, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ultimately building Osnovy into an internationally recognized brand with over 400 published titles before selling the business in 2024.
Core Expertise
Dana’s core expertise lies in leading complex transformations in high uncertainty environments, particularly at the intersection of culture, business, and social impact. Her 14 year journey at Osnovy Publishing shows a consistent pattern: taking a distressed legacy organization, modernizing its product and operations, and building a recognizable brand while maintaining mission and cultural relevance. She is comfortable dealing with financial distress, broken internal systems, and shifting external conditions, and is known for combining creative vision with disciplined execution, from redesigning catalogues and launching new formats to implementing processes, policies, and governance that make a business more resilient and, ultimately, investable or saleable.
In her role at Tokarev Foundation, Dana has added a sophisticated impact lens to her toolkit. She works with venture philanthropy principles, applying elements of venture capital thinking to philanthropic capital: clear selection criteria, pilot projects, structured impact measurement, and a focus on whether a grant can lead to systemic change rather than isolated outcomes. Her work on future impact investing vehicles focuses on designing instruments that can support Ukrainian and regional businesses in health tech and ed tech, drawing on her own experience as a founder who once struggled to access capital.
Through Dana Pavlychko Academy she has also become a specialist in guiding founders and executives through personal and professional reinvention. Dana translates her own path through burnout, relocation, sale of a family business, and career pivot into practical frameworks for others, focusing on identity beyond the company, honest self assessment, mindset, and everyday systems that make ambitious change sustainable. She treats the creator economy as a serious strategic channel, showing leaders how to use content and personal branding to build trust, community, and opportunity, rather than chasing short term virality.
Academia
Dana’s academic foundation is rooted in international education. She attended UWC Adriatic in Italy as part of the United World Colleges movement, an experience that immersed her in a global community of students and strengthened her conviction that education and dialogue are core to democratic, open societies. She went on to study public policy, economics, and international relations in Brussels and London, ultimately completing a master’s degree in Public Policy at King’s College London, where she developed a rigorous understanding of how states, institutions, and policies shape societal outcomes.
Later in her career, already a seasoned founder, Dana decided to deepen her business education through the Executive MBA at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Motivated by a desire for new tools, inspiration, and a global peer network, she applied while still running Osnovy, leading a nonprofit, and raising three young children, and then managed all of these responsibilities in parallel during the program. She describes the Oxford EMBA as transformative less for the technical content, which she values, and more for the confidence, ideas, and time to think that came from spending two years in an environment of high performing peers working through similar leadership challenges. That period gave her both the clarity and courage to design and execute the sale of her company and to commit fully to venture philanthropy and her own academy.
Key Perspectives that Dana Shares on the Podcast
On the podcast, Dana stresses that founders should not equate their identity with their business and that a healthy company is one that can eventually function, and even be sold, without the founder at its center. She explains how deliberately building processes, policies, and clean financial structures at Osnovy Publishing allowed her to exit without abandoning her team or her family’s legacy, and why entrepreneurs should think about optionality, including potential exits, from the very beginning rather than only when they feel trapped. For Dana, endings are not failures but strategic transitions that open space for more aligned work and a more sustainable life.
She also argues that Ukraine’s future depends on impact driven businesses as much as on aid, and describes how venture philanthropy at Tokarev Foundation supports organizations in health and education that are rebuilding systems even while the war continues. Dana illustrates how carefully designed pilots, like STEM labs with Save Ed, become both learning hubs and community anchors, and why rigorous impact measurement is essential to scaling what works. In parallel, she encourages leaders everywhere to embrace the creator economy and invest in their own growth, using vehicles such as Dana Pavlychko Academy to develop self awareness, resilience, and an abundance mindset that can withstand crises and major pivots.
A Quote from this Conversation with Dana:
“Somebody has to be the grownup and take responsibility for what has to be done.”
