I make successful digital strategies. CEO | Empowering with WordPress 💻🔑

Hello there 🖐🏻 

As the CEO of IT Monks, I’ve spent the last 15 years helping companies in Manufacturing, Automotive, Travel, and E-Learning turn complex ideas into smooth, high-performing WordPress experiences. 

What drives me? Seeing a business grow because its digital system finally works the way people think.

I’ve led over 950 projects, from global enterprises to ambitious startups — always with the same focus: build something that lasts and make every pixel earn its purpose.

Beyond business, I’m passionate about meaningful collaboration — connecting with creators, technologists, and leaders who share a love for innovation done right.

Let’s connect, share insights, and make the web a simpler, smarter space together. ⚡

Alex Osmichenko

Wine enthusiast 🍷 and former athlete 🥊 with a long-term bias toward entrepreneurship, tech × capital, and real operating work 👨🏻‍💻

I’m most interested in software-heavy businesses in food, healthcare, and energy – places where better systems and sharper value creation mechanics can actually move cash flow. 

My background is in building IT products, high-load systems, and engineering teams 
 • Founded tech company Scalamandra, later acquired by Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR).
 • I’ve been on both sides of the table: as a founder and as a technical partner to capital, sitting close to ICs, board packs, and term sheets.

Today, I run Bearskin Group – a boutique technical partner for private equity funds, family offices, investment bankers, and capital-backed companies in the mid-market (£20M–£400M).

What this looks like in practice:

• Technical due diligence & vendor risk for M&A
• Capital raise support (equity, debt, private credit)
• Infra + org cleanup for post-raise growth & turnarounds – taking companies from distressed to investable
• Strategic tech resourcing: engineers, interim CTOs, embedded squads – the quiet roll-up operating system behind a thesis
• Capital matchmaking through partner investment banks, PE funds, and lenders when a deal should move

If you’re a founder or investor working with software products and want the tech layer to help close the gap to your thesis, not fight it, I can help.

🧠 Follow if you care about the mechanics of value creation, not just buzzwords.
📩 DM if you’re raising, acquiring, or fixing a business and IT is part of the equation.

Inst: www.instagram.com/elijah.podavalkin

https://www.bearskingroup.com/

Elijah Podavalkin

i’d be a bit nervous if i were a junior investment banker or pe analyst in 2026

after sitting in enough deal rooms, you start seeing who actually gets the return offer.

the one who knows every accounting rule and every excel shortcut? useful. replaceable.

the one who stays late, volunteers for everything, never misses a comment? respected. still replaceable.

ai already handles the technical floor. clean models, fast comps, tidy memos. the market no longer pays a premium for mechanical excellence.

return offers quietly go to a different profile.

the analyst who reads the room.
knows why everyone is really there.
builds relationships across teams.
gets pulled into conversations before the meeting starts.

not always the smartest on paper. always the hardest to ignore.

here is what funds, banks and family offices keep telling me:

“we don’t struggle to find people who can model.
we struggle to find people who understand the deal.”

core skills are shifting fast.
from spreadsheet operator to commercial thinker.
from task taker to signal reader.
from “tell me what to do” to “here is what matters.”

ai is compressing the bottom of the skill stack.

social intelligence, judgment and deal instinct are becoming the new scarcity.

the bar is moving sideways.

___
save this post. revisit it when you hire your next analyst
Elijah Podavalkin

Elijah  Podavalkin

3x Founder, 1 Exit | Tech × Capital | Inside the mechanics of private equity value creation

private equity invented a whole new language to avoid saying one simple thing

we say “synergies”.
we say “platform play”.
we say “digital transformation”.
we say “growth at scale”.

the scoreboard still cares about one number: 

ebitda.

most exits brag about at dinners did not come from some magic hyper growth story.

they came from boring work: changing prices, fixing gross margin, stopping cash from leaking in working capital. the stuff nobody wants to post on linkedin 📉

EY’s long-running “how do private equity investors create value?” and follow-up work with NIESR show the same thing in simple words:

most value in buyouts comes from normal revenue growth and better ebitda margins, not from clever multiple games. on average, pe-backed companies increase productivity by around 6.9% when you look at ebitda per employee.

inside boardrooms the energy still goes into big brand stories and “ai-enabled” stickers on every process. the simple question “how fast does cash come in and out?” often sits on one small line at the back.

every serious buyer looks at the same thing in the end: trailing ebitda and how sure they feel that the margin is real, repeatable, and not a one-quarter trick.

a fund lives or dies on the number that pays everyone.

ebitda.
___

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follow for more insights on tech × capital 
Elijah Podavalkin

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in 2025 around 16,500 millionaires left the uk

that was the largest wealth outflow in the world. many of them were founders and investors. a large share relocated to the uae.

when founders move, their best people move too.

this is the part many people miss.

it is not just wealthy individuals changing residency. operational talent moves with them. ctos, product leads, engineers, operators. 

the people who actually build companies.

there is a simple reason the comparison with dubai keeps appearing in conversations.

in the uk, top personal tax rates reach 45%, and recent policy changes have tightened rules for non-dom residents.
in the uae, personal income tax remains 0%.

for founders deciding where to base a holding company or scale a team, the calculation becomes very straightforward.

the shift is already visible in deals.

family offices trying to build uk roll-up platforms often discover that their best targets are moving headquarters or senior teams to dubai or considering the us. 

some companies keep commercial operations in london while relocating leadership and ownership structures elsewhere.

capital usually follows talent.

when the builders move, the ecosystem slowly moves with them.

london still has deep financial markets and extraordinary human capital.

but the gravitational pull is changing.

what is a solution?

i moved to london about a year and a half ago. over time it became clear this was the right place to be if you work at the intersection of tech and capital

a few reasons why this ecosystem makes sense:

(1) london has a very dense capital network. family offices, private equity, operators and advisors often sit within a few streets of each other. deals move faster when conversations happen in the same rooms.

(2) being physically close to investors and founders changes the quality of work. zoom is efficient, but many decisions in private markets still happen around a table.

(3) the work around tech × capital is becoming more hands-on. building platforms, structuring systems and helping companies become investable works much better when you are close to the capital allocators themselves.

london remains one of the few places where technology, capital and global networks intersect in a very concentrated way.

if you’re around mayfair, st james’s or the usual private markets circles, always happy to exchange notes.

the myth of the “ai company”

80% of the “ai” startups in diligence are rubbish
here’s what investors need to look for:

over the last year, i reviewed about 35 startups calling themselves “ai companies.” 

most had no proprietary models, no unique data, and no defensible technology. they were thin wrappers around standard gpt apis with good design.

founders know investors are scanning decks for one word:

Mr. AI 

so they put it on slide one. capital is flowing toward the label.

during tech due diligence, the pattern repeats. 

the deck shows machine learning diagrams. the demo looks impressive and the backend reveals an off-the-shelf model with no ownership of core intelligence and no control over long-term cost structure.

if you remove the api key, there is NO company.

real ai businesses usually show at least one of three things: proprietary data, unique model tuning, or infrastructure that creates switching costs. without that, the valuation rests on borrowed technology.

invest accordingly.

follow for more on the mechanics of tech diligence in private markets Elijah Podavalkin

investment bankers and pe analysts. let me hold your hand when i say this: if you need a perfectly clean data room, perfectly reconciled numbers and perfectly framed founder materials to do serious work…ai can already do most of your job.

i have to push younger analysts on this all the time.

they are often too quick to panic when the material is messy, incomplete or badly organised, as if every deal should arrive ready for investment committee.

target company data missing or the founder story not lining up?

can you rebuild the economics from what the market is telling you?
can you figure out what management is not saying directly?
can you use ai and external research to close the obvious gaps?

there is a baseline responsibility on founders and advisors as well, of course.

but if you only perform when the process is tidy…are you really an analyst in the first place?

worth considering.

Elijah Podavalkin

“2 and 20” is mostly dead. if you’re still pricing a fund like it’s 2006, you’re probably missing how private equity actually gets paid today

for years people talked about private equity fees as if the formula never changed.

2% management fee.
20% carry.

in reality, almost every serious fund today negotiates something different.

management fees often land closer to 1–1.5%.
carry can range anywhere from 10% to 30%.

and the real mechanics rarely stop there.

hurdles change.
catch-ups change.
fee offsets change.
terms shift depending on the fund, the cycle and the lp sitting across the table.

for example, a first-time manager in london might accept 1.25% management fee and 15% carry with a 12% compounded hurdle just to secure a large institutional commitment.

that structure would have looked strange fifteen years ago.

today it’s simply how negotiations work.

private equity economics were never just “2 and 20”.

they are a set of levers.

the smartest allocators understand how to pull them.

worth remembering the next time someone quotes the old formula.

Bearskin Group

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