🇺🇦 Founder of Beverly English Leadership & Communication School, founder of Beverly Media, and host of the Be Yourself Podcast — stories of reinvention, comebacks, and choosing to live your own life instead of someone else's.
Sergey Leshchenko's story doesn't start with a plan — it starts with a challenge. Not the most popular kid in school, never the head of the class, he says his drive to become an entrepreneur was less ambition than insecurity: a need to prove to himself that he could build something out of nothing. What changed everything was an unlikely spark — falling in love with American basketball commentary, and through it, with the English language itself. He started obsessively learning English, taping vocabulary cards to his bedroom walls, until that obsession turned into a career.
That career took him from the night shifts of an academic-assistance call center in Kyiv to co-founding his own company in the same space — one that eventually attracted investment from Genesis, one of Eastern Europe's largest venture groups. For a while, it looked like the dream was working. Then it wasn't. A growing rift with his co-founder over control of the company, paired with an investor relationship that cared only about growth numbers, ended with Sergey being asked to leave the very business he helped build.
"Investors are not your friends, by no stretch of the imagination. They are investors — you adjust the tool for them, like one of the best bets that they made."
Sergey Leshchenko, on what he learned from losing his companyWhat followed was, in his own words, the most miserable period of his life — the loss of a community, an identity, and a sense of power, followed by a long search to rebuild from zero. Four years later, Sergey is on the other side of it: founder of Beverly English Leadership & Communication School, helping Ukrainian professionals communicate confidently with international partners; founder of Beverly Media, a video production agency built exclusively for podcasters; and host of the Be Yourself Podcast — a show built around the very thing that got him through it all: the radical idea that you have to find yourself before you can ever be yourself.
When he's not interviewing founders, veterans and people mid-reinvention, you'll find him behind a microphone reading poetry, behind a DJ booth, or simply asking the question that drives everything he does now: what would you do without money, without sleep — what energizes you so much that you forget to eat?
Want Sergey to host an event in English, give a talk, interview your guests, or help your podcast actually look like a show? Reach out — every link below goes straight to him.
If you play with matches, you get burned — but having remorse about something you didn't try is just as horrible as being sorry about something you tried and it didn't work. We have to raise the bar.
The talent will ruin you without you putting in work. The more talented you are, the more responsibility you have to channel it in the right direction.
One act of courage can change your life. You've been building up to this one moment — now you just have to rip the band-aid.