This is the best News Items Podcast I have ever done. It’s the clearest analysis about the war in Ukraine (and the future of warfare) that I’ve read or heard.
The guest is Perry Boyle. Perry is the co-founder and CEO of MITS Capital, a Kyiv-based investment bank and venture firm focused on Ukraine’s defense-technology sector. Launched in January 2024, MITS runs what it describes as Ukraine’s first defense-tech accelerator, in partnership with American University Kyiv and with backing from the Ukrainian military, and is raising the roughly $50 million MITS Lightning Fund to invest in early-stage Ukrainian startups working on drones, autonomous systems, and AI for defense.
Before turning to Ukraine, Boyle spent more than 30 years on Wall Street as an investment banker, analyst, and hedge fund executive. He began at Salomon Brothers and Alex. Brown & Sons, was a founding partner of Thomas Weisel Partners, and later spent over a decade at Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital and its successor Point72 Asset Management, where he was a senior partner, ran equities, and headed capital development during the firm’s 2018 reopening to outside investors.
He chairs the board of The BOMA Project, a poverty-graduation nonprofit working in East Africa, has served on the advisory boards of the Center for a New American Security and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and writes for UNITED24 Media. He holds an AB in economics from Stanford, an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School, and an MA from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and is a CFA charterholder. He lives in Ketchum, Idaho.
Great podcasts are entirely the product of a great guest. So many thanks to Perry Boyle for taking the time to speak with me before the nightly attacks on Kyiv commenced.
(The News Items Podcast, Episode #23. Recorded 28 September 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.)
