Dmytro Piskaryov’s second set of instructions

On a door at WoodGreen Community Services, Dmytro Piskaryov found four words worth carrying into his next job: “Everyone Belongs Here.” When he announced he was leaving the Toronto nonprofit, he wrote about the people he had worked with, the decisions that limited budgets demanded, and a forthcoming director of operations role. It was a different vocabulary from the agency credentials that had once accompanied his name.

Those credentials belonged to Netpeak, the digital marketing agency where he had been a programmer, technical director, co-founder and CEO. His responsibilities had expanded from software to financial results, strategy, new business directions and acquisitions. Right To Food now lists him as Director of Operations. Between those titles lies a career with several changes of scale, country and purpose.

The useful place to begin is with the work itself. Piskaryov’s trail includes instructions for corporate email, explanations of recommendation algorithms, client reporting systems and a talk about being an introvert. Taken together, they offer a more particular portrait than a succession of executive titles can manage. A curriculum vitae has very little room for a well-organized inbox.

The first job came with a $50 salary

Piskaryov was still a schoolboy when Artem Borodatiuk offered him work moderating a forum and maintaining websites for $50. He was 15. Later, Borodatiuk brought him from his hometown of Samara to Odesa. The young recruit became part of the agency’s early story, long before its network of businesses acquired the size and complexity that would attract profiles of its own.

His first contribution was technical. He began as a PHP developer, and a 2018 account of Netpeak’s development described him as its first employee. He had spent years working remotely before moving to Odesa. The geography of his career already involved considerable distance between the person doing the work and the office associated with it.

By March 2016, he was appearing on the programme for an IT careers webinar as Netpeak’s chief technical officer. His advertised topic concerned the personal qualities of an IT specialist. The accompanying biography traced his progress from junior developer to CTO and said he had worked at Netpeak for eight years. He was being asked to explain a route he had already travelled.

A little comedy in the server room

In June 2012, Piskaryov published a practical guide to setting up corporate email. It compared running a company’s own mail server with using an outside service, then walked through domain verification, mail routing and account creation. Reliability was the stated priority. Glamour was not on the checklist.

There was room for a joke. While recommending a separate administrator account and a strong password, he added a wink about writing that password on paper and sticking it to the monitor. The article moved comfortably between technical particulars and the familiar absurdities of office life. Its subject was ordinary, which was precisely why getting it right mattered.

Another article explained personalized recommendations: how records of clicks can help select the next article or product someone might want. He discussed clustering, collaborative filtering and the relationship between items viewed together, then outlined an online-store example. These were explanations for readers who wanted to understand what the machinery was doing. Before the management titles, there was already a habit of opening the casing and pointing to the moving parts.

Thirteen measures, and a client who can see them

The client account system Piskaryov described for Netpeak brought a different audience into view: customers trying to understand what they were paying for. Its reporting page combined performance indicators with comments from the specialists working on a project. Rather than judge search optimization only by the positions of selected phrases, the agency used measures connected with the client’s business goals.

The account included 13 basic indicators for each project, supplemented by goals configured in Google Analytics. It connected to the agency’s own ERP and CRM systems. Clients could inspect balances, payments and documents; specialists could use notifications and digests to respond to problems. A reminder about an expiring domain registration made it into the design, too. Grand strategy can come unstuck over a very small renewal.

This was a view of agency work in which reporting, delivery and administration belonged together. The client needed visibility, the specialist needed useful signals, and both needed the underlying records to agree. Piskaryov wrote about the connecting pieces in detail, giving the customer’s side of the system as much attention as the internal machinery.

Who has the ball?

As CTO in 2016, Piskaryov described a task-management arrangement built around an unusually plain question: who needed to act next? Netpeak had experimented with Planfix in 2011, replacing tasks sent manually by email. The system later connected through an API to the agency’s own business software.

One workflow separated tasks waiting on the person doing the work from tasks waiting on the person who assigned it. A question moved the ball back to the requester. A separate project gathered high-priority improvements, with limits on work in progress and someone responsible for following their movement. The team called that project Singapore.

It was a practical account of management at the point where things get stuck. The important distinction was whether a task needed effort, an answer or a decision. A queue full of activity could still contain work waiting for its owner to notice.

The introvert takes the microphone

In a Netpeak Pulse appearance, Piskaryov chose a personal subject: the story of an introvert. The talk was presented as an account of confronting fears and changing oneself. Pulse was designed around employees talking about people rather than reciting company results. For an executive whose written work could accommodate formulas and configuration settings, it offered another register.

His public appearances also stayed close to the practical questions of running a business. In January 2022, he and fellow Netpeak co-founder Andriy Chumachenko represented the agency in a Kyivstar business discussion. The subjects included cloud services, information security, business scaling and cost management. The conversation brought their operating decisions into a room with outside experts.

A few months earlier, he had joined leaders from several related businesses for a discussion of the Netpeak ecosystem. Shared administration, instructions and specialist support formed part of that model. These appearances show the range of his public role: explaining the company’s infrastructure, discussing its business choices, and occasionally making himself, rather than the organization, the subject.

When a workflow meets a war

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed the immediate meaning of keeping an agency running. Piskaryov later described advance evacuation planning and arrangements with transport providers. He said the company helped evacuate 130 people from regions experiencing heavy fighting, including moves within Ukraine and to Bulgaria, where it had an office.

The commercial task changed alongside the logistical one. He described rebuilding the business around demand in Europe and North America as Ukrainian marketing activity contracted. Preserving the team was a central concern. Speaking about the agency’s situation, he discussed adjusting working arrangements and rebuilding the processes used to attract international clients.

In August 2022, Piskaryov and Netpeak’s head of partnerships, Vlad Braganets, appeared on the Internet Marketing Podcast to discuss that period. Their subjects included communicating across 300 employees, changes to the agency’s business model, and relationships with clients and partners. The conversation put management at the level of messages reaching people and decisions being understood. An organization chart, however tidy, does not deliver a message by itself.

Leaving the company, keeping a stake

In April 2023, Piskaryov left Netpeak and moved to Canada. He described the decision, made for personal and professional reasons, as the hardest of his life. At the time of a subsequent account of the group, he still held a stake in the business and said an exit was not financially attractive to him.

That distinction matters to his story. Leaving an operating job and selling ownership are separate decisions. A person can stop running the company that has occupied much of his working life while remaining financially connected to it. Piskaryov’s departure had both a clear change of role and a continuing business relationship.

Canada also brought work outside the agency. His public record includes volunteering at the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s Language Assessment and Referral Center in August and September 2023. He helped with client meetings, translation for Ukrainian refugees, callbacks and exam monitoring. Those are specific tasks, with people at the receiving end. They give the move a local, everyday dimension beyond the change of country on a professional profile.

“I’m happy I got to belong here too.”

Dmytro Piskaryov, on leaving WoodGreen

The work that travels

Piskaryov also mentored through Projector Institute, covering business strategy and product management. His listed mentoring period ran from April 2023 to December 2024, and he said the proceeds were donated to support Ukraine’s armed forces. In 2024, his education record included the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. The Canadian chapter contained further learning as well as employment.

After working at WoodGreen, he described the effect of nonprofit constraints on operational choices: less room for loose priorities and more need for resourceful decisions. His farewell thanked colleagues for their commitment to the organization’s purpose. It also invited people working where operations, strategy and social impact meet to stay in touch.

His present role at Right To Food places him in an organization supporting community food centres, partnerships and advocacy across Canada. The business around him has changed substantially from the agency he once led. The practical questions remain recognizable: how resources are organized, how colleagues get the support they need, and how decisions become work someone can actually complete.

The distance from a schoolboy’s website job to operations in Toronto is considerable. Piskaryov’s record gives that distance some texture: a password joke, a client dashboard, a microphone, an evacuation plan, a volunteer callback. They are the smaller entries between the milestones. They are also where much of a working life happens.