Dmytro Horilyk is CEO and co-founder of DrugCard, an AI-powered pharmacovigilance platform he launched in 2019 with his brother Artem and friend Myroslav Demchun, after Artem identified inefficiencies in manual literature screening at a leading Ukrainian pharma manufacturer. Dmytro has since grown DrugCard into a platform serving 138 countries, recently completing its first acquisition in Latvia.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
I don’t have a structured routine, no morning ritual, no meditation-then-gym thing some founders do. The one habit I have is skipping breakfast, and that’s not tied to productivity at all.
The day usually starts with checking messengers and the calendar, seeing what’s urgent, what’s moved overnight, and what meetings are already locked in. From there it’s reactive by design: I don’t block out a fixed structure, I just work through what’s in front of me as it comes.
Time management is honestly still the challenge I haven’t solved. Balancing founder life with family (wife, son, parents, friends) is hard, and there’s no clean middle ground; you always end up leaning one way.
In the early years, “productive” meant full immersion, long days, nights, weekends, almost everything else pushed aside. I don’t think you can get a company to a sustainable stage without going through that.
So, no polished routine, no hack for balance. Just messengers, calendar, and a lot of hours.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I bring ideas to life mostly through direct conversations with people, not through planning them out on paper first. When something is unclear, I ask about it directly, even if it makes me look inexperienced. That’s literally how the first product features got shaped: I didn’t know pharmacovigilance well, so I asked clients how their processes actually worked, and their answers turned a rough idea into something buildable.
Once an idea feels worth pursuing, the next step is committing to it fully for a real stretch of time. Nothing became a real business here without a period of intense, hands on work: long days, testing it directly with real clients, adjusting quickly when something didn’t land. Ideas don’t get life from perfect planning. They get life from fast iteration with real people and enough sustained effort to actually see them through.
What’s one trend that excites you?
AI becoming a genuine daily tool in healthcare and pharmacovigilance. It’s already happening whether companies officially adopt it or not: doctors, pharmacists, and PV specialists are using tools like ChatGPT or Claude in their daily work, often without telling anyone. Regulators haven’t caught up yet, and honestly I think that gap is a good thing right now. Loose regulation leaves room for real innovation instead of choking it early. What excites me is building in that window, using AI to make monitoring and safety work genuinely better, not just faster on paper.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Honestly, I don’t think I have one. I never built any real habits after starting the business, whatever I had before just stayed the same. I don’t do a morning routine, no meditation, no gym before work. I skip breakfast, but that’s not a productivity habit, it’s just something that stuck from before and has nothing to do with the business.
If I’m honest, the closest thing to a “habit” isn’t really a habit at all. It’s more a willingness to ask direct questions even when I don’t know something, and to push through periods of full immersion when a problem needs it. That’s not scheduled or consistent enough to call a habit, but it’s the pattern that actually moved things forward for me.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Learn to sell earlier. When we started, none of us knew anything about sales, and it took nearly losing the local market to force us to learn. I’d tell myself to build that skill from day one instead of waiting until there’s no other option.
I’d also tell myself to study culture before pushing hard into new markets. We lost good leads early on simply because we didn’t understand that direct, fast follow ups that work in Ukraine or the US come across as pushy in places like the Nordics. Understanding people before pitching them would have saved a lot of wasted effort.
And on hiring: don’t assume a senior expert will fix everything just by joining. I’d tell myself to hire people I can actually grow with from junior or middle level, rather than betting on instant expertise that often isn’t real. That lesson cost us time we didn’t need to lose.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
I don’t think you can build a lasting company without going through a period, usually around three years, of near total immersion in the work. Long days, often nights and weekends, almost everything else pushed aside. I know that’s not a popular take, especially with a lot of people in the younger generation who value work life balance from day one, and I understand why. But every founder I know who actually got their business to a stable, long term stage went through something like that period. Balance can come later, but I think that early stretch of full commitment is what actually determines whether a company survives. This is just my personal view though, plenty of people see it differently, and I respect that.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Repeatedly asking direct questions, even when it makes me look like I don’t know something. That’s literally how the first client relationships got built: I wasn’t a pharmacovigilance expert, so I asked people straight up how their processes actually worked. It felt exposing at first, like admitting a lack of expertise, but that’s exactly how we learned how the industry really operates, and clients felt like experts sharing their knowledge. Real trust came out of that.
I’d recommend the same thing to anyone: don’t be afraid to look “stupid” by asking what you don’t understand. It’s the fastest way to learn the truth about a market, a culture, or the people you’re working with, and it usually works in your favor far more than pretending you already know everything.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Honestly, I don’t have a polished technique for this. Time management and balancing everything is still a challenge I haven’t fully solved, so when things feel overwhelming, I usually just push through by focusing on whatever is most urgent in that moment, checking messengers and calendar to see what actually needs attention right now versus what can wait. It’s more reactive than a structured system.
When it’s more than a bad day, when it’s a real setback in the business, the approach has been to make a decision quickly rather than sit with the discomfort. Whether it’s a hiring mistake or a hard call about a person not working out, moving fast on the decision tends to clear the overwhelm faster than waiting for a perfect moment or a calmer state of mind.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Learning to sell, out of necessity rather than choice. When we started, none of us, me, Myroslav, or Artem, knew anything about sales. We believed in the product, but the local market simply wasn’t buying, and eventually I realized the core issue wasn’t the product, it was that we didn’t know how to sell it. So I made the decision to actually learn sales myself, and that shift is what pushed us to go after international markets instead of staying stuck locally.
The reason it worked isn’t magic, it’s that once I treated sales as a skill to be learned rather than something you’re born with, everything else followed: understanding different markets, adapting to different cultures, building the first real client relationships through direct conversations. Without deciding to learn that one skill, there wouldn’t have been a path to expanding beyond Ukraine at all.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
We pushed hard into the Nordic market, specifically Denmark. We used a very direct, aggressive follow up style: if a client didn’t respond, we’d reach back out again and again. It actually generated a few good leads, we even got to the proposal stage with some of them, and then almost everyone either went silent or declined.
It took a while to realize we hadn’t failed on substance, we’d failed on culture. That kind of pressure works in fast paced markets like Ukraine or the US, but in Scandinavian culture it reads as pushy and uncomfortable, not persistent. We likely lost real leads and contracts simply because we didn’t understand that before pitching.
The lesson was straightforward but important: any business is fundamentally about working with people, and working with people means understanding their culture first, their habits, their holidays, what’s appropriate to bring up and what isn’t. Since then, researching a market’s culture has become a non negotiable step before we push into it, not an afterthought.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Build a narrow, vertical AI tool for a specific regulated profession, not another general assistant. Right now, everyone is defaulting to broad tools like ChatGPT or Claude for daily work, including in pharma and healthcare, but general tools don’t hold a real moat long term. The opportunity is in taking one specific, high friction professional workflow, something like literature monitoring in pharmacovigilance, and building a tool around it that’s trained and structured specifically for that data and that regulatory context.
The moat isn’t the AI itself, everyone has access to similar models now, it’s the volume of relevant, specific data you accumulate for that one use case, and how deeply you understand the professionals actually doing that work. Pick a profession, not an industry broadly, and go deep rather than wide. That’s a business idea I’d genuinely hand over for free, because there’s room for many of these, not just one winner.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
The tool I actually rely on daily is Claude, and not just the chat itself, the connectors, code execution, all of it. My team uses it the same way: generating and structuring meeting transcripts, drafting content, running research, connecting it to the tools we already work in rather than treating it as a separate thing you open occasionally. It’s become part of how the whole team operates, not just something I personally use.
What makes it actually productive isn’t the novelty, it’s that it’s wired into real workflows: turning raw conversations into usable documents, handling repetitive drafting work, pulling structure out of messy input. That’s the part that saves real hours, not the fact that it can chat.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
Probably not a big purchase at all, more like a small local experience during one of the many business trips. I’ve been to around thirty countries at this point, and it’s usually not the meetings that teach you the most, it’s spending a little money on something completely ordinary and local, a meal, a small local event, just sitting somewhere people actually talk. That’s where you pick up on how a culture really works, what’s appropriate, what isn’t, things you’d never get from a pitch deck or a sales call. Given how much of our growth depends on reading different markets correctly, that kind of cheap, unplanned local moment has probably paid for itself many times over.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman, is probably the one I’ve gotten the most out of. I’ve read it several times, and it’s genuinely practical, it breaks down how a company’s structure and growth priorities actually shift at different stages, which is exactly the kind of thing you don’t learn as an engineer turned CEO. Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands is the other one I’d mention, it’s about cultural differences across countries, and given how much of our growth depends on understanding different markets, that book probably saved us from repeating some of our early cultural mistakes elsewhere.
I don’t really have a podcast that’s shaped me the same way, books have been the bigger lever for me.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
Honestly, I don’t watch much these days, most evenings get absorbed by work or family time. If I had to name something, it’d probably be a documentary style series about business or growth rather than fiction, something I half watch while thinking about something else entirely.
Key learnings:
- Learn to sell before you have to. We nearly lost the business because we knew the product was right but had no idea how to sell it, don’t wait until there’s no other option to build that skill.
- Culture isn’t optional in international growth. A follow up style that works in Ukraine or the US can read as pushy in Scandinavia, understand people before you pitch them.
- Hire people you can actually grow with, not people who claim expertise. Senior hires who oversell themselves or expect big-company conditions rarely work out in a young company, junior and middle level people who grow alongside you often do.
- Move fast on hard decisions. Whether it’s firing someone or cutting a market that isn’t working, indecision costs more than the discomfort of acting quickly.
- Full immersion for a real stretch of time, roughly three years in our case, is what actually gets a company to a sustainable stage. Balance can come later, but that period of commitment is hard to skip.