Ekaterina Avdonina, Co-Founder & CEO of Mirastar

Most people stop asking why somewhere around age seven. We learn that questions slow things down, that knowing the answer is what gets rewarded, that admitting you don't understand something is a weakness. By the time we're professionals, the habit is gone.

Ekaterina Avdonina has spent a lot of time finding the people who never lost it. It's shaped how she hires, how she builds teams, and what she looks for in the people around her. I’m comfortable saying her ability to find and work with these people is a huge part of her success.

She co-founded Mirastar in 2019 with Anthony Butler after scaling Delin Capital's platform from €400 million to over €1.3 billion in under three years. A year after launch, KKR took a majority stake. Since then the business has acquired over 70 properties and roughly €3 billion of assets across six European countries. She runs it as CEO.

Hard skills get you through the door, CV, education, and technical background is a filter to reach the interview stage, but what determines success is cultural fit.

In Mirastar's early days, only 20–30% of interview time went to culture, and it showed. They hired people who looked right on paper but didn't work out, a problem compounded by talent shortages at the peak of the cycle in 2020–2021. Over time, they traced these missteps back to cultural fit. Now they try to understand candidates holistically, how they handle setbacks, what they do outside of work, what excites them.

When I pushed on the most important traits, Ekaterina gave two, resilience and curiosity.

The successful people at Mirastar, she said, have the intellectual curiosity of a five-year-old. They want to know more, and they don't hear an assumption from a previous deal and carry it forward unexamined. That mindset, "we did it this way last time, so we'll do it this way again" doesn't work. The people who thrive are the ones who keep asking why, who aren't satisfied with surface-level answers, who treat every new situation as genuinely new rather than a repetition of something they've seen before.

Resilience is related but distinct. It's not grit in the abstract, but the refusal to accept the first "no" as final. Finding another solution, then another. The job of a real estate investment professional is problem-solving and if everyone approached problems the same way, there'd be no winners and losers. Outperformance comes from seeing things differently, and that requires both the curiosity to ask new questions and the resilience to keep pushing when the first few answers don't work.

Can curiosity be cultivated? Ekaterina thinks so. Some of it comes from childhood and family backgrounds that encourage questions, but reading helps, and so does genuine interest in other people. You can learn a lot through conversations if you're genuinely trying to understand how someone else sees the world. It's not fixed at birth, it's a muscle that can be developed.

In an age where AI is taking over routine tasks, she sees curiosity as more important than ever. The technical skills can be taught on the job, and many of them will eventually be automated anyway. But the personality trait, the drive to keep asking questions, to never be satisfied with "that's just how we do it", that's what separates people who grow from people who plateau.

Often curious people have a focusing problem. They go down rabbit holes and scatter across too many interesting questions at once.

Ekaterina sees focus as trainable, and that's where leadership comes in. Managers, mentors, and peers help channel energy into one thing at a time. The key is sequential mastery rather than simultaneous exploration:

The satisfaction of becoming genuinely expert in something, even something narrow, is what keeps curious people grounded. You have to give them the space to go deep before moving on, rather than letting them skim across the surface of everything.

She doesn't run the team from a corner office. She sits on the floor with everyone else, always has, and talks to people all day. She over-communicates priorities, what matters this week, this month, this quarter, because things get lost in translation in fast-moving environments..

Every year, they write a strategy document covering operational priorities, investment focus, macro risks, and longer-term themes. The whole team collaborates on it, and they've just finished the 2026 version. It touches on everything from individual asset plans to views on where the European economy is heading. The document serves as alignment in written form, making sure everyone is pointing the same direction and understands not just what they're doing, but why.

Ekaterina has said before that understanding risk is what separates the best investors from everyone else. So how do you actually get better at it?

Her answer surprised me a bit, she doesn't think you can teach someone to "see" risk directly. Risk perception is personal, it comes from your experience, everything you've lived through, how your brain is wired. Two people can look at the same deal and see completely different threats. One person's obvious red flag is another person's non-issue, because their backgrounds have trained them to notice different things.

That's why team composition matters so much. Diverse backgrounds surface different risks, and things one person would never think to flag, another spots immediately. At Mirastar, every significant deal goes through a workshop with the investment team, asset management, development, and operations. Everyone puts their concerns on the table, even the concerns that might seem tangential or unlikely and then they work through mitigations together. The goal is to get all the risks laid out before making a decision, not to discover them afterwards.

But what about the individual? How does a young professional develop this skill?

Ekaterina reframed it. The skill isn't perceiving risk, the skill is asking questions.

"The process of understanding risk isn't knowing the answer. It's formulating the right questions. That's the real skill."

She gave me an example. They're currently evaluating something with an occupational situation that could resolve three different ways. The instinct is to list the risks of each scenario, but you can also invert it: if we mitigate this risk, what opportunity does that create? It's curiosity applied to uncertainty, asking questions of yourself, of the deal team, of the model. Not waiting to be told you're finished, but stepping back and asking: what does this actually mean? What am I missing?

The ability to perceive risk comes with experience, but the habit of asking questions is where it starts. If you're not curious enough to ask "what could go wrong here?" then you'll never develop the pattern recognition that lets experienced investors spot risk instinctively.

Ekaterina has been in industrial & logistics since the late 2000s. Back then, the market was to follow the third-party logistics operators. Returns were largely about income, and the sector was considered boring by most standards.

Then e-commerce changed things. The game became backing the right locations and occupiers during a period of accelerated structural growth, and that wave drove outperformance for a decade.

Both windows are now closed.

Industrial is a mature sector and the easy gains are gone. What remains is operational: manager skill, occupier relationships, asset-level execution. The sector increasingly resembles how offices and retail have always worked, what you buy matters, where you buy matters, how you manage matters. Two identical buildings on opposite sides of a street can perform very differently depending on who's running them.

"You need to be a developer, a manager, an operator. You need occupier relationships. You need to be everything. And you need to be well-capitalised, this is an extremely capital-intensive business."

You also need diversification. You don't want to own one building with one tenant on one lease, because the consequences of that tenant leaving are catastrophic. You need a portfolio that can absorb individual setbacks without derailing the whole strategy.

Ekaterina doesn't view current trends,  AI, automation, robotics as straightforward tailwinds the way e-commerce once was. A more productive warehouse might mean fewer warehouses are needed, or different kinds. Humanoid robotics is arriving faster than anyone expected, and it's changing what buildings need to offer. The technological shifts of the last two years are considerations, not certainties, they could be opportunities, but they could also be threats.

What is certain is that buildings are changing. Automation is making them more complex, flexibility matters more than ever, taller structures, reconfigurable layouts, and above all, power requirements are exploding. The physical frame of the building is becoming less important than its ability to support whatever the occupier needs to do inside it.

Two years ago, most logistics investors weren't thinking much about power. The wake-up call was fleet electrification, future-proofing for electric delivery vehicles but the implications go further. Automation needs power, AI needs power, and warehouses are becoming something closer to data centres in their energy demands.

Europe is behind, the US has spent heavily on grid upgrades and private infrastructure investment, while Europe hasn't kept pace. The shortage is coming, and most people in the industry don't fully appreciate it. Ekaterina is genuinely concerned about the lack of infrastructure funding and what that will mean for an industry whose buildings need ever more power.

You can apply to the grid for more allocation, but capacity is limited and queues are long. You can generate on-site through solar, batteries, and wind, but the cost of bringing meaningful power on-site is still prohibitive for most assets. The economics don't yet work for multi-megawatt on-site generation, so most investors are left waiting in line for grid allocation.

"Even in our portfolio, to be properly future-proof over the next ten to fifteen years, we're short on power. It's not a crisis today, but it's a question every investor should be asking: what's my power strategy?"

The thread running through this conversation, from hiring resilience to navigating grid constraints, is that curiosity is a professional utility, not just a personality trait.

Ekaterina’s view on risk is demystifying. We often think of great investors as having an innate instinct for what could go wrong. But her perspective suggests it’s actually a repeatable process: the willingness to admit what you don't know, the safety to discuss mistakes openly, and the habit of asking "what if" regarding everything from a lease agreement to a power connection.

The market is getting harder, and technical skills will only get you so far. The long-term winners will likely be the ones who, like Ekaterina, view every assumption as a starting point for a question rather than a fact.