The founder
A soldier who became a historian who became a storyteller.
Samuel P.N. Cook graduated from West Point in 2000 with a degree in European history and was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army Cavalry. In Iraq, he served as regimental adjutant to Colonel H.R. McMaster during the battle of Tal Afar.
He came home and taught Russian military history at West Point — the scholar's lens layered onto the soldier's. But the next chapter was about a different weapon entirely: the story.
Before the war: teaching the world to tell its story
In 2014 Cook founded James Cook Media in Poland — a company built on a single idea he'd go on to prove again and again: that marketing is really storytelling, and storytelling is how you change what people believe.
In 2018 he moved to Kyiv and built a tech startup there, earning a place in the Los Angeles Techstars program in 2021. He didn't parachute into Ukraine when the war began — he already lived there, with his wife Kateryna. It was home.
On February 12, 2022, he evacuated his company to western Ukraine. On February 26 — two days after the full-scale invasion began — he founded the Borderlands Foundation. While the battle for Kyiv raged, he started recording: daily podcasts, interviews, the testimony of people the world was about to forget.
"I came to Ukraine to record one war. I found three million people whose stories no one was writing down."
Soldier, scholar, storyteller — that instinct is the whole foundation.
