He bought into Russia's mail.ru (through a merger; he's considered a founder, even though mail.ru's roots go back years before), during the first dotcom boom.
He led it and helped it get huge. A lot of people got rich, including Millner, and Russians had great mail service. It went public on the LSE a few years ago, and is worth billions.
So, on top of substantial personal wealth, he became a known successful tech entrepreneur, so it was possible for him to get LPs for his fund.
If you change the countries and company names around, he's basically Marc Andreessen or one of the PayPal mafia.
It's not so much that silicon valley is like the Russian finance economy, it's that tech businesses are pretty similar the world around.
It's a lot more probable than a journalist becoming one of Silicon Valley's top VCs (Mike Moritz).
I have and my experience is that it might have been one of the best free ones available in Russian, but it surely was not great. In fact when I stopped using it a couple of years ago it was terrible: routinely dropped connections to their POP server, a web interface overladen with copious flash ads that slow you machine down to a crawl, and on top of that your email address ending up in spammers' databases without being EVER used on the web (and I even tried registering a relatively random looking address to prove the point). But the worst thing I didn't like about them was that they had the terrible practice of spamming my contacts with invites to their new social networking sites making them look like it was me who actually sent them.
He led it and helped it get huge. A lot of people got rich, including Millner, and Russians had great mail service. It went public on the LSE a few years ago, and is worth billions.
So, on top of substantial personal wealth, he became a known successful tech entrepreneur, so it was possible for him to get LPs for his fund.
If you change the countries and company names around, he's basically Marc Andreessen or one of the PayPal mafia.
It's not so much that silicon valley is like the Russian finance economy, it's that tech businesses are pretty similar the world around.
It's a lot more probable than a journalist becoming one of Silicon Valley's top VCs (Mike Moritz).