Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner, Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist whose innovative investment techniques and prescient awareness of the commercial potential of the Internet revolutionized venture-capital investment strategies in the 2010s.

Milner grew up in a Jewish family in Moscow. His father, a university professor, wrote or edited some 50 books on American business-management practices. His mother was a physician. As a teenager Milner took night courses in computer programming. After earning a degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University (B.A./B.S., 1985), he pursued a Ph.D. in particle physics. While a graduate student, he found success selling personal computers on the gray (quasi-legal) market and, with his father’s support, abandoned physics in 1990 to undertake M.B.A. studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he did not complete that degree, he went on to work for three years in the financial sector branch of the World Bank.

Upon his return in the mid-1990s to Moscow, Milner sought a place in post-Soviet Russia’s emerging capitalist economy, working first for influential oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Alliance-Menatep brokerage firm. In 1998 Milner and other investors bought a macaroni manufacturer and transformed it into a very successful concern. The next year, Milner cofounded a venture capital firm, NetBridge, and began investing in Russian Internet companies. When the Internet bubble burst in 2000–01, NetBridge merged with Port.ru, which, as Mail.ru, became one of Russia’s most successful Internet companies. Milner was its chief executive officer (2001–03). In 2005 Milner cofounded the holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which acquired control of Mail.ru and between 2005 and 2011 invested some $1 billion in more than two dozen businesses.

During this time Milner founded DST Global and began broadening his investment horizon further. In 2009 he shocked Silicon Valley when he bought a 2 percent stake in Facebook for DST and Mail.ru for $200 million, more than two years before the social network’s initial public offering. Not only was Milner’s buy-in widely considered to be wildly overvalued, but he also abjured the perks usually considered prerequisites for such early-stage investment, most notably a seat on the company’s board. By 2010, however, as online social networks skyrocketed in popularity, the value of Milner’s concerns’ initial investment had swelled to about $1 billion (a total investment of $800 million yielded a value of about $5 billion by 2011). By making similar well-timed early investments in other Internet companies—including group discounter Groupon, gaming company Zynga, music provider Spotify, and microblogging service Twitter—Milner watched his personal fortune grow to an estimated $1.1 billion by 2013.