Yuri Milner
Encyclopedia
Yuri Borisovich Milner (Russian: Юрий Борисович Мильнер) (born 11 November 1961, Moscow, USSR) is a Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He founded investment firms Digital Sky Technologies
(DST), now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global. Through Mail.ru Group and DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook
, Zynga
, Twitter
, Spotify
, ZocDoc
, 360Buy.com and Groupon
.
Fortune
magazine's list of the world's fifty most prominent business people in 2010 placed Milner at 46th place, making him the only Russian on the list. In 2010 Milner was recognized by Russian business magazine Vedomosti
as Businessman of the Year.
Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University
, graduating in 1985. He went on to work at one of the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences
, in the same department as the future Nobel Prize
winner Vitaly Ginzburg
. As a doctoral candidate in particle physics, Milner befriended Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov
. Sakharov's forward thinking would inevitably influence Milner's venture investment strategy.
In 1990 Milner became the first non-emigre from the Soviet Union to go to the United States to receive an MBA degree at the Wharton School of Business, . Press quoted him as saying that he made this decision after "being disappointed in myself as a physicist."
in Washington D.C. as a Russian banking specialist focused on the development of private sector banking. He has described his time at the World Bank as his "lost years," due to watching from afar the privatization of government holdings during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin
. In the spring of 1995, Milner was appointed CEO of Alliance-Menatep, an investment brokerage company belonging to the now jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky
. In December 1996 Milner worked as Vice President and Head of Investment Management of Menatep Bank. In February 1997, Milner became the deputy chairman and the head of the investment division of Menatep Bank. At the time, the market makers described him as "a well-known professional, who will bring the bank valuable experience in international financial institutions and transactions in the Russian investment market."
From 1997-2000 Milner was Director General of the investment fund New Trinity Investments.
In 1998, Milner once again took over as general director of JSC Alliance Menatep. The same year he became the CEO of the investment fund New Trinity Investments (according to other reports, the post he won in 1997).
During this period, after reading a review by Morgan Stanley
analyst Mary Meeker
on the prospects for online businesses, Milner decided to create an internet company. He sought funding from his former Menatep colleague Gregory Finger, who at the time led the Russian branch of the US investment fund New Century Holding. The fund agreed to invest $4.5 million with the proviso that Milner and Finger each personally invest $750,000.
), free web-hosting Boom.ru (based on GeoCities
), and online shop 24x7 (using the formula of Amazon.com
).
In February 2001, netBridge and Port.ru (which owned Mail.ru) announced a merger. Milner became CEO of the new company named Mail.ru (though the legal name Port.ru was also retained).
In January 2003, Milner was appointed the CEO of "Neftyanoi", (owned by Igor Linshits
).
In 2005, NCH shifted its focus from the Russian Internet projects and Milner founded the investment fund Digital Sky Technologies (DST), becoming its chairman in 2006. A meeting through mutual friends resulted in Alisher Usmanov
becoming a shareholder of DST in 2008.
founder Mark Zuckerberg
. The meeting led to an agreement on 26 May 2009 under which DST bought a 1.96% stake in Facebook for USD 200 million.
On 16 September 2010, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) changed its name to "Mail.ru Group". The group's portfolio included Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru, ICQ
, a minority stake in the social network VKontakte (Russian Facebook equivalent), online payments service OSMP.ru, e-Port, as well as some other Russian assets. Milner's commercial interests in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon were transferred to DST Global. Milner became the CEO of DST Global and the chairman of the board of directors of Mail.ru Group. In November 2010, Mail.ru Group held its Offering
on the London Stock Exchange
.
On 29 January 2011, Milner announced that he would invest $150,000 into each of the start-up program participants selected by the incubator Y Combinator
.
On 02 August 2011, DST made a significant investment of $800M in Twitter and invested $50 million in ZocDoc
.
, a business tycoon who has since been imprisoned. Despite this Milner maintains good relations with the Russian government. In 2009, Milner joined the Commission on Modernization established by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
.
in 2010, Yuri Milner said of himself:
Yuri is married to former high fashion model and Contemporary Artist Julia Milner. Mrs. Milner has achieved recognition for her photography
and mobilography: photos taken with a mobile phone that she decorates and transforms with childlike spontaneity to produce vivid, expressive images. During the 52nd Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art Julia Milner received acclamation for her contribution entitled, Click I Hope. The Milners live and work predominantly in Moscow
with their two children.
In 2011 Yuri Milner bought a $100 million home in Los Altos Hills. The compound spans three plots totaling 7 hectares and includes a roughly 25500 square feet (2,369 m²) main house and a 5500 square feet (511 m²) guest house. The current tax bill is about $304,000 a year. The Wall Street Journal reported the price as $100 million, saying it was the most ever paid for a single-family home in the United States.
Digital Sky Technologies
Digital Sky Technologies or Mail.Ru Group is an international investment firm focused solely on the Internet sector. The firm was founded by Yuri Milner and emerged out of Mail.ru Group...
(DST), now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global. Through Mail.ru Group and DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, Zynga
Zynga
Zynga is a social network game developer located in San Francisco, United States. The company develops browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace....
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, Spotify
Spotify
Spotify is a Swedish-founded, UK-headquartered DRM-based music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Launched in October 2008 by Swedish startup Spotify AB, the service had...
, ZocDoc
ZocDoc
ZocDoc is an online medical appointment booking service. ZocDoc users search for doctors, dentists, and other health care providers by insurance type and location...
, 360Buy.com and Groupon
Groupon
Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies. Groupon was launched in November 2008, the first market for Groupon was Chicago, followed soon thereafter by Boston, New York City, and Toronto...
.
Fortune
Fortune (magazine)
Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...
magazine's list of the world's fifty most prominent business people in 2010 placed Milner at 46th place, making him the only Russian on the list. In 2010 Milner was recognized by Russian business magazine Vedomosti
Vedomosti
Vedomosti is a Russian language business daily. It is a joint venture between Dow Jones, the Financial Times and Sanoma, publishers of The Moscow Times....
as Businessman of the Year.
Early life and education
Born into a Jewish family on 11 November 1961 in Moscow, Yuri Milner was the second child of Russian intellectuals. His father, Boris Zakharovitch Milner, is a distinguished expert in the sphere of management and organization. He was Chief Deputy Director at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Betty Milner, Yuri's mother, worked at the capital's state-run laboratory for disease control. He has a sister, eight years his senior, who is an architect.Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University
Moscow State University
Lomonosov Moscow State University , previously known as Lomonosov University or MSU , is the largest university in Russia. Founded in 1755, it also claims to be one of the oldest university in Russia and to have the tallest educational building in the world. Its current rector is Viktor Sadovnichiy...
, graduating in 1985. He went on to work at one of the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....
, in the same department as the future Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg ForMemRS was a Soviet theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the fathers of Soviet hydrogen bomb...
. As a doctoral candidate in particle physics, Milner befriended Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
. Sakharov's forward thinking would inevitably influence Milner's venture investment strategy.
In 1990 Milner became the first non-emigre from the Soviet Union to go to the United States to receive an MBA degree at the Wharton School of Business, . Press quoted him as saying that he made this decision after "being disappointed in myself as a physicist."
Business career
Milner spent the former half of the 1990's at the World BankWorld Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
in Washington D.C. as a Russian banking specialist focused on the development of private sector banking. He has described his time at the World Bank as his "lost years," due to watching from afar the privatization of government holdings during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
. In the spring of 1995, Milner was appointed CEO of Alliance-Menatep, an investment brokerage company belonging to the now jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a Russian prisoner, considered by some - such as Amnesty International - to have been imprisoned for political reasons, jailed until 2016 and a former Russian oligarch and businessman...
. In December 1996 Milner worked as Vice President and Head of Investment Management of Menatep Bank. In February 1997, Milner became the deputy chairman and the head of the investment division of Menatep Bank. At the time, the market makers described him as "a well-known professional, who will bring the bank valuable experience in international financial institutions and transactions in the Russian investment market."
From 1997-2000 Milner was Director General of the investment fund New Trinity Investments.
In 1998, Milner once again took over as general director of JSC Alliance Menatep. The same year he became the CEO of the investment fund New Trinity Investments (according to other reports, the post he won in 1997).
During this period, after reading a review by Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm headquartered in New York City serving a diversified group of corporations, governments, financial institutions, and individuals. Morgan Stanley also operates in 36 countries around the world, with over 600 offices and a workforce of over 60,000....
analyst Mary Meeker
Mary Meeker
Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst primarily associated with the Internet. She is a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers....
on the prospects for online businesses, Milner decided to create an internet company. He sought funding from his former Menatep colleague Gregory Finger, who at the time led the Russian branch of the US investment fund New Century Holding. The fund agreed to invest $4.5 million with the proviso that Milner and Finger each personally invest $750,000.
Russian Internet investor
In 1999 Milner, Finger, and NCH created a new company, NetBridge. In 2000, Milner became the president Netbridzh Services Ltd (netBridge) - the company that was, in the words of Milner "... created as an Internet incubator and investment fund." Netbridge succeeded in transferring a variety of US-pioneered internet business models to Russia, creating companies including the portal List.ru, online auction site Molotok.ru (based on eBayEBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
), free web-hosting Boom.ru (based on GeoCities
GeoCities
Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...
), and online shop 24x7 (using the formula of Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
).
In February 2001, netBridge and Port.ru (which owned Mail.ru) announced a merger. Milner became CEO of the new company named Mail.ru (though the legal name Port.ru was also retained).
In January 2003, Milner was appointed the CEO of "Neftyanoi", (owned by Igor Linshits
Igor Linshits
Igor Leonidovich Linshits is an international entrepreneur and the Chairman and CEO of , an investment company located in London, United Kingdom.- Background :Igor Linshits was born on 18 December 1963 in Georgian city of Rustavi in the former USSR...
).
In 2005, NCH shifted its focus from the Russian Internet projects and Milner founded the investment fund Digital Sky Technologies (DST), becoming its chairman in 2006. A meeting through mutual friends resulted in Alisher Usmanov
Alisher Usmanov
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov is an Uzbek-born Russian businessman.According to the 2011 edition of Forbes magazine, the oligarch is one of Russia's richest men, with a fortune estimated at US$17.7 billion, and the world's 35th richest person.Usmanov is married and is a graduate of Moscow State...
becoming a shareholder of DST in 2008.
International Internet investor
In January 2009, while in Palo Alto, Milner became acquainted with the FacebookFacebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
founder Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...
. The meeting led to an agreement on 26 May 2009 under which DST bought a 1.96% stake in Facebook for USD 200 million.
On 16 September 2010, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) changed its name to "Mail.ru Group". The group's portfolio included Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru, ICQ
ICQ
ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, which was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis, then bought by America Online, and since April 2010 owned by Mail.ru Group. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase "I seek you"...
, a minority stake in the social network VKontakte (Russian Facebook equivalent), online payments service OSMP.ru, e-Port, as well as some other Russian assets. Milner's commercial interests in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon were transferred to DST Global. Milner became the CEO of DST Global and the chairman of the board of directors of Mail.ru Group. In November 2010, Mail.ru Group held its Offering
Offering
Offering may refer to:* Offering, a collection of donations during religious worship, see alms, tithe or charity* Offering, a religious sacrifice of plant, animal or human life* Offering , a part of devotional practice*Phan...
on the London Stock Exchange
London Stock Exchange
The London Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located in the City of London within the United Kingdom. , the Exchange had a market capitalisation of US$3.7495 trillion, making it the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world by this measurement...
.
On 29 January 2011, Milner announced that he would invest $150,000 into each of the start-up program participants selected by the incubator Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...
.
On 02 August 2011, DST made a significant investment of $800M in Twitter and invested $50 million in ZocDoc
ZocDoc
ZocDoc is an online medical appointment booking service. ZocDoc users search for doctors, dentists, and other health care providers by insurance type and location...
.
Political involvement
Much of Milner's early career was spent working for Mikhail KhodorkovskyMikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a Russian prisoner, considered by some - such as Amnesty International - to have been imprisoned for political reasons, jailed until 2016 and a former Russian oligarch and businessman...
, a business tycoon who has since been imprisoned. Despite this Milner maintains good relations with the Russian government. In 2009, Milner joined the Commission on Modernization established by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is the third President of the Russian Federation.Born to a family of academics, Medvedev graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1987. He defended his dissertation in 1990 and worked as a docent at his alma mater, now renamed to Saint...
.
Personal life
In an interview with VedomostiVedomosti
Vedomosti is a Russian language business daily. It is a joint venture between Dow Jones, the Financial Times and Sanoma, publishers of The Moscow Times....
in 2010, Yuri Milner said of himself:
- "In the past few years I simply do not have time for hobbies. I am even starting to forget what I was fond of. Such as in the past it was reading of literature not related to work.".
Yuri is married to former high fashion model and Contemporary Artist Julia Milner. Mrs. Milner has achieved recognition for her photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
and mobilography: photos taken with a mobile phone that she decorates and transforms with childlike spontaneity to produce vivid, expressive images. During the 52nd Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art Julia Milner received acclamation for her contribution entitled, Click I Hope. The Milners live and work predominantly in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
with their two children.
In 2011 Yuri Milner bought a $100 million home in Los Altos Hills. The compound spans three plots totaling 7 hectares and includes a roughly 25500 square feet (2,369 m²) main house and a 5500 square feet (511 m²) guest house. The current tax bill is about $304,000 a year. The Wall Street Journal reported the price as $100 million, saying it was the most ever paid for a single-family home in the United States.