Milner Yury Borisovich (Benitsionovich)

Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (born November 11, 1961, Moscow, RSFSR, USSR) - entrepreneur, manager, co-owner of the DST Global fund, former co-owner and chairman of the board of directors of Mail.ru Group.

Biography

Yuri Milner was born on November 11, 1961, the second child in the Jewish family of the famous economist Benzion (Boris) Zakharovich Milner (born 1929). Mother, Betty Iosifovna Milner (born 1930), worked in a sanitary and epidemiological laboratory.

• 1985 - graduated from the Physics Department of Moscow State University with a degree in theoretical physics.

• Started the business by trading computers

• In 1990 he went to America, where he entered the Wharton School of Business (Wharton), USA. The press quoted him as saying that he was prompted to take this step by "disappointment in himself as a physicist."

• In 1992-1995, Milner worked at the World Bank, where he was an expert on the Russian banking system in the private sector development department.

• In the spring of 1995, Milner took over as CEO of Alliance-Menatep.

• In February 1997, Milner became deputy chairman of the board and head of the investment department of Menatep Bank. At that time, market participants already spoke of him as "a well-known professional who will bring with him to the bank valuable experience in international financial institutions and operations in the Russian investment market."

1998: Creation of netBridge Internet Project Incubator

In 1998, Milner again took over as general director of Alliance-Menatep CJSC. In the same year, he became CEO of the investment fund New Trinity Investments (according to other sources, he took this post in 1997).

During this period, Milner came up with the idea of ​ ​ creating an Internet company, and in 2000 he became president of Netbridge Services LLC (netBridge) - a company that, according to Milner himself, was "created... as an Internet incubator and investment fund "and in less than a year of work became one of the market leaders (according to other sources, he headed the company in 1999). Using the principle of transferring various American Internet models to Russian soil, the company has created a number of projects, such as the List.ru portal, the Molotok.ru online auction (created by analogy with eBay), free web hosting Boom.ru (analogue of Geocities) and the 24x7 online store (like Amazon.com).

2001: CEO of Mail.ru

In February 2001, netBridge and Port.ru, which owned the assets of the Mail.ru portal, announced their merger. Milner became the CEO of the new company Mail.ru (the legal name - Port.ru - was retained).

• In January 2003, Milner was appointed General Director, Chairman of the Board of LLC Management Company Concern Oil. It was noted that at that time Concern Neftyanoy was a co-owner of LUKOIL-Neftekhim, Sixth TV Channel, Atomenergosbyt and Mail.ru. As of October 2003, Milner was also a member of the directors of Atomenergosbyt. At the same time, the weekly SmartMoney later, in 2007, talking about the history of Milner's assets, wrote that the Neftyanoy concern itself arose... "almost imperceptibly among Mail.ru shareholders."

• In May 2003, Milner appeared as the president of the National Postal Service "Mail.ru."

2005: Establishment of the DST Foundation

In 2005, NCH withdrew from Russian Internet projects, and Milner founded the Digital Sky Technologies Investment Fund (DST).

• In 2006, Milner became chairman of Digital Sky Technologies.

• In 2008, through mutual acquaintances, he met Alisher Usmanov, who in August became a shareholder of DST.

• In January 2009, Palo Alto met. Mark Zuckerberg On May 26, 2009, an agreement was signed under which DST dollars bought a 1.96% stake for US $200 million. Facebook

• In 2009, Milner joined the modernization commission founded by the president. Russia Dmitry Medvedev

• On September 16, 2010, the investment company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) changed its name to "Mail.ru Group." The company was managed by: Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki, ICQ, a minority stake in the Vkontakte social network, OSMP, e-port, as well as some other Russian assets. International assets - shares in the social network Facebook (10%), the manufacturer of games for social networks Zynga and the discount service Groupon were transferred to DST Global. Yuri Milner is the founder of DST Global and chairman of the board of directors of Mail.ru Group.

• In November 2010, Mail.ru Group held an IPO on the London Stock Exchange.

• On January 29, 2011, Milner announced that he would invest US $150,000 in each of the start-ups participating in the Y Combinator incubator program.

2012

Departure from the Board of Directors of Mail.ru Group

On March 14, 2012, the founder of Mail.ru Group, Yuri Milner, resigned from the post of board of directors of this company, follows from the official message of the group published on the website of the London Stock Exchange. His place on the council was taken by the general director of Mail.ru Group Dmitry Grishin.

"Together with Mail.Ru, we went a long way from the moment the company was formed to a successful IPO in November 2010," Milner said in a statement. - Recently, as chairman of the board of directors, I watched as the team led by Dmitry Grishin, with whom we created the company and worked side by side for more than 10 years, consistently improved products and services, and also consistently showed steady growth in operating and financial indicators. I am sure that now the Mail.Ru team has excellent potential to develop the achieved success under the leadership of Dmitry. "

Milner's final departure from Mail.ru Group is connected with his desire to fully focus on foreign projects, says a source in a large Internet company.

Creation of a prize for scientists in the field of physics with the main prize of $3 million

August 2012: Milner announced the creation of a prize for scientists in the field of physics. The prize is called The Fundamental Physics Prize (the original name in English translates as the Fundamental Physics Prize) and at the time of establishment is 3 million US dollars - the main prize, as well as the rest of the prizes. Thus, the established prize is the largest scientific prize in history, more than 2.5 times superior to the Nobel Prize in Physics.

2013: Plan to Raise $1 Billion to Create DST Global III Fund

DST is going to raise $1 billion to create a technology investment fund DST Global III. It is assumed that the new fund will be invested in minority packages of companies whose market capitalization will exceed $500 million, acquiring them at the late stages of the startup. According to Slon.ru^[1]future Milner may invest in such popular services as Foursquare, Badoo, Square, Flipboard, Pinterest, Instagram and Quora.

2022

Donation of $100 million to refugees from Ukraine

Russian billionaire investor Yuriy Milner will donate $100 million to refugees from Ukraine. Founded by the businessman along with his wife Julia, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation has established the Tech for Refugees initiative, which will also include major IT companies including Airbnb, Flexport and Spotify, the project said.

Most of the amount donated by the Breakthrough Prize will be used to help victims of the conflict in Ukraine, in the future the initiative will also cover refugees from other regions.

"We were appalled by the deeply distressing suffering of the Ukrainian people. We believe that this initiative, launched in partnership with some of the most creative technology companies and organizations in the world, can provide practical assistance to people living in turmoil outside their homeland, "the words of Yuri and Yulia Milner are quoted in the message

.

Renunciation of Russian citizenship

On October 10, 2022, it became known that Yuri Milner had renounced Russian citizenship. The entrepreneur himself announced this on his Twitter blog.

{{quote 'Me and my family left Russia forever in 2014... This summer [2022 - approx. TAdviser] we have officially completed the process of withdrawing from Russian citizenship, - wrote Milner on his personal page on the social network. }}

By October 2022, Yuri Milner ranks 15th on the Russian Forbes list. His fortune is estimated at $7.3 billion.

According to information from the DST Global website, Yuri Milner has been an Israeli citizen since 1999, he has not been to Russia since 2014, when he moved from California. Milner also has no assets in Russia, 97% of his personal fortune was created outside the Russian Federation.

{{quote 'Yuri has never met with Vladimir Putin either personally or as part of any groups, the website says. }} Earlier in 2022, Yuri Milner, like some other immigrants from Russia, for example, Pavel Durov, asked Forbes not to consider them Russian businessmen.

According to the American Forbes, Yuri Milner is "the most influential Russian technology investor," he was one of the first to invest through his DST Global venture fund on Twitter and Facebook (the social network and its parent company Meta are recognized in Russia as extremist and banned).

Yuri Milner has become the third major Russian investor to renounce Russian citizenship since the beginning of 2022. Earlier, the founder of the investment company Freedom Finance Timur Turlov (fortune of $2.4 billion) and entrepreneur Ruben Vardanyan ($1 billion) refused the passport of the Russian Federation. ^[2]

Real estate

In March 2011, it became known that Yuri Milner, head and co-owner of the investment fund DST Global, recently bought a mansion in California's Silicon Valley, paying about $70 million for it.

The mansion with a total area of ​ ​ about 2.5 thousand square meters is located in the city of Los Altos Hills. It is also accompanied by a plot of land with an area of ​ ​ about 4.5 hectares. According to analysts, this is the most expensive house in the history of all real estate transactions in Santa Clara County, which includes Los Altos Hills.

The purchased home, which is the largest mansion in the county, includes five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a tennis court and two adjacent lots. On the ground floor of the building there are two bedrooms, a game room, a servant room, a security room, a gym, a sauna and spa, an indoor pool, a three-car garage and a car wash, writes Mercury News. On the second floor are the remaining bedrooms, two dining rooms and a living room.

The purchase was made through La Paloma Property, a company registered in Delaware, where, according to the laws of the heads of companies, they are not required to disclose their identity. According to sources, they paid for the mansion in cash and shares, and one of the sources claims that among them were shares of the social network Facebook. This method of calculating for real estate is unusual in California.

Milner does not reportedly make frequent appearances at the new mansion and has no plans to move to the US for permanent residency anytime soon.

The seller of the building was the famous businessman Fred Chan, founder of ESS Technology. He began building this mansion in 2003 and completed construction a few years ago, but then decided to continue to live in Hawaii, where his family owns an estate in Honolulu.

Quotes

Principles of Yuri Milner

• I think Runet today is an extremely open system with free competition. ["Secret of the Firm," 2009]

• I was impressed by two things on the Internet: an economy of scale, when a small number of people can provide a service to a huge number, and what is called user generated content - you occupy a kind of "real estate" on the Internet, give people the rules of the game, they come there and start creating something on an incredible scale. [Forbes, 2010]

• We have two main tools of production - servers and brains. If brains become more expensive, then servers become cheaper from year to year. So the global trend is on our side here. ["Secret of the Firm," 2009]

• Young people now have unique opportunities. Thus, the threshold for entering the technology business is exponentially falling. For example, 10 years ago, it took several million dollars to launch a startup. Already a few years ago, it was possible to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now nothing is actually needed. You can just sit down, write an app for a social network and grow a big business out of it. Moreover, you no longer even need to have your own servers. It can be a product of pure reason, and it has never been as close to the user as it is now. This is one of the reasons why I believe that the era of people with a mathematical mindset is now coming. [Vedomosti, 2010]

• All successful Internet companies in the world are run by programmers. And any attempts to transfer control to non-programmers had dire consequences. [Forbes, 2010]

• Our basic principle is to get on the same boat as the founders and not do anything that goes against their interests. Corporate activism in the tech industry is not our method. [Forbes, 2010]

• Why did Facebook let us, not others, invest this purchase? We are very comfortable. [Forbes, 2010]

• I don't think there's a traditional economy and a "new one." The economy is one, but we live in a time of rapid changes in this economy, and the tool for these changes in this case is the Internet. [Vedomosti, 2010]

• A project growing without advertising support is the best leading indicator. This means that people need such a project. ["Secret of the Firm," 2009]

• The most effective business model on the Internet is freemium: 90-95 percent of users are provided free of charge, and earn 5-10 percent. The same Google is freemium: millions of people use search, maps, news and all its other services for free, and it earns on several percent who click on ads. ["Expert," 2010]

• I think that over time, the social network will know so well about your hobbies that it will be able to find a previously unfamiliar, but interesting person on the other side of the world. [Vedomosti, 2010]

7 unknown facts about Yuri Milner

• 2000s: Milner is the author of the book "The First Public Tender in Russia. Lessons of'Red October' ', dedicated to holding an open tender for the purchase of shares of JSC Red October (Milner himself was called the author of the idea of ​ ​ holding it as the general director of Alliance-Menatep).

• 2010: According to Yuri Milner in an interview with Vedomosti: "For the past few years I have not done anything else, I just don't have time for a hobby. I'm even starting to forget what I was fond of. It used to be reading non-specialized literature. "

• September 2011: Milner won the GQ men's magazine's top award, Man of the Year. Since the winner himself held another deal in New York, the prize for him was received by his father, who emphasized that he could not assume that he could someday replace his son in something.

• 2011: Together with Pavel Durov, Milner is engaged in "IT charity." This year, Pavel Durov and Yuri Milner launched a project to support novice Internet entrepreneurs. Durov will select promising startups, and Milner will give them $25,000 each, not counting on a share in the company.

• May 2012: Yuri Milner bought a social network for Pair lovers. As one of the founders of Pair Oleg Kostur said, the startup raised $4.2 million from several dozen investors, among which are venture funds SV Angels, Tencent and CrunchFund, as well as the creator of the social network Path Dave Maureen.

Notes