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.
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