Yuri Milner
Yuri Milner
Yuri BorisovichMilnerМи́льнер; born 11 November 1961) is a Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He founded investment firms Digital Sky Technologies, now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Flipkart, Spotify, ZocDoc, Groupon, JD.com, Planet Labs, Xiaomi, OlaCabs, Alibaba, Habito, Wish and many others. Milner's personal investments also include a stake in 23andMe and Beepi...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth11 November 1961
CountryRussian Federation
Big Internet companies on average are capable of generating revenue of $1 million per employee, and that compares to 10 to 20 percent of that which is normally generated by traditional offline businesses of comparable size.
My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.
When you have a few billion people connected with screens, not voice... screens are important. You can transmit a thousand times more information.
Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people.
I have invested in four social networks. More than any other.
We monitor close to 50 companies globally that can be potential investment opportunities. I'd like to see DST as a significant global investment company in the Internet arena.
One of the companies that we've invested in is called Facebook. In only two years, between 2009 and 2011, the information exchanged between people increased 28 times. And that cannot be explained by new people joining Facebook.
I think there's a time to be private and a time to be public, and I think that companies like Facebook and Groupon are basically transformational companies. You don't come across them very often, and I'm pretty sure that they can continue to grow for a long time even being public.
You know among people who kind of travel a lot and have exposure to the United States and some other countries, they do have accounts, but you know, Russia is not exactly the place with multiple language skills so local networks kind of have an edge.
Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.
We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.
Google never knew how successful key words would be. Facebook didn't know how successful Zynga would be.
You have to travel globally today to know what's going on and maintain an edge.
Facebook now is mostly about people you know. In the future it could be about people you know less but are more important.