Yuri Milner

Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (, ; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (later VK), and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify, Byju's, Flipkart, Wish, JD, Alibaba, Nu Bank, and many other enterprises.

In 2012, Milner's personal investments included a stake in 23andMe, Habito, and Planet Labs. In 2017, he also had a minority stake in a real estate investments startup, Cadre.

Early life

Born into a Jewish family on 11 November 1961, in Moscow, Yuri Milner was the second child of Soviet intellectuals. His father, Bentsion Zakharovitch Milner, was Chief Deputy Director at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was active in management and organization. Betty Iosifovna Milner, Yuri's mother, worked at Moscow's state-run virological laboratory for disease control. His older sister, eight years his senior, is an architect. In 1985, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Lomonosov University. He then worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute in the field of theoretical physics under the supervision of future Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg.

Milner became an Israeli citizen in 1999. In 2005, he moved to Israel with his family. They relocated to California in 2014. Milner has stated he has not been to Russia since the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. In August 2022, he renounced his Russian citizenship, reportedly in response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

Education

Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University, graduating in 1985. He went on to work at Lebedev Physical Institute, one of the institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. As a doctoral candidate in particle physics, Milner befriended Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov's forward-thinking co-founder would later influence Milner's venture investment strategy.

In 1990, Milner became the first non-émigré from the Soviet Union to travel to the United States to receive a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The press quoted him as saying that he made this decision after "being disappointed in myself as a physicist." Milner was a commencement speaker for the Wharton Business School's 2017 class. During his commencement speech at the Wharton School, Yuri Milner mentioned that he did not complete his MBA at Wharton. He humorously recounted asking the dean if they were aware of his incomplete academic record when inviting him to speak, to which the dean affirmed and still extended the invitation. In September 2020, the non-profit foundation operated by Milner and his wife, Julia, established the Friends of Israel MBA Fellowship at the Wharton School. The $10 million fellowship supports more than 60 Israeli students at Wharton over 10 years.

Business career

Milner started his business career selling gray market DOS computers in the Soviet Union, which displeased his father. When the USSR collapsed, he stopped selling computers in order to enroll at the Wharton School to earn an MBA.

After graduating, Milner spent the first half of the 1990s at the World Bank 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 the privatization of government holdings during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In the spring of 1995, Milner was appointed CEO of Alliance-Menatep, a stock brokerage company belonging to then oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In December 1996, Milner worked as vice president and Head of Investment Management of Menatep Bank. In February 1997 Milner was appointed the deputy chairperson and the head of the investment division of Menatep Bank but left this position in early 1998. 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".

Russian Internet investments

In 1999, 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 friend from Menatep days 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. Milner, Finger, and NCH created a new company, NetBridge. In 2000, Milner became the president of Netbridge Services Ltd. (netBridge) – the company that was, "created as an Internet incubator and investment fund". Netbridge succeeded in transferring a variety of U.S.-pioneered Internet business models to Russia, creating companies including the portal List.ru, online auction site Molotok.ru (based on eBay), free web-hosting Boom.ru (based on GeoCities), and online shop 24×7, 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 2005, NCH shifted its focus from Russian Internet projects and Milner founded the investment fund Digital Sky Technologies (DST), becoming its chairperson in 2006. A meeting through mutual friends resulted in Alisher Usmanov becoming a shareholder of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) in 2008. On 16 September 2010, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) changed its name to "Mail.ru Group".

In 2010, Mail.ru Group completed successful initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange with market valuation of $5.6 billion.

In March 2012, Milner stepped down from the role of chairperson of Mail.ru and from the board of directors. Dmitry Grishin was elected to the board and appointed as chairperson while retaining his CEO position. There were no other changes to management or to the board.

Post Mail.ru Group's IPO, DST is the sole vehicle for further international investments. The company is now fully independent of Mail.ru Group.

From May 2009 to January 2012, Milner was a member of the Commission on Modernization established by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian President from 2008 to 2012.

Technology investments

In January 2009, while in Palo Alto, Milner became acquainted with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The meeting led to an agreement on 26 May 2009 under which DST bought a 1.96% stake in Facebook for $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 chairperson of the board of directors of Mail.ru Group. In November 2010, Mail.ru Group held its offering on the London Stock Exchange. In March 2012, Milner stepped down from the role of chairperson of Mail.ru and from the board of directors.

DST Global became one of the world's leading technology investors and its portfolio has included some of the world's most prominent Internet companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Airbnb, Spotify, Alibaba, and others.

On 5 November 2017, ''The New York Times'' reported that Milner had strong Kremlin backing for his investments in Facebook (over 8%) and Twitter (5%). His companies sold these holdings two years before that report was made public however, Milner denied any allegation he was working with Russia to turn social media against US Democracy in his open letter published in ReCode.

DST Global has invested over $12.5 bn in over 80 companies between 2009 and 2021. Less than 3% was raised from Russian institutions as limited partners, all prior to 2011, and was fully returned by 2014. The remaining 97% was raised over the course of the past 12 years from international institutions and private investors. DST Global has no institutional investors from Russia since 2014, has no office or investments in Russia.

G8 Summit in Deauville, France

Among a small group of invited technology entrepreneurs and CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Eric Schmidt (Google), and Hiroshi Mikitani ( Rakuten), Yuri Milner participated in the G8 Summit in Deauville, France in May 2011, where they discussed the internet and the world economy.

Altos Labs

In September 2021, an investment vehicle held for the benefit of the Breakthrough Foundation, founded by Milner, which supports existing and future philanthropic projects in fundamental sciences invested in Altos Labs together with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Altos Labs is a funded biotechnology company dedicated to harnessing cellular reprogramming to develop longevity therapeutics. The company has recruited prominent scientists such as Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte (known for work on rejuvenation through reprogramming), Steve Horvath (known for work in epigenetic aging clocks), and Shinya Yamanaka (the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of cellular reprogramming in mammalian cells). Milner reportedly originally considered pursuing reprogramming philanthropically, having already awarded three-year grants of $1 million a year to several geroscience researchers, but was convinced by former National Cancer Institute head Richard Klausner that a well-funded biotech company would lead to faster progress.

Selected investments

* 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.
* In February 2014, it was announced that Milner had led a round of funding for cloud-graphics company, Otoy.
* In April 2016, online mortgage broker platform Habito launched with backing from Milner, amongst other fintech investors.

Forbes list controversy

On 29 January 2018, Milner's name was included in the United States Treasury Department's "Report to Congress Pursuant to Section 241 of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017 Regarding Senior Foreign Political Figures and Oligarchs in the Russian Federation and Russian Parastatal Entities" (CAATSA), a list of 96 individuals of Russian heritage who "have an estimated net worth of $1 billion or more".

Although it was widely reported in the media that those on the list "may be subject to sanctions", the CAATSA Report itself made clear that it "in no way should be interpreted to impose sanctions on those individuals or entities". It also specified that inclusion in the report "does not constitute the determination by any agency that any of those individuals or entities meet the criteria for designation under any sanctions program", and in no way indicates that "the U.S. Government has information about the individual's involvement in malign activities". Shortly after the list was released, it was reported that the Treasury Department had simply copied it from the Forbes' 2017 ''The World's Billionaires'' list: people on the Forbes list who had Russian heritage and a net worth of $1 billion or more had been indiscriminately included in the CAATSA Report.

In its response to a lawsuit asserting that the compilation of the list was "arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law", the Treasury Department has confirmed that it is "not challenging" the allegation that it had "simply republished" the Forbes billionaires list. In April 2020, in its annual Billionaire List Forbes magazine re-classified Yuri Milner from the Russian list to the Israeli list of billionaires, confirming his Israeli citizenship and close ties to the country.

Philanthropy

Breakthrough Prize

In July 2012, Yuri and Julia Milner established the Breakthrough Prize, joined the following year by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg. The Prize is a set of international awards recognizing three fields of endeavor: Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Laureates receive $3 million each in prize money, making the Breakthrough Prize the largest scientific award in the world. There are also New Horizons awards in Physics and Mathematics for younger researchers who have already produced significant works, as well as Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes for women mathematicians who completed their PhD in the recent past.

Committees of previous laureates choose the winners from candidates nominated in a process that is online and open to the public. , $308 million in prize-money has been awarded to 271 individual scientists and four large research teams.

The Prizes are presented annually at a gala ceremony featuring celebrity presentations, films, comedy, and live music. The last ceremony took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, with the previous seven held at Hangar One (Mountain View, California). The annual celebrations also include symposiums in the three recognized fields. The program is broadcast on the web, most recently on YouTube.

Breakthrough Initiatives

In July 2015, Milner launched Breakthrough Initiatives, a scientific program to investigate the question of life in the Universe. He announced the initiatives at the Royal Society in London, alongside Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees