Based on subsequent valuations it would seem like Facebook, Groupon and others are doing very well. It only takes a few home runs to cover a lot of strikeouts and singles.
Right. We can bound this by getting the total market size of the macaroni business in Russia, and comparing to public investment numbers by Milner in other companies. Does the top down (revenue, profits) match the bottom up (sum of investments)?
Unless he built the Russian Chef Boyardee, it strains the imagination to believe that macaroni was anything but a front for money laundering, from the Russian Mafia, Usmanov, or who knows where.
Though I doubt YC companies are at risk of having their legs broken by Russian gangsters should they fail, because Milner is in the US and wants to play by American rules (though the US itself is rapidly moving towards the cynicism/crony capitalism/venture socialism of the Soviet bloc).
Sort of like Michael Corleone becoming a pillar of the community, these sorts of transactions buy respectability.
All that said, Americans shouldn't be too self satisfied. We'll probably realize in a few years that the $787B stimulus and the $9T Federal Reserve bailout ended up in the pockets of a few politically connected American oligarchs like George Kaiser, as the euphoria of 2009 Obama America was similar to the euphoria of 1992 Yeltsin Russia. Massive amounts of money flew around with little accountability and the hangover will be a bitch.
Anyway, from a blackbox perspective Milner's presence is good for startups at all stages, as even if he is only a threat to invest his presence forces better terms from others. I think that is the pragmatic perspective: he is a feature of the landscape, so might as well benefit from him.
(still, that macaroni calculation would be a damn interesting public spreadsheet. should be done anonymously of course...)
The next step might be to figure out the size of that Extra M deal, in order to gauge its then-profitability. (Even though that has no bearing on its profitability afterwards, it is at least a starting point.)
This is little bizarre: http://search.appliances-china.com/Look.php?ID=CaoGP4TW%2F%2... ...
Extra M "company details" reads as follows: "We are international purchaser of Machinery & Industrial products for long time." It's proving difficult to find much info about Extra M.
He bought into Russia's mail.ru (through a merger; he's considered a founder, even though mail.ru's roots go back years before), during the first dotcom boom.
He led it and helped it get huge. A lot of people got rich, including Millner, and Russians had great mail service. It went public on the LSE a few years ago, and is worth billions.
So, on top of substantial personal wealth, he became a known successful tech entrepreneur, so it was possible for him to get LPs for his fund.
If you change the countries and company names around, he's basically Marc Andreessen or one of the PayPal mafia.
It's not so much that silicon valley is like the Russian finance economy, it's that tech businesses are pretty similar the world around.
It's a lot more probable than a journalist becoming one of Silicon Valley's top VCs (Mike Moritz).
I have and my experience is that it might have been one of the best free ones available in Russian, but it surely was not great. In fact when I stopped using it a couple of years ago it was terrible: routinely dropped connections to their POP server, a web interface overladen with copious flash ads that slow you machine down to a crawl, and on top of that your email address ending up in spammers' databases without being EVER used on the web (and I even tried registering a relatively random looking address to prove the point). But the worst thing I didn't like about them was that they had the terrible practice of spamming my contacts with invites to their new social networking sites making them look like it was me who actually sent them.
