The Billionaire Who Friended the Web?

Tech's titans used to wonder about Yuri Milner. Now he's the guy everyone wants to copy.

It's 8 p.m. on a winter's night in Moscow. Yuri Milner steps into an elevator for the quick, quiet ride to his penthouse apartment. He's invited me for dinner with his wife, Julia, and their two young daughters. Across the marble floor of their palatial living area is a huge set of windows overlooking this old city glittering under heaps of snow. The hallways are painted a wild combination of orange, purple and green. A glassed-in area off to the left has a small grove of lemon trees Julia tends to. There is so much to see. But tonight, like every night, Milner's mind is elsewhere.

"San Francisco is just waking up," says Milner, 49. Sure enough, his iPhone starts ringing. Fund managers and lawyers 11 time zones to the west want to pitch deals. Dotted around the room are nine giant flat-screens airing overseas channels like CNBC and CNN. There are three more screens in Milner's desk area around the corner to the right. One shows a Twitter feed of mentions of Milner or his businesses,DST Global, an investment firm, and Mail.ru Group, Russia's largest Internet company. Even the dining area has screens on three walls.Our dinner was interrupted several times when Yuri or Julia would look up at CNN. (Egypt was burning.) Information overload? Milner shakes his head and deadpans, "It's my job."

"He's a robot," Julia interjects. Milner sheepishly admits he hasn't been to their holiday home on the Volga, just two hours from Moscow, in almost a year. The last movie he saw was The Social Network (arguably work-related). He is away from home at least two or three weeks each month.

It's hard work bankrolling the Web. Thanks to Milner's enviably early investments in Facebook (he controls about a 10% stake), social gaming phenomenon Zynga and the local-discounts company Groupon (Milner controls about 5% of each), this onetime doctoral candidate in particle physics has generated astounding returns, at least on paper. The Milner-controlled stake in Facebook, acquired over time for an estimated $800 million, is worth about $5 billion. Milner has made himself a billionaire and inserted himself atop the pecking order in Silicon Valley by redefining how tech investing is done.

"Yuri is industrializing venture capital. For the first time in a long time, he is approaching venture capital as an asset class rather than as a profession," says Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures in London.

source: http://www.forbes.com

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