Yuri Milner Portrait

Impressive guy, didn't know he used to be in physics Phd program. Changes my perception of him a bit ...

The most interesting thing to me was:

he had a mathematical formula to keep abreast of [an internet bubble]. It involved looking at every Internet deal worth more than $100 million in a three-month period and measuring the growth of each firm’s income–if the firms in more than half the deals had a PE higher than their growth rate, it was a bubble. He has wiggle room here: ultimately the market needs to define what a bubble is, in the same way it’s defined a recession.

Without commenting on the formula itself, it's extremely interesting to think about Milner's motivation for publicly sharing that tidbit. It's true meaning is drastically different based on how 'deep' his game is.

Instead of him trying to strike it out in Silicon Valley, I wish he would adopt some good industry standards for his own money cow back home--mail.ru.

The site is plagued with unoptimized flash ads that slow my computer down to a crawl. mail.ru also likes to send spam that claims that people on your mail.ru contact list invite you to join some new social network of theirs--without those people even knowing about it. I suspect similar emails have been sent on my behalf to my contacts as well, all without my bidding.

I guess this is just too much to ask at the moment. The so called Runet has not grown out of its infancy, and mail.ru is its flagship company.

> He also reads Paul Graham’s Hacker News, and admires the Y Combinator founder for being able to “spot talent and nurture it. He’s so committed to young entrepreneurs,” Milner said, adding how in the start-up funder’s early years Graham had a whole wall of food devoted to feeding the start-up founders himself.

He looks exactly the way I'd pictured him from reading previous articles about him.