On a trip to Silicon Valley a while ago, I had back-to-back meetings with the founder of a fintech firm, the head of a start-up incubator and a senior executive at a virtual reality company. By chance all had one characteristic in common: they had been born in the Soviet Union.
Apart from the Indian-born executives who now run Google, Microsoft, IBM and Twitter, few nationalities have had such an outsized impact on the US tech sector as Russians and Ukrainians. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and Yuri Milner, the influential tech investor, were both born in Moscow. Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, and Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal, originally hail from Kyiv.
A few more supercharged entrepreneurs may soon be pitching up in the US, Europe and Israel. Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine has driven millions of Ukrainians out of their country and triggered a mass exodus of Russians, too. But while the hope is that the flight of so many Ukrainians may be temporary, the outflow of Russians may prove more permanent. President Vladimir Putin has slammed his country into reverse gear, returning Russia to a dictatorial and isolationist past that many Russians thought they had left behind.