The Dutch parent of pioneering Russian tech company Yandex is selling its operations in the country at a steeply discounted price of just over $5 billion to its Russia-based managers, oil company Lukoil and other investors.
Maybe chasing pots of gold by operating businesses in places where the law is a mere suggestion that can be overridden at the whim of a dictator isn’t such a great idea after all.
Probably not the conclusion they’ll arrive at; the correct people already got rich off this bullshit.
Russia was a very different country when Yandex started out. For as terrible as things were in the '90s for most Russians, there was a newfound sense of freedom for the first time in Russian history, accompanied by a cultural explosion and a similarly vibrant startup culture.
China experienced a brief period of far more restrictive, but still previously unheard of freedom when the tech companies that now dominate its part of the Internet started out. It didn’t last, Xi quickly killed it off once he took the throne, but the country is still benefiting from these small handful of years, not realizing quite yet what they have lost.
Are you expecting companies that were created during such times to just shut down once their countries slide back into totalitarianism?
I expect them to do what Google did: see the way the winds are blowing and get out before their assets are seized or their leadership disappeared. It’s not like these are sudden shifts. The decline of both states toward increasing totalitarianism has been happening for at least 15 years.
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Probably not the conclusion they’ll arrive at; the correct people already got rich off this bullshit.
Russia was a very different country when Yandex started out. For as terrible as things were in the '90s for most Russians, there was a newfound sense of freedom for the first time in Russian history, accompanied by a cultural explosion and a similarly vibrant startup culture.
China experienced a brief period of far more restrictive, but still previously unheard of freedom when the tech companies that now dominate its part of the Internet started out. It didn’t last, Xi quickly killed it off once he took the throne, but the country is still benefiting from these small handful of years, not realizing quite yet what they have lost.
Are you expecting companies that were created during such times to just shut down once their countries slide back into totalitarianism?
I expect them to do what Google did: see the way the winds are blowing and get out before their assets are seized or their leadership disappeared. It’s not like these are sudden shifts. The decline of both states toward increasing totalitarianism has been happening for at least 15 years.
In the case of Russia at least, the frog was boiled very slowly, slow enough that if you wanted to, you were able to deny it for many years.