#15 Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner on Forbes

Yuri Milner is best known for investing in insanely profitable start-ups including a little one called Facebook. He's also known for using the resulting profits to fund big-picture science projects and awards.

What happens when an outsider beats the Valley's elite venture capitalists at their own game? A controversial money guy invests in every social media powerhouse.

Yuri Milner is pushing forward with the hunt for intelligent alien life beyond our planet, and is investing another $100 million in a more proactive approach after putting up the original $100m last year.

Milner was named -- like many other Russian boys born in 1961 -- for the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.

Yuri started investing in Internet companies in 1999. In 2005, he founded Digital Sky Technologies, Limited (now DST Global/Mail.ru Group) to focus on Internet investments in the Russian speaking world. Under his leadership, Mail.ru Group performed approximately 75 transactions and built what is now the leading Russian language website in terms of users. Mail.ru Group is also the seventh most popular website globally in terms of page views or minutes spent online according to Comscore. Yuri is now the non-executive Chairman of Mail.ru Group.

Yuri Milner on Forbes

Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner[2] (Russian: Ю́рий Бори́сович (Бенцио́нович) Ми́льнер; born 11 November 1961[3]) is a Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He founded investment firms Digital Sky Technologies (DST),[4] now called Mail.ru Group and DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Flipkart, Spotify, Zocdoc, Groupon, JD.com, Planet Labs, Xiaomi, OlaCabs, Alibaba, Habito, Wish and many others. Milner's personal investments also include a stake in 23andMe [5]