Typical Russian Speaking IT founder
IT and tech sectors have become truly borderless, religion-, ethnicity- and nationality-agnostic in the past several decades. For many people especially minorities and those from under-represented backgrounds, IT and tech have become a safe haven, where professionals are mainly judged by their skills, deeds and contribution, rather than skin colour, country of origin or living conditions. At least that’s what we experience personally. Now when it comes to Russians who work in IT or tech, many outsiders would treat them as avid hackers whose daily job is to break into other countries military IT systems, as well as managing Facebook and Twitter troll networks with fake news and propaganda. In reality, Russians working in IT and tech have a slightly different image — we can reassure you with that, as at LETA Capital we specialize in investing in Russian-speaking IT and tech entrepreneurs who build international startups. But don’t just trust my words, have a look at the results of the analysis of 5,000 LinkedIn profiles of Russian-speaking IT and tech entrepreneurs and check out below a typical profile of a modern Russian IT and tech entrepreneur which came out from this analysis.
1. Lack of diversity
IT & tech sectors are dominated by men (Google & Microsoft reported ~20% of its workforce are females), which is in line with the data from our sample: for every 10 male entrepreneurs, there is only one female. In our portfolio, for example, there are two females among all of the founders and both of them show outstanding results. We genuinely hope that the share of females in IT & tech will be increasing over time, while we will do our best to keep contributing to this.
2. “You know whats a cool name? Angelo. It has angel and jello in it.” © Big Bang Theory
As you might have guessed, in this section we will talk about names (please bear with me, some really useful information will follow, I promise). In the meantime I suggest you have a look at the most popular names among Russian speaking IT entrepreneurs:
In regards to the most popular last names, it goes as follows: Ivanov (10), Kuznetsov (9), Popov (7), Levin (6), Petrov (6), Smith (6), Grigoryan (5), далее по 4: Abramov, Aliyev, Anderson, Grigoriev, Khachatryan, Kogan, Kozlov, Lebedev, Mammadov, Morozov, Nikolaev, Panchenko, Savchenko, Semenov, Shevchenko, Smirnov, Sokolov.
3. Briefly about the companies
Our sample contains ~4,900 companies, and in this research, we have no plans analyzing these companies, as it’s rather a subject of a separate post. Instead, this post is focused on tech entrepreneurs themselves, and, as you likely remember, our main goal is to try and draw a portrait of a modern typical Russian-speaking IT entrepreneur, hence in regards to the companies they are working on, I will share the cloud of their respective company names, which look as follows:
4. Geographies
Check this one out: Russian-speaking IT entrepreneurs live in 636 cities in 89 countries! (at least those who use Linkedin). This includes CEOs, CTOs and co-founders of IT & tech companies only.
The largest Russian-speaking diaspora is in the United States: 1,100 people, including 221 in San Francisco, 146 in New York, 35 in Los Angeles, 25 in Seattle and 23 in Washington. There are 750 IT entrepreneurs based out of Russia (within our sample), 75% of them are in Moscow, 12% in Saint-Petersburg, 5% in Novosibirsk, 2% in Tomsk (among other cities).
The remaining countries are distributed as follows: Ukraine (333), UK (222), Israel (207), Canada (115), Germany (115), Lithuania (91), Poland (81), Belarus (85), Latvia (71), France (68), Armenia (63), Estonia (62), Netherlands (57), Bulgaria (55), Czech Republic (53), Finland (43), Spain (43), Austria (30), Switzerland (42).
5. Education
Let’s move on to getting acquainted with the Russian-speaking tech entrepreneurs, particularly, their education — let’s see where they studied (or still studying), where they received theoretical and practical skills to build successful ventures — i.e. Universities. It is hard to believe, but it turned out that Russian-speaking IT entrepreneurs (within our sample) studied in 1,633 Universities around the globe, anywhere from the University of Bremen and Voronezh State University to Stanford and Oxford. Luckily, in the Russian-speaking tech culture, it is not as trendy to drop out of school, therefore most of the tech founders obtain second and even third degrees. What’s the exact breakdown? Please find below:
As a result, within an entire sample of 5,000 LinkedIn profiles, 63% hold Bachelor’s degree, 59% of which also obtained Master’s, while 10% out of total advanced their qualification at the MBA (average time between obtaining Master’s and MBA is 4.72 years). Astonishing enough, 9% of all Bachelor’s holders have also studied for a PhD!
Distribution by speciality areas seems quite logical: almost 60% have a technical or engineering degree, while a significant part of their business education is obtained at the Master’s or MBA.
As per Universities, below is a list of the most popular Universities and schools in respect to the number of Russian-speaking graduates who eventually became IT & tech founders:
6. Age
Below you will find a distribution by an average age of Russian-speaking tech entrepreneurs as an estimate based on the year of their obtaining Bachelor’s and assuming that at that moment the person is 21 years old. 80% of the total sample as of today (2020) is aged between 25 and 44 years.
7. Work experience
In this section, we are going to look at the present place of work, as well as all of the past ones in respect to the length of positions held. Interestingly enough, it turned out that for 80% of all Russian-speaking tech founders from our sample, an average time they occupy their present job is 3.2 years, while for the top 50% it is 1.8 years.
At the same time, an average number of past jobs held (excluding the present one) is 5.4, while an average total length of the whole previous experience amounts to 5.2 years, i.e. an average length per one position is 9.9 months — not too long at all! As Somerset Maugham put it: “<..> nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last<..>”.
8. Skills
We seem to be approaching the end of a race and will shortly finalize the portrait of a typical modern Russian-speaking tech entrepreneur. Those of you who will finish reading this post will get the desired answer! In the meantime, we have two sections left to cover: skills & competencies of the modern Russian-speaking tech founders, as well as their interests.
Let’s first examine a set of professional skills of Russian-speaking IT entrepreneurs, which they indicated themselves on their respective LinkedIn profiles: interestingly enough, 13% and 17% of founders indicated “Entrepreneurship” and “Startups” respectively.
It is remarkable to note, that among top-60 skills, the number of managerial ones (Management, Business Strategy, Business Development, Marketing Strategy, Strategic Planning, etc.) almost equals to mentions of the hard skills (Software Development, Web Development, JavaScript, Java, PHP, MySQL, HTML, Linux, C++, etc.), although, as you remember, our sample includes only the founders and management of IT companies, which theoretically could indicate an excellent technical training of Russian-speaking tech entrepreneurs, but who might lack managerial & leadership skills at the same time.
9. Interests
“Interests” basically mean profiles and groups of well-known companies and individuals whom Russian-speaking tech founders are following on LinkedIn. No advertising here whatsoever, but make sure you follow the companies and people from this list since at least 50 Russian-speaking tech founders from our sample are following each one of them from this list.
10. Hooray! The profile is ready!
Congratulations. Now we are ready to sum up all of the above and draw a portrait of a typical modern Russian-speaking tech entrepreneur which we prepared by studying data on 5,000 profiles on LinkedIn. Please meet (virtual) Alexander Ivanov:
Mr Ivanov, 25–44 years old, holds Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Master’s/MBA in Management, lives between Moscow and the U.S., 2 years ago co-founded an IT startup employing 1–200 staff, has 5 years of previous work experience across 5 positions. He is really good at Project Management, Software Development and Marketing. He doesn’t believe in Bill Gates’ ‘microchip’ conspiracy, cos he follows him on LinkedIn and saw him rejecting the accusations. Dreams about raising funding from LETA Capital. 🙃
Thank you for reading until the end. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. If you are thinking about raising funding just like Mr Ivanov, feel free to send us your pitch to info@leta.vc and we will get back to you soon!
