5 ms·
Facebook: Are You Interfacing with the Russian Mafia & KGB? (2010)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- DevX101 15y agoI'm going to guess you're with the CIA. Can you guys have accounts on other social networks?
- forensic 15y agoWhat did the comment you're replying to say? He has deleted it. But I'm curious.
- felipemnoa 15y agoHe said that the CIA does not allow its employees to have Facebook accounts and the reason cited was similar to the title of this article. They were also advised that their families should not have Facebook accounts. Even low level employees were advised to do this. Finally, he made a point of saying he was using a throwaway account.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nivertech 15y agoNow you can mine Facebook vs. population census and calculate who is a CIA employee ...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- palish 15y agoCould you expand on that?
- nivertech 15y agoBTW, In-Q-Tel guys, a CIA venture capital arm, have LinkedIn profiles.
- nivertech 15y agoBTW, this is how CIA employee profile on LinkedIn looks like: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ijhijj-jijijijji/40/a56/1a2 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ijhijj-jijijijji/40/a56/1a2
- DevX101 15y agoAndrey Ternovskiy also turned down several large investment offers from U.S. firms. His refusal to deal with DST doesn't necessarily mean he had ethical problems with the source. Maybe he just didn't want VC money.
- joshu 15y ago> Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York He blew off the people who flew him out, IIRC
- SkyMarshal 15y agoI heard that too. Sounds like he had a bit of an ego, pissed off potential investors, and now Sean Fanning's Airtime is on the way to becoming Chatroulette done right (your FB friends instead of random pervs), and Andrey will have to return home empty handed when his Visa expires...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dmitri1981 15y agoI wonder if any YC companies have passed on Milner's generous investment offer due to these allegations?
- jwwest 15y agoIt's highly un-PC to say, but any money coming out of Russia requires a higher level of scrutiny due to the environment there. Actually, it's probably a great idea to research any investor throughly before taking money. There's an incredible berth of information on how to create attractive companies for investment, but not so much on dating your investors.
- pg 15y agoNo. In fact, I have never heard of a case where a startup refused investment from a venture fund because of who their LPs were. Incidentally, the Start Fund is Yuri's private fund. It's not part of DST.
- eps 15y agoThe question is how likely Yuri's private fund is to stay that way.
- Hitchhiker 15y agoThe guy worked for the world bank. He owns a gigantic home and probably has been vetted by the feds given their recent investment activity. I think pg must be literally rofl with some of the stuff being posted re Yuri in recent times. Do think that HN also doubles up as some kind of comedy central carefully curated by wily partners. Information asymmetry ensures that some jokes are only understood by the chosen few. Look at this " official " account http://twitter.com/#!/yurimilner http://twitter.com/#!/yurimilner for further insights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcxGFmYyPs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcxGFmYyPs reflects yC quite well. PG is Colonel Hogan of course.
- felipemnoa 15y agoDevil's Advocate: Bernard Madoff used to be chairman of nasdaq and was only "caught" because he confessed. Even when the SEC was told point blank by Harry Markopolos that Madoff was a fraud nobody did anything. When lots of money is involved some people turn a blind eye if it benefits them.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI always find these sorts of allegations lacking a certain credibility. In the sense that a 10% share holder really can't over whelm the company's direction without a lot of help from other share holders.
- felipemnoa 15y agoLet me play devil's advocate: Does the Mafia care that they have only 10% share?
- wisty 15y agoAn interesting article on connections between the Russian mob, Putin, the KGB, and Russian investors. The Facebook angle is just a bit of linkbait spice, and is only a small part of the article. If I were Zuckerberg, I wouldn't really care where my investors were. Once you are liquid, you just can't control what happens to your shares. And at Facebook's stage of development, they aren't going to change direction just to get another minority investor (unlike a new start-up, which can be sunk by a VC overthrowing their CEO, stacking the board, wiping out the value of employee options, and other such tricks). I'd watch my back when travelling in Russia, though (whether or not I'd taken their money). edit: other interesting bits - legal threats against bloggers; and ISPs taking down blogs due to the threats.
- reso 15y agoYeah, Mark controls 3/5 board seats for life. Investors are essentially just along for the ride.
- fl3tch 15y agoTIL. But let me ask you something. If Mark isn't in this for the money (that's the way he's painted anyway, since he could have sold or gone public long ago for tons of cash), what exactly does he want? Why keep that kind of control (3/5 board seats, private company)? What exactly does he want?
- AJ007 15y agoI think the answer is simple, he wants to control his own damn company.
- xxbondsxx 15y agoHe already answered this in an interview about the Social Network. A lot of people in Hollywood (and in general) don't understand the concept of just loving to build things. Facebook was built by him and it's gotten insanely huge and when you've dedicated a large portion of your life to something like that, you don't want to give it up. No other work would be satisfying; facebook is his. Some people truly love doing this stuff and don't build it to flip it and that throws people off
- demetris 15y ago“Are these the folks you want having access to all the personal data on your Facebook account?” If I had to choose, I would say these folks do indeed sound scarier than Zuckerberg. The piece needed a better closing sentence.
- jccodez 15y agoFront Page???
- terse 15y agoi'd venture to guess that the majority of fb's shareholders are based outside the u.s. fb manages to remain not only a creepy, privacy invading behemoth but also, for its size and investment, an unusually secretive one. by all means you should share everything with them, but it doesn't work the other way around. their books are closed to public view. how is this accomplished? the newyorker ran a piece about this back in jan.
- darksaga 15y agoIts always been scary to do business in that part of the world. I had a few buddies who were in telecom and were working there shortly after the fall of Communism. They used to tell stories of caring large sums of cash to pay bribes and keep the KGB at bay while they went about their work. They made it seem like this was just the way business was done. It seems like it's getting more dangerous since these people have no problem killing influential and powerful people. Scary, very, very, scary.
- skeptical 15y agoI get it, Russia is becoming strong again but it's not a business partner, so let's turn on the old propaganda machine that has been off since the cold war. Is the russian mob or the kgb so different than other organizations in other countries? Would an article on chinese government inteligence still be recieved as seriously?
- adlep 15y agoThis is exactly why Yuri's Milner's involvement in YC is controversial. Most likely, given the political and economical climate in Russia he did not earn his wealth by playing fair. Now some of that tainted money are being handled over to our best for a quick wash...
- guard-of-terra 15y agoWhat do you mean by "playing fair"? Like, in post-war Japan and Korea they decided how many big corporations they are going to grow, allocated resources and appointed people in control. Those became for-life managers to multi-billion corporations because they were in the right time in the right place. Was that fair? The "wealth" had to go somewhere and some people got it with some effort. What should have they done? How would you differentiate between someone who got a piece of USSR industry and pillaged it, and someone who ran his piece wisely?
- eps 15y agoCommon opinion between Russians is that anyone who accumulated a lot of wealth in early 90s and managed to stay alive was in mafia or had very close ties with it - either a criminal or a state one. The reason is simple. If you start legitimately and your business is successful, you would be approached eventually by power people offering protection in exchange for sharing profits and/or company share. No exceptions. You earn - you share. The choice between the criminals and corrupted officials was yours though.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoThis applies to running small and medium business, but not to "inheriting" large chunks of [especially mining and extraction] industry. There, mafia doesn't have any business commonly associated with them. Mafia does loans, racketeering and vice. Large industry isn't about any of those things. Maybe I'm wrong but I think you should not overextend the meaning of term "mafia". Anyway, this does not answers the "fair" question. Oneself fairness is not direcly affected by people the person in question has to deal with. You still have to prove unfairness, "he was seen near where the mafia usually manifests" doesn't cut it.