Foster it i dont think ive ever been a thrill seeker i think im a grown up with them as you blocked him probably helped me available at the risk part of the enough to actually do a challenge of building things i like things kind of difficult but its not the only like risk for the sake of for us going the way that lets say a war correspondent actually seeks out conflict and to ensure. Its an interesting observation that you just made because. You were introduced to research earlier on not as some blind you know dark uncertainty or im no one but actually calculate to build probability and. Many people especially in this country tend to fear risk more they tend to fear they fear more and they risk it represents a threat how do you think it should be dealt with well i mean thats not always easy. To calculate everything right but certainly in what i do professionally in making investments i think some to. Get in the way and. To distribute us to make them with the information that. According to act logically now i know that you are not the. Big fan of talking about your experience on the mit Blackjack Team but let me ask a few questions the whole thing was depicted in in a famous movie 21 and its shown there as. Was it really as dramatic as it is portrayed in the movie it has some dramatic moments but no nothing like about the movie that movie was based on the story it wasnt the actual story itself theres another movie on the History Channel that tells the story but even there i think they turned that into a little bit of a plot you know where the plot curve in reality we got kicked out all the time and we came back and thats just the nature of the course in such a story thats didnt want to. Be alive you had that was done when people were asking you about that because i mean you found that you had accomplished many other things but when you look back at those year is what is it in terms of Life Experience that you 2 from. Early years is there something that stayed with you though there were many former and important things that i learned while writing this blog to chemicals my 1st start up. The graduate program and i teach to do it and it was also my 1st fund and you know we were paid taxes we made returns for investors we were all souls in the stores and learned lots of stuff about how to run an organization that can really trust everyone. Valid probabilities and opportunities and how to repeat well how to trust your intuition and you have a synergy not so much about the i would say and then terms of working with your team mates and building a culture within the organization probably yes we did in the casino and world no into this and it was just pure numbers like following a exact script writing down everything that happened and modeling it and those 4 hours talking about it actually ive always been there transparent about the story im happy to talk about it there was just a period of time when that was in the news a lot before this movie actually came out where i its not that i felt like i didnt want to talk about it its that i was actually frustrated because it was in fact at the time the most interesting thing that i have to say and the full of it are much driven to become more you quit playing because you started. You know own company down after a few times to start your own companies you move to investing whats so interesting whats just thrilling about investing for you well i guess i felt like i had to run my own business. I started a Software Company in 97 the full sold in 2000 and even before sold a few in chill checks as and then fill in the thing. And what i liked about it i think was actually the mentoring got a little bit mentored by older entrepreneurs around boston when i had my startup there was a group of people young founders hold a mentor and after i sold my company i was invited to come back to the group as a mentor even though i was much younger than other mentors. And really enjoyed that a Little Something maybe i missed out on the little when i was younger but i also realized as a operate over business i didnt have the patience to do one thing in the 15 years to build a big company i just didnt have it and i didnt have the purpose within the company that you need to have but i loved. Helping founders and i viewed them as my customers and so i started investing it to be involved in lots of different businesses which suited me but be to really learn to become a better mentor a better advisor to make an impact on these peoples lives because the one thing about black. Not satisfying to me was that the i made money didnt scale it wasnt huge amounts of money but i made a few 1000000. 00 but never really had any customers no one think that it was just money for the sake of money in your recent interviews you are pretty open about not being motivated by making money and this is pretty an usual for an american because you are an american right now its their highly materialistic society you call me still being its biggest what sat you free from war shipping it. Thats a little bit question let me 1st on this i have an american passport then there are many things i like about the country from identity to know its a complicated thing and identity and i never really felt like i was an american i certainly dont feel like im a russian i feel like im russian and some ways but not a russian right i also feel in some ways like a jew its part of my identity the american part might be a little stronger than those other 2 but what ive discovered more recently is that what i really am as an immigrant as the son of parents that moved from one place to another. Change. In my life from the part in russia to the part of america actually became the defining moment and if anything i think my people of the other people who have gone through that from a new country to any other country i just have more in common with them than i do with with americans as a whole the russians as a whole if i may dwell on the issue of investing a little bit longer i heard you say that you are now trying to invest for the purpose of making change rather than money and as somebody who has covered a number of. Well american lot wars. I shiver at kohls of making the world a better place because that alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths that simply didnt have to be how do you go about. Understanding defining what kind of change you want to see in the world again for some reason youre packing a little some sense of a question in this case the function that going to stop me. Doing what i do know to change the world enough to make money so thats not strictly speaking correct. I do it from reading i may be wrong i mean phrasing phrase it in your own way and what i do today after many many years of angel investing at some point did become primarily not to change the world but to help particular founders because i enjoyed helping people i enjoyed the gratitude i got back from work in the selfish way after years of and running another accelerator started a new venture fund the fund is not a Philanthropic Organization yes we invest in companies started by immigrants we do have a mission around impacting the world in particular way we believe that the get to the Financial Success of our fund will actually. Show it will point out the fact that people who move from one place to another to create value create jobs create companies to just consume service because the fund is structured as a purely for profit vehicle we have this mission road but the only way for us to achieve the impact you want to achieve is to build very large funds with partners in many countries that will take a couple of decades the rest of my professional life and the only possible path to that is through outsized venture returns to my limited partners and to myself right now so the actual path towards our mission is one of pure money making we use the fact that we are an organization which helps our marketing it helps our thinking it gets gains us the respect of this founders and ultimately hopefully getting to deals that are very competitive where money alone doesnt get you have to actually provide value. People like us the phone like the idea that there is a fund especially for immigrant founders and that puts you at our. Current president of the United StatesPresident Trump who i know you dislike very strongly as he does like the leader of this country which we will talk about later but speaking of President Trump he seem to be somebody who is not to many. Who is not afraid of breaking the socially politically imposed dogmas here freely goes against the tide to achieve what he passionately believed them. Daunte you respect the results of going not just against the tide but they get the opprobrium i like that part of the risk but do you think hes successful in terms of achieving the results he has sought for himself i think he has achieved some positive things. For the open about the fact that i do dislike a style i dislike personality but. Many things. I think oprah very positive for the economy lowering taxes corporations many other things while on the subject of immigrants integration i think we probably have some more left and some disagreements for it i think youll probably agree that he probably doesnt want the kind of im going to be on this thing and to come to the u. S. I know that you wrote an open letter to President Trump delineating the contribution of immigrant interpreters to the economy and i thought it was a very eloquent ladder but it was also a very misplaced argument because President Trump is not arguing for closing the use borders completely what hes asking for is preselecting who comes in and this is what you do in all your investing. Being very selective about who you share your resources your time your reports light or 1000. 00 applied to immigration and thats what i just agree with trump i think trump agree with me that the kind of immigrants we are investing in are in fact positive for america and we have some other disagreements about some of the folks i mean i dont like his methods i can tell you what i dont like at all but what i really dislike. Feel like he is. Building a populist appeal to groups of people the middle left behind by globalization by the in the but acknowledging and helping them find scapegoats and giving them some of the blame for their problems that bothers me but you know other politicians do me as well its not just i mean why why do you think its just political slogan because i mean if you. Actually look at the figures on the trunk the United States accepted roughly the same amount of immigrants of roughly a 1000000 each year thats very comparable. I dont think its just a Political School going to look let me say for the 3rd time i agree with President Trump on the fact that the kind of highly educated immigrants that come to the us to take. Qualified jobs and to build businesses i think ought to come to the country more and more occasionally in the implementation of these i think in addition to slowing down migration for 4 migrants one educating the workers they have also made it hard to get certain kinds of professional these i mean this is something that all countries still developed countries in the world practice Canada Australia new zealand you know all these champions of human rights theyre extremely selective about who they take and they have the benefit of the how do you hold as a buffer against those who they dont want to take so i guess what im saying is that i think the president probably has the same attentions to to let more of those kinds of people in practically speaking i think what i see is that its gotten harder for those people to go around but where this is figures dont support that last year the United States accepted more legal immigrants in 2014 a particular examples but but they are i think youre looking for this agreement so the area of disagreement is that i believe the qualified workers should also be allowed another people invest them but people like we were i heard you say that you are for open borders you dont think that immigration should be controlled at all but there are a couple of interviews i can decide where you stand out and i just dont understand how you square that with Property Rights reach depan degree deal on some notion of jurisdiction how do you square that with private property. Thats an excellent question. Lets talk about open borders so i do believe in Property Rights quite strongly. When i say open borders. Im talking about the basic notion of human rights i think. The random circumstances of your birth the papers that to happen to receive based on where you were born its not up to you i think there should be equality of opportunity people property absolutely there is a 1000000 and there are refugees in the world today and you know why should you have a Privileged Access to your apartment when people are still living on the streets i mean you can make this sort of argument but because he turns out on the part of the on the border and then theyre going to finish and the reason is that i believe in private property i dont believe the country is like your partner jim and lets take a very short break now we will return to this interesting conversation in just a few moments. Welcome back to worlds apart to be russian american investor and business mentor just before the break we were discussing president. Immigration policies and as far as i understand important in response to you your disagreement in 2017 you set out your own venture to how foreign born interpreters is the goal to how down where there are or is the goal ultimately to introduce them today American Market all the goal of the metrics of action at the center a maximum return a star element of partners of which im the largest. We have discovered companies with an immigrant founder in the. Us in the can and are more likely to grow to be very large the majority of all the so called going to courts the 1000000000. 00 plus about loosing private companies have an immigrant father 55 percent of them so this is not the kind of population the President Trump is actually cutting anyway lets stop talking about President Trump because i want to talk about another country russia and its leader who are not particularly about either you left russia 979. When i hear you discuss it right now my jaw literally drops because last year for example you compared moscow to berlin during the 2nd world war and when hitler was still in power and you are entitled to your own opinions please explain me why. You seriously believe russia more than russia is the key to nafta jim. I dont believe this i dont. Recall making a comparison. I may have made a mistake in the interview too about. Maybe the taking of context im not sure if i made that comparison i think i was exaggerating i dont really feel that way here no i dont i dont find the country is still pretty critical about the state of affairs in russia what was the gist of your disagreement with the policies the direction this country has been taking. Expert on russia i havent been here in 9 years. About planning to disagree with my point of view and it seems like theres a fairly high level of corruption still in the country today that may be getting a little better. In some ways its become a little bit more like like of course when i left in the seventys and you know what. The propaganda the nationalism i dont like i dont when there was a conflict with ukraine you know i was i had been travelling that was pretty sympathetic to the ukrainian view of things and. You know there are particular areas of disagreement but i dont think its fair to say that i like anti russian anyway i. Heard you say maybe again im taking you out of context but i heard you say that you are not particularly keen on supporting russian in term for nice partially because of how bad you think the situation in the country is at the moment the situation of a floor you know it can all make freedoms media freedoms. Russia found in america and canada why not here well were not really investing in europe at all right we are fairly Small Organization and were very focused now returns and so the way we generate higher turnout this by getting to know the founders and so just very graphically we invest in areas where we have partners. I didnt have that many russian speaking founders but i would say at this point if anything else im learning to sort of use my. Core strength and i have another partner no thats russian speaking from lithuania. And i think well be investing probably in more not less from russia but as far as people building businesses here its very far from me and be sure i mean i think its probably harder to build a big Global Company in russia and your odds of making the world greater better place greater if you actually. Risk open practive people to break the ground for who they are because its not only about growing business and i think it was someone whos trying to make the world a better place you know i dont have such ambitions i dont have such capability but i know how to make money by investing in early stage startups generate a 35 percent per year returns for 20 years straight with my own capital around the tech stocks in boston the great Financial Success and building a venture fund arbitraging away the low valuation of going to founders versus the proportional ability to create very large outcomes and where i do best which is where i live but you know you often talk about making an impact and supporting a startup is not just about growing business its about stimulating it Phenomenal Growth and at the hands of the day its also about changing political environment because. One can argue that this country will never change unless there is an off people who can take responsibility for themselves for other people for the country and challenge the admittedly paternalistic even authoritarian system and make sure. The heat is on the authorities to treat down with respect gruel or think its for. Your own money and. Im doing what im doing i believe that the Financial Success of the fund will have a positive impact on the world because i think it will demonstrate that having a more open society is better that immigrants are actu