Part IThe Story
A Birthday Call From Tel Aviv
On February 11, 2022, Arkady Volozh turned fifty-eight. He spent part of the day on the phone in his car in Tel Aviv, talking about his father. The old man was in his eighties and an oil geologist, and Volozh was bragging, in the way sons brag about fathers who are still working the ground, that he had "discovered" oil in Israel. The quotation marks belong to the magazine. The pride belonged to Volozh.
The man on the other end of the line was Paul Starobin, a writer for Wired, who was preparing to fly to Israel to profile the reigning baron of Russia's technology sector. Volozh was in what Starobin called a privetliviy mood, from privet, the casual Russian hello: open, engaging, a host. He asked whether there was anything in particular his visitor wanted to see. The old city of Jerusalem, perhaps? Starobin had seen it. He had a different idea. Yandex had recently bought an electric-scooter business in Israel, and he wanted to try the company's products himself.
How about a scooter ride?
Hold that question. The answer comes later.
On the day of the call, Yandex had a market capitalization of $16 billion on Nasdaq. About 85 percent of its shares traded in the United States. Most of its 18,000 employees worked out of the headquarters on Leo Tolstoy Street in Moscow, while the founder, whom everyone at the company called Arkady, Western-style, without the patronymic Yurievich, had for several years lived more or less full-time in Israel with his family. The company ran Russia's dominant search engine, its leading ride-hailing app, its biggest music service, its navigation, its maps, its news aggregator, and a good deal of its e-commerce and payments. Its six-wheeled delivery robots, which Starobin described as "something of a six-wheeled Igloo cooler," were rolling across college campuses in Arizona and Ohio. It had self-driving cars on test routes in Ann Arbor. Taken together, the arrangement was a bet that a company could belong to one country, sell to the world, and be governed from a third place without anyone forcing it to choose. Volozh had kept that bet going for a quarter century.
Thirteen days after the birthday call, at 5:50 in the morning on February 24, Vladimir Putin announced his "special military operation," and the first missiles fell on Ukraine. By March 2, Yandex was worth $6.7 billion. Forbes calculated that Volozh's fortune had dropped from roughly $2.6 billion to $580 million in a matter of days. He was no longer, by the magazine's accounting, a billionaire. Four months later the European Union put him on a sanctions list, at position 1,175, below an executive of the state oil giant Rosneft and below a son of the late mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin. In Moscow, meanwhile, people were starting to call him a traitor.
Der Spiegel later wrote that his fate was "more than just astonishing. It doesn't make much sense." He had become an enemy of the state on both sides of the confrontation between Russia and the West. The proverb about the enemy of my enemy, the magazine noted dryly, "apparently doesn't apply in this case."
Then came the part that makes even less sense, or perhaps the part that finally does. Four years after that phone call, the remains of the company he had been forced to give up were trading on Nasdaq under a new name and a new ticker. They were worth roughly $50 billion, about three times Yandex's value on his birthday, and were bound by contracts with Microsoft and Meta that together ran to more than $46 billion. Forbes put his net worth at $6.8 billion. He had renounced his Russian citizenship. His father, by then presumably in his late eighties, was still in Israel.
The son of a man who looked for oil underground had spent his life building machines that looked for things, and in the end he found the one resource every power on earth wanted: computing capacity. Getting there required losing almost everything he had built on the way.
By the Numbers
From Softool to the Nasdaq-100
4.5 GBSize of Yandex's first search index, covering 5,000 servers, at its 1997 launch
$5.28MPaid by Baring Vostok in 2000 for 35.72% of the company
$1.3BRaised in Yandex's May 2011 Nasdaq IPO, the largest dot-com offering since Google's
$31BYandex's peak market capitalization, November 2021
$5.4BDiscounted price of the July 2024 sale of all Russian assets, the largest corporate exit from Russia after the invasion
$19.4BMaximum value of Nebius's September 2025 AI infrastructure contract with Microsoft
~$50BNebius market capitalization, May 2026
The Geologist's Son
Guryev sits on the Caspian coast of what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and is now Atyrau, Kazakhstan. It is an oil town, and the Volozhs were an oil family in the specific sense that the father was a petroleum geologist. The mother taught music. The family was Russian-Jewish. Arkady was born there on February 11, 1964, which in the Soviet geography of prestige put him about as far from the center as a gifted child could get while still being counted.
He was sent to the Republican School of Physics and Mathematics in Alma-Ata, now Almaty, one of the Soviet boarding schools that collected mathematically talented children from the outer republics and drilled them hard. One of his classmates there was Ilya Segalovich, born that same year, seven months after Volozh, on September 13. The two boys became friends. A decade and a half later, Segalovich would think up the name that made them both rich.
In 1981, both of them went to Moscow to apply to Moscow State University, the most important university in the country. Volozh wanted to study geology, as his father had. Neither boy was admitted. A Moscow Times reporter, writing about it in 2005, put the reason as plainly as a Russian newspaper could at the time: in 1981 it was difficult for minorities and applicants from outside Moscow to get into the capital's top schools. Volozh had graduated from the Alma-Ata school with top marks. It made no difference.
The rejection sorted the two friends into adjoining branches of the same Soviet extractive economy. Segalovich went to the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, to the geophysical faculty, and so became the geologist Volozh had wanted to be. Volozh went to the applied mathematics faculty of the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas. A Moscow State geology degree would have sent him out after hydrocarbons. Gubkin instead sent him to a computer, and he graduated in 1986 into the closing years of an empire whose main export was what came out of the ground.
Soviet graduates of that era owed the state their labor. Volozh was required to work for at least three years at the computing center of the Pipeline Construction Research and Development Institute. A pipeline is the most literal piece of infrastructure there is: a pipe that carries a raw material from where it lies to where it is wanted. The computing center, the Moscow Times reported, was handed many of the institute's most innovative projects. Even so, a young mathematician in a pipeline institute in 1986 was serving the oil economy, at a desk.
That boundary between what comes out of the ground and what can be built on top of it ran through his whole life, and in 2023 he finally said so out loud. Writing about the founding of Yandex, Volozh said his generation had believed they were building a country "known in the world not only for its raw materials." The phrase is easy to skim past, but it is central to understanding him.
Pumpkin Seeds for Computers
In 1988, a Soviet government decree made cooperatives, small private enterprises, legal. Even then, the change came down through the Party. In Volozh's account, nobody stepped forward with an idea.
— Arkady Volozh, to The Moscow Times, 2005Our district's [Communist] Party office said, "We are now creating cooperatives." Our institute's head called my department's chief and said, "We'll be now establishing a cooperative."
So a cooperative was established. It was called Magistr, and its business model, to the extent it had one, was this: export pumpkin seeds from Russia's south, and import personal computers from Austria. Agricultural goods went out, machines came in. It was the whole Soviet economic predicament in a single trade, and Volozh, who was responsible for the technical side, admitted seventeen years later that he still did not quite understand how it had worked. "I still don't understand how [this cooperative] really functioned," he said, and the reporter noted that he said it as a joke.
The computers were what mattered. "A personal computer was like a personal car," Volozh remembered. In 1989 he left Magistr with two PCs, sold them for $3,600, and used the money to buy a two-room apartment near Kievskaya metro station in Moscow. Kievskaya is named for the city at the end of the rail line that leaves from its station: Kyiv. Nobody thought anything of that in 1989.
He did not go into real estate. The same year he co-founded CompTek, which would grow into one of Russia's largest distributors of networking and telecommunications equipment, a business of boxes and cables that was profitable and dull. He also started working on search. With Arkady Borkovsky, a programmer who would later end up at Yahoo in California and who was one of the many Soviet engineers whose careers moved steadily westward through the 1990s, he set up a company called Arkadia. In 1990, Volozh called his old classmate from the Alma-Ata school. Segalovich joined.
The problem Arkadia worked on was Russian grammar, which is unusually hard on a search engine. A single Russian noun can take a dozen or more forms depending on case, number, and gender, and verbs multiply further by aspect and tense. A search engine that matches strings exactly will fail on most Russian queries. Arkadia's first products were information-retrieval systems for the International Classification of Inventions and a classifier of goods and services. They ran under DOS and searched only words picked from a fixed dictionary.
In 1993 Arkadia became a division of CompTek, and over 1993 and 1994 its technology improved considerably through work with the laboratory of the linguist Yuri Apresyan at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems. The result was a morphological dictionary small enough, 300 kilobytes, to sit entirely in memory and run quickly. For the first time, a user could type any form of a Russian word and find every other form.
The first applications are worth recording. In 1994 the team built the Biblical Computer Directory, a searchable version of the Synodal translation of the Old and New Testaments. In 1995 came an academic edition of the Russian classics on CD-ROM, produced with the Gorky Institute of World Literature. The first thing the future Russian Google searched was scripture, and the second was Pushkin. Only after that did it search the internet.
That same year, 1993, Volozh and Segalovich came up with a name for the technology. It was an acronym, Yet Another iNDEXer, the kind of self-deprecating joke engineers make when they assume they will lose. It was also a bilingual pun. In Russian, the letter Я, pronounced ya, means "I." Read that way, the name means "I-index": I search, or the index of me. Segalovich is usually credited with the name. Volozh drew the first logo himself, modeled on CompTek's. Their search company carried the first-person pronoun at the front of its name.
Yet Another Indexer
On September 23, 1997, at the Softool exhibition in Moscow, CompTek announced the Yandex.ru search engine. A photograph from that day shows Volozh, Segalovich, and Elena Kolmanovskaya, an early colleague, at the stand. They look like what they were, researchers in their thirties at a trade fair. The first index covered about 5,000 servers and took up 4.5 gigabytes. By 1998 the entire search engine ran on three machines using FreeBSD and Apache: one crawled and indexed, one answered queries, and one served as a backup. Revenue in the first year, Reuters later reported, was under $100,000.
Volozh made a point of the date. Two decades later, sitting in a WeWork in Tel Aviv, he told the Israeli business daily Calcalist that he did not much like the comparison with Google. "Yandex's search engine went live in September 1997," he said, "almost a year before Google." He was not wrong.
The company's timing came from that same period. In 1998 Yandex introduced contextual advertising. In 2000 Yandex was incorporated as a standalone company in Cyprus, and Volozh left CompTek to become its full-time CEO. That year Baring Vostok Capital Partners bought 35.72 percent of the company for $5.28 million, a valuation of about $15 million for what would become the most valuable technology company in Russia. In 2001 came Yandex.Direct, the advertising network that paid for everything after it, and in the same year Yandex passed Rambler, the incumbent, to become the leading search engine of the Russian internet. By April 2002 it was handling more than two million queries a day. It became profitable in 2003. The account of how a few Moscow investors priced all of this, and mispriced it, has been told in Russian by Sergei Vasiliev in Как мы покупали русский интернет ("How We Bought the Russian Internet"). The founders seem to have understood the Western-style capital structure they were adopting better than most of their investors did.
By 2002 the word "Yandex" had become ordinary Russian. When Volozh's company went to court to recover the yandex.com domain from the third party that had bought it, the defendant argued that "Yandex" was already a generic word for searching. Volozh's pun had become a common noun within five years.
In 2003, Sergey Brin and Larry Page came to Moscow. Calcalist later recounted the meeting in some detail, and it noted the similarities. All four men were mathematics enthusiasts and children of scientists who had met in school. Three of them, Brin, Volozh, and Segalovich, were Soviet-born Jews. Google was not yet public, but it was already much bigger than Yandex. Brin and Page offered $100 million.
Everything appeared to be in order. Then Volozh and Segalovich realized that Yandex would disappear inside Google, and that they would go from being founders to being hired engineers. The deal was off.
The refusal is worth pausing over, because it was not a nationalist gesture. Nothing in the record suggests Volozh turned down Google to keep a Russian company Russian. He turned it down so that the company would stay theirs, which is a different and more personal motive, and to judge by the name, it was the motive built into the company from the start.
The Soft Voice in the Room
In November 2005, the Moscow Times reporter Maria Levitov described the forty-one-year-old CEO of Russia's largest internet portal like this: unlike other high-profile internet gurus, Volozh "does not sport a ponytail and appears at public functions in a suit and tie." He had a quick mind and was "first to crack wry jokes when least expected," but he looked "somewhat like a researcher at the Academy of Sciences." While the future kings of the American internet boom were making late-night runs to Chuck's Donuts in Redwood City, Levitov wrote, Volozh had been trading pumpkin seeds.
He told her something in that interview that also served as a corporate strategy: "We used to create services as we wanted to use them. Now, we think of services that our children and parents would use."
Fourteen years later, in July 2019, Calcalist's Sophie Shulman found him in Tel Aviv dressed in a white T-shirt and denim, lightly stubbled, his voice "soft and quiet," walking through a WeWork full of young founders who did not recognize him. The only people who stopped him for selfies were, as Shulman noted, "exclusively of Russian descent." His company had a market capitalization of $12.8 billion, and he described it to her as "the Russian Silicon Valley." Shulman summed up his method in one sentence: "Quietly, carefully, and with a great deal of Soviet discipline." Among the American and Israeli executives who worked with him, the same quality came up repeatedly. John Boynton, the American chairman of Yandex's board, who would later chair its successor, told Wired that Volozh "does not come across as a driven entrepreneur." Starobin called him "self-effacing, cerebral, respectful, a soft voice in the boardroom with a salt-and-cinnamon goatee."
The people who reported to him described something sharper underneath. Greg Abovsky, who served Yandex as both chief operating officer and chief financial officer, sat across from Volozh at the moments when product decisions turned into financial ones.
— Greg Abovsky, former COO and CFO of Yandex, to The Moscow Times, 2025He was a great productologist. Sometimes he would rip people to shreds for designing a button a certain way… and other times he would be so proud of what people were able to accomplish. He really got under people's skin, both in a positive and a negative way.
"Productologist" is a term of art in Russian tech, someone whose expertise is the product itself, and Abovsky's description is the useful corrective to the soft-voice image. Volozh delegated almost everything and cared intensely about a few things. When the Moscow Times tracked down nearly a dozen old associates in 2025, they described him as "a meticulous, soft-spoken delegator whose greatest strength is knowing how to get the most out of the people around him." Alexander Laryanovskiy, a tech entrepreneur born in Soviet Turkmenistan who met Volozh in the late 1990s and was later hired to help with international expansion, another child of the Soviet periphery drawn into the Moscow company, remembered the early energy above all: "He was very energetic, he was very proactive."
Under Volozh the company was run, in the description of one early profile, in a way that was not typical for Russia: T-shirts, self-set schedules, a free buffet, billiards and ping-pong. More consequentially, it ran on mathematics. In 2009 Yandex launched MatrixNet, a gradient-boosting method for machine-learned ranking that let the search engine weigh an enormous number of signals at once. Its open-source descendant, CatBoost, was released in July 2017 and was already being used in a project with CERN to analyze particle-experiment data. JetBrains later used it for code completion and Cloudflare for bot detection.
Volozh was convinced that mathematical talent was a national resource that could be refined, much like the oil his father had looked for. In 2007, he and his team founded the Yandex School of Data Analysis, a free, master's-level program in data science, and that year he also helped set up and then headed the Department of Data Analysis at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The company had decided to produce the people it needed instead of waiting for the state to produce them. Years later, in Tel Aviv, the school would open a branch.
There was one person no school could replace. Ilya Segalovich, Yandex's chief technology officer, had a life outside the company that was as unbusinesslike as Volozh's suit was businesslike. With his wife Maria he ran a charity called "Children of Mary," and he brought Patch Adams's international troupe of clowns to Russia to entertain sick children, often performing with them himself. In 2004 he co-authored a paper laying out details of Yandex's ranking. On July 27, 2013, he died of stomach cancer. He was forty-eight. Two days earlier, The Wall Street Journal had published a story headlined "Yandex Co-Founder on Life Support."
The boy from the Alma-Ata school who had been turned away from Moscow State University alongside Volozh, who studied the geology Volozh had wanted to study, and who gave the company its name, did not live to see what the Kremlin did with it. Within a year of his death, Volozh had moved to Israel.
The trouble started, as it often does in Russia, with a compliment. Yandex was becoming important. In 2012 it passed Channel One, the state's flagship television network, in daily audience, and in 2013 it passed it in revenue, becoming the largest media property in Russia. That May, a bill in the State Duma proposed classifying Yandex and VKontakte as strategic enterprises and "national information translators." The media expert Mikhail Gurevich called Yandex a "national treasure." In Russia, being called a national treasure usually means the state is starting to think of you as its property.
The state had been circling for a while. In 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev initiated the purchase by Sberbank, the state-controlled savings bank, of a "golden share" in Yandex, designed to keep an important national company from falling into foreign hands. Volozh agreed to it. The alternative, all observers understood, was worse. Yandex's holding company had already moved from Cyprus to the Netherlands in 2007, and its head office was officially a virtual office address at Schiphol Airport, a company domiciled, on paper, at an airport. The operating company remained in Moscow, on Leo Tolstoy Street, a street name the internet columnist at Vanity Fair joked was "the exact street and city we would say if asked to name any Russian address."
Then came the 2011 IPO. On May 24, Yandex N.V. raised $1.3 billion on Nasdaq, the largest dot-com offering since Google's in 2004, and the stock rose 55 percent on its first day. Baring Vostok still held 35 percent and Tiger 15 percent. Within months Yandex had launched in Turkey and was talking openly about global expansion. In an October 2011 interview with Kommersant, filed with the SEC in translation, Volozh explained his reasoning. Only a few countries in the world, he said, had their own search technologies: "the United States, China, South Korea, the Czech Republic and Russia." Only three companies had a global index: "Google, Bing and Yandex."
In the same interview he complained, mildly, about Google's use of Chrome to make it harder for users to switch default search engines, and he made a point that had nothing to do with politics but would later look painfully relevant. "No matter what browser people use, it is important that they always have a choice." Yandex, he noted, "seem[s] to be the only search engine in the world who, as an alternative, has always offered our users an opportunity to search on other engines right on our search results page."
The Kremlin did not share his view of choice. In 2016, according to a later investigation by the independent outlet Meduza, the top five news results on Yandex's home page began to include only pro-Kremlin media approved by the Presidential Administration. Yandex maintained that its news ranking was generated by algorithm. Russian law, though, allowed only registered media sources to appear there, so the algorithm worked on a list the state had already filtered. In June 2019, Yandex refused a Federal Security Service demand under the Yarovaya law to hand over encryption keys for its mail and cloud services. It reached a compromise under which it would provide the requested data without surrendering the keys. That November, after negotiations in which Putin was reportedly personally involved, Yandex agreed to a restructuring that gave more influence to Kremlin-approved board members. Sberbank's golden share was moved into a new "public interest foundation." Sberbank had previously agreed to sell it for one euro.
That figure, one euro, measures the price of an arrangement in which nobody was paying anyone and nobody could leave.
There were other episodes that the founder's admirers find hard to discuss. In April 2020, Yandex search began placing negative commentary about the opposition politician Alexei Navalny at the top of results for his name. The company called it an "experiment" and reverted to organic results. In May 2017, Ukraine had banned Yandex by presidential decree, and on June 1 of that year, after the Security Service of Ukraine raided its offices and accused it of sending Ukrainian users' data to Russian security agencies, an accusation the company denied, Yandex closed its offices in Kyiv and Odesa. In 2018 the digital-rights group Access Now sent a letter addressed to "Arkady Volozh, Chief Executive Officer, Yandex N.V., Ulitsa Lva Tolstogo 16, Moscow," noting that Yandex had ranked ninth of twelve companies in its category for disclosure of users' human rights protections, with no change from the year before.
In 2017, Volozh personally showed Vladimir Putin the company's driverless-car prototype at Yandex's headquarters. The photograph shows the soft-voiced founder walking the head of state around the car he hoped would take Yandex out of Russia.
He was already living outside the country.
Leaving by Degrees
He did not leave all at once. Volozh left Russia the way a cautious man moves money, a portion at a time, keeping reserves.
In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, he moved to Tel Aviv. His parents moved to Israel the same year. The Bell, the Russian independent outlet, later dated his withdrawal from day-to-day operational management to the same year. Reuters added a practical reason: he recognized that some services, such as self-driving cars, "could be better developed overseas." He had been building connections in Israel already. From 2010 to 2012 he sat on the board of Face.com, an Israeli facial-recognition startup in which Yandex invested and which Facebook bought in 2012. Yandex's stake returned $5.7 million and 142,479 shares of Facebook. In March 2014, Yandex bought the Israeli geolocation startup KitLocate and opened an R&D office in the country. In 2016, Volozh obtained Maltese citizenship through Malta's investor program, which made him an EU citizen with no connection to Malta beyond the purchase. In 2017 he married his second wife, Tosha, in Zikhron Ya'akov, a town founded in 1882 by Jewish immigrants from Romania. By The Bell's account, around 2019 he largely stopped visiting Russia, while staying on the payroll as a shareholder and as CEO.
To Calcalist in 2019 he explained his presence in Israel this way, as the paper's headline put it: "We didn't come here for taxis. We came for minds." The company bought Wind's Tel Aviv scooter operations in October 2021, which was the scooter business Starobin would ask about four months later.
His family had divided along the lines of their own choices. His eldest son, Lev, founded a business called MoscowFresh and worked as a manager at Yandex Taxi. His son Timofey became a jazz drummer in New York. His daughter Anna-Ester became an animator in London, running a studio called Dragonbee, and an LGBTQ campaigner. That last fact is worth placing next to another one: in July 2023, Kinopoisk, the film service Yandex had bought in 2013, was fined one million rubles under Russia's new law for "showing films demonstrating non-traditional sexual relations."
His ex-wife, Irina, whom he had married while still a student in the 1980s and with whom he had three children, appears in the record only by her first name. He had six children in all.
The Morning of the Twenty-Fourth
Within hours of Putin's announcement on February 24, about forty of Russia's leading businessmen were summoned to the Kremlin. The heads of Yandex, Ozon, and VK were among them. A source close to the discussions later gave The Bell the key message: "We will support business, regardless of any sections, but you must be patriotic."
Inside Yandex, according to three sources who spoke to The Bell, the invitation set off a fierce argument: go, or don't go? Volozh was in Israel and no longer ran the Russian company directly, so the decision fell to the managing director, Tigran Khudaverdyan. He was a Yandex lifer who had risen to run its taxi business before becoming deputy CEO, and in the end his attachment to the company held him in place. Some colleagues tried to talk him out of going. He was inclined to attend. Volozh, The Bell reported, "could not decide." In the end it was agreed that when the head of state calls, you go.
Many at Yandex still believe that was a mistake. "After all, Oliver Hughes wasn't there, even though Tinkoff was also called," one manager told The Bell with a shrug. In less than a month Khudaverdyan was on the EU sanctions list, and on March 16 he resigned. In the first chaotic days he had briefly left Russia, then returned to Moscow to keep running the company, believing, acquaintances said, that millions of people depended on its services and thousands of families on its payroll. One of them offered a simpler explanation: "It seems to me, he just missed it – his work, his office."
The CEO, Elena Bunina, was on vacation in Cyprus when the war began. A mathematician by training who had risen to run the Russian operating company, she never went back. In early April she wrote on the company's internal forum that she would not return to Russia because of the war, flew directly to Israel, and stepped down. Several other senior people did the same: Roman Chernin, who ran geolocation services; Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of the self-driving group; and Vera Leizerovich, the product chief for ads. "When the invasion started," Volozh later said, "half of the Yandex top management and a thousand engineers left the country."
On June 3, 2022, the EU's sixth sanctions package named him. The listing called him "a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation" and accused Yandex of "promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and de-ranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin." The EU cited, among other things, that Russian state-owned banks were shareholders and that the Russian state held a veto over the sale of material intellectual property, which was the golden share sold for one euro. Volozh resigned as CEO and from the board the same day. He held 45.3 percent of the voting power and 8.6 percent of the economic interest through a family trust, and he signed the voting rights over to a trustee who would follow the board's directives. His statement was short: "While I consider this decision to be misguided and ultimately counterproductive, I do not intend to give any instructions to my family trust as long as sanctions are in place."
The United States and the United Kingdom never sanctioned him. The economist Anders Åslund called the EU's reasoning "poor and dubious." The political scientist Gerhard Mangott said, "It is hard to understand what Volozh is being accused of." It was not hard to understand what Yandex's news product had become, though. Lev Gershenzon, the former head of Yandex.News, said publicly that the company was a key element "in concealing information about the war." Yandex Maps, in June 2022, stopped showing national borders at all. In November, Ukraine's human-rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, pointed out that buildings in Mariupol destroyed by Russian forces were hidden on Yandex's maps while remaining visible on Google's.
In September 2022, Yandex sold its news aggregator, its Zen blogging platform, and the yandex.ru home page itself to VK, the state-aligned social network. The company had to move its front door. It settled on ya.ru. With the name domain gone, what remained was the single Cyrillic letter, Я: "I."
That October, squatters occupied a residential property Volozh owned in Amsterdam. An Amsterdam district court later ruled that they could stay, because sanctions prevented the renovation of the site. A man whose name was synonymous with the Russian word for searching could not legally renovate his own house.
On December 30, 2022, he wrote a farewell letter to Yandex's employees, published by the Russian outlet RBC. "As you know, I have not managed Russian Yandex for a long time," it said, "and this year I had to leave all positions in the company." He called Yandex "the project of my life" and called the plan to split it "reasonable and necessary." He had agreed to the partition with Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minister and head of the Audit Chamber, a close Putin ally who had discussed the deal with Putin himself in late November. Kudrin was the kind of liberal technocrat the Kremlin keeps on hand for situations like this. The letter ended: "Thank you to everyone who has built and is building the best technology company in the country. May the new year bring peace to all."
It did not.
Kazakhstan-Born
For eighteen months after the invasion, Volozh said nothing public about the war. The silence was noticed. In the summer of 2022, Oleg Tinkov, the flamboyant banker who had condemned the war that spring and who said he was then forced to sell his bank at a huge discount to the Kremlin loyalist Vladimir Potanin, said publicly that he expected two other businessmen to speak out: Sergei Galitsky, the founder of the Magnit supermarket chain, and Volozh. Tinkov had made a fortune with almost no help from the state, and he paid for speaking out in the currency the state understood. Potanin, it turned out, would also be among the bidders for Yandex's Russian assets.
In early August 2023, journalists at Meduza noticed something on Volozh's personal website. It described him as "a Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor, and philanthropist." It called Yandex "one of the largest internet companies in Europe." Russia was barely mentioned. The Kyiv Post, citing a monitoring project, would later argue that elements of his Russian past had also been trimmed from his Wikipedia page. Pro-Kremlin propagandists and opposition figures were, for once, equally outraged: the first because he was erasing Russia, the second because he was erasing his responsibility.
According to The Bell's sources, he took the criticism hard. On August 10, he published a statement.
— Arkady Volozh, statement of August 10, 2023I am totally against Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where I, like many, have friends and relatives. I am horrified by the fact that every day bombs fly into the homes of Ukrainians. Despite the fact that I have not lived in Russia since 2014, I understand that I also have a share of responsibility for the actions of the country.
"There were many reasons why I had to remain silent," he went on. "You can argue about the timeliness of my statement, but not about its substance. I am against war." He wrote that "in February 2022, the world changed, and I realized that my story with Yandex was over," and that he had spent the time since then on a task that "required a lot of effort, attention and caution": getting talented Russian engineers out of the country. Then he went back to the founding:
"We believed that we were building a new Russia — an open, progressive, integrated into the global economy, known in the world not only for its raw materials." Over time, he wrote, "it became clear that Russia was in no hurry to become part of the global world. At the same time, the pressure on the company grew." And then, the closest he came to self-criticism: "Has it always been possible to find the right balance? Now, looking back, it is clear that something could have been done differently."
He was, by The Bell's count, only the second major Russian businessman to condemn the war openly and unambiguously. One person close to him told the outlet that there had been "dozens of times when Arkady wanted to speak out, but each time there was something that could be harmed." In January 2025 he gave a specific reason. It had taken eighteen months, he said, because he first needed to relocate about 1,000 Yandex employees who wanted to leave Russia. A person cannot speak freely while their people are still exposed.
The statement earned him a personal mention from Putin, which Reuters described as a greater threat to his security and to the deal splitting Yandex. Kremlin media handled it carefully, emphasizing that the businessman "is currently supporting Russian engineers who have left the country." The Bell's sources noted that nationalizing Yandex outright would wipe out foreign shareholders and probably the company's international business, and one of them put the Kremlin's dilemma neatly: Yandex was not Danone. "Nationalizing factories is one thing, but nationalizing brains is very different."
A family acquaintance, looking at the children Volozh had raised (a drummer playing benefit concerts for Ukraine in New York since March 2022, an LGBTQ campaigner in London), told Coda Story: "When the EU put Arkady on the sanction list, the Kremlin must have had a huge laugh."
In February 2024, the European Council decided not to renew the sanctions against him. On March 12 he was formally removed from the list. On July 15, the Dutch holding company completed the sale of all its Russian assets for $5.4 billion, at a price heavily discounted under Moscow's rules for exiting foreigners. It was the largest corporate exit from Russia after the invasion. The buyers were a consortium: senior Yandex management with 35 percent, a Lukoil-controlled fund with 15, and companies owned by Alexander Chachava, Pavel Prass, and Alexander Ryazanov. The Bell noted speculation that the named owners were intermediaries for others. The Russian company kept the name, the services, the revenue, and nearly all the people. In its 2025 report it listed 36,991 employees.
Volozh kept the shell company registered at the airport.
Railways
On July 16, 2024, the day after the sale closed, the shell announced itself as Nebius Group. The name, its website explains, combines nebula, Latin for cloud, "with a reference to the infinite loop of the Möbius strip." A Möbius strip is a band with only one side. Trace a line along it and you come back to where you started, except that you are now on what seemed to be the other side.
Volozh's launch statement went back to the railways, a theme he had used before.
"Overcoming the current AI infrastructure deficit is a challenge for the entire industry if the AI revolution is to deliver on its promise. This is something foundational, like the railways in the industrial revolution." He called the model "T2T," technology for technologists. "Europe's challenge in the global AI race," he said, "is competing for talent. This is what we have — very smart and talented people."
What he had, specifically, was a data center in Mäntsälä, Finland, which had been Yandex's only significant computing facility outside Russia. He also had about $2.5 billion in cash, no debt, a Nasdaq listing on which trading had been halted since February 2022, three side businesses (Toloka, a data-labeling company; TripleTen, an edtech bootcamp; and Avride, the self-driving and delivery-robot unit, now based in Austin), and roughly a thousand engineers who had left Russia and followed him. Nebius projected annual recurring revenue of about $200 million within six to nine months. In The Bell's only interview with him from that period, he did not play down the task: "We need to launch a new company." An acquaintance told the outlet, "Arkady is rejuvenated. For two years under sanctions he was depressed but now he is bursting with energy and ideas."
He described AI the way he might have described search in 1993. "I have a feeling that AI is more than just hype. This is a serious, long-term thing. It's similar to the rise of the internet and search engines in the 1990s: a big change that happens once in a generation."
The Finnish facility, a source close to the company told The Bell, had to be greatly expanded and almost entirely re-equipped. That required land, electricity, permits, and above all chips. Nebius was among the first to get the leading Nvidia GPUs, helped by what Volozh described to The Innovator's Jennifer Schenker as "a long-standing collaboration with Nvidia across hardware and Cloud which gives us preferential access." The company built its own racks and its own software stack. "We are not the integrator," Volozh said at the DLD conference in Munich in January 2025. "We build the data centers ourselves." To Schenker he put it this way: "Nebius has rebuilt everything from scratch, but we are not starting from scratch. We are rising from the ashes with more than 850 hugely talented engineers across the group."
On October 21, 2024, the shares resumed trading on Nasdaq under a new ticker, NBIS. Volozh had chosen to stay public because it was a cheaper and easier way to raise capital in an extremely capital-intensive business. "Our ambition is to build one of the world's largest specialist AI infrastructure businesses," he said. "This requires access to technological expertise, graphics processing units and capital. These are exactly what we have." In December, Nebius raised $700 million from a group including Accel, Orbis, and Nvidia. A further billion came through bonds. The money went into concrete and power: a GPU cluster in an Equinix facility in Paris, sites in Britain, Spain, and Israel, a tripling of capacity in Finland, a cluster in Kansas City, a 300-megawatt campus under construction in Vineland, New Jersey, and later a proposed "AI factory" along Lakeshore Parkway in Birmingham, Alabama.
The new board, approved at a shareholder meeting held at the airport-office address, Schiphol Boulevard 165, on August 15, 2024, brought old names and new ones together. Esther Dyson, the American internet investor who had backed Yandex in its early days, joined it. So did Kira Radinsky, an Israeli machine-learning researcher, and Ophir Nave, an Israeli executive who became chief operating officer. Elena Bunina, the CEO who had flown from Cyprus to Israel in the spring of 2022 rather than go home, joined as a non-executive director and became head of science and education. Roman Chernin, who had gone to Israel the same spring, became chief business officer. John Boynton stayed on as chairman, the same American who had once told Wired that his CEO did not come across as driven.
In a Tel Aviv conference hall in March 2025, Volozh described where he thought things were going. "We are moving towards an internet where data will be generated instead of simply retrieved." The man who had spent three decades retrieving was now building the facilities that generate. "The chip wars are only escalating," he said. He predicted that work would be disrupted soon, and that a programmer's job would become something like "running a team of 10 thousand algorithms instead of running a team of 10 engineers."
On September 8, 2025, Nebius announced a contract with Microsoft worth up to $19.4 billion, and the stock rose 60 percent in a day. That November came a roughly $3 billion deal with Meta. In February 2026 the company bought Tavily, an agentic-search startup, for about $400 million, which meant a search company again. Later that month, Volozh completed the formal renunciation of his Russian citizenship. On March 11, Nvidia announced it would invest $2 billion in Nebius. On March 16, Meta signed a second contract, worth up to $27 billion. By May 2026 the company was in the Nasdaq-100 and worth about $50 billion, with Volozh holding an economic interest of around 11 percent. The Bell observed, with some satisfaction, that the rump had passed the Russian company in value. Its 2025 accounts showed $529.8 million in revenue, a net loss of $446.7 million, and 1,371 employees. That last number is about the size of the group of engineers Volozh said he had moved before he could speak.
"I've never been so excited about the future," he said in 2024.
On January 25, 2026, from one to two in the afternoon, he and Elena Bunina gave a lecture at Bar-Ilan University, in the Computer Science Auditorium of Building 503, on "Company Launch and Growth in the Era of AI." Registration was by Google Form.
It is tempting to end there, with an older man teaching in a university auditorium in the country that admitted him, having been turned away in 1981 by the university of the country that raised him. But the true ending of the story is earlier, back on the phone in a car in Tel Aviv, on a birthday, thirteen days before the morning that divided his life. It was a man bragging about a father who had found oil in a new country. A reporter asked for something more modern than Jerusalem. The company had just bought the scooters.
How about a scooter ride?
Of course, he said.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract principles from a career that does not reduce neatly to them. Volozh's methods were formed in a context that most operators will never face: a hostile state, a captive domestic market, and a war. Some of what he did is admirable, some is compromised, and some only looks wise in hindsight. These principles are drawn from the decisions themselves, the ones that compounded and the ones that came due, rather than from his own retrospective account of them.
The principles
- 1.Make your moat out of a difficulty only you can parse.
- 2.Refuse the exit that turns founders into employees.
- 3.Build the escape hatch decades before you need it.
- 4.Manufacture your own talent supply.
- 5.Compete on the product, not on the competitor.
- 6.Delegate the company; keep the button.
- 7.Treat every accommodation as a loan against future sovereignty.
- 8.Move the people before you move your mouth.
- 9.Carry the team across the border, not the product.
- 10.Read the new wave through the grammar of the last one.
- 11.When supply is scarce, own the stack down to the rack.
- 12.Stay public when capital is the raw material.
Principle 1
Make your moat out of a difficulty only you can parse
Yandex's first defensible asset was not its code but Russian grammar. A Russian noun can take a dozen or more forms, and a search engine built on English assumptions about string matching would fail on most Russian queries. Volozh and Segalovich spent most of the early 1990s on that problem, working with Apresyan's linguistics laboratory until they had a 300-kilobyte morphological dictionary that ran entirely in memory. They tested it on the Synodal Bible and the Russian classics, texts where getting the morphology wrong is obvious to every reader.
By the time Google arrived, the gap between a search engine that understood Russian and one that only tolerated it was obvious to ordinary users. When Volozh told Kommersant in 2011 that only five countries had their own search technologies, he was really describing which grammars and markets had resisted a general-purpose solution long enough for a local champion to grow up.
The lesson travels: find the structural difficulty in your market that the global leader will treat as an edge case and that you can treat as the main problem. Local complexity protects you only if you have actually mastered it.
Tactic: List the three things about your market that a global competitor would get "mostly right," and make getting them entirely right your first product.
Principle 2
Refuse the exit that turns founders into employees
In 2003, Brin and Page offered $100 million for a company that had become profitable only that year, at a time when Baring Vostok's entire position had cost $5.28 million three years earlier. On paper the deal looked like an obvious yes. Volozh and Segalovich said no, and the reason recorded by Calcalist is precise: Yandex would disappear into Google, and they would go from founders to hired engineers.
The interesting point is that the refusal was about identity, not about valuation. They did not hold out for a higher price. They rejected the form of the outcome. The name they had chosen a decade earlier, with its first-person Я, already said as much.
There is a cost to this kind of conviction, and it showed up nineteen years later, when a company that might have been a Google subsidiary instead became a Russian national asset that the Kremlin could squeeze. Founders who refuse a strategic exit should be clear about what they are taking on in exchange: the independence they keep also makes them a target.
Tactic: Before evaluating any acquisition offer on price, write down in one sentence what role you would hold the day after closing, and decide whether that sentence is acceptable at any number.
Principle 3
Build the escape hatch decades before you need it
Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus in 2000 and reincorporated in the Netherlands in 2007, with its head office at a virtual address at Schiphol Airport. It listed on Nasdaq in 2011. Those decisions were made for ordinary reasons: access to Western capital, investor protections, tax efficiency. In 2024 they became the means of survival. Because the holding company was Dutch and the Russian business was a subsidiary, the subsidiary could be sold and the parent kept, along with the Nasdaq listing, the Finnish data center, and the cash.
⇄
The Long Escape
A structure built for capital became a structure for exit.
2000
Yandex incorporated as a standalone company in Cyprus; Baring Vostok buys 35.72% for $5.28 million.
2007
Holding company reincorporated in the Netherlands as Yandex N.V.
2011
$1.3 billion Nasdaq IPO; shares rise 55% on day one.
2014
Volozh moves to Tel Aviv; Israeli R&D office opens.
2016
Volozh acquires Maltese, and thus EU, citizenship.
2022
Nasdaq halts trading; EU sanctions Volozh; he resigns.
2024
Russian assets sold for $5.4 billion; Yandex N.V. becomes Nebius Group; trading resumes October 21.
2026
Volozh renounces Russian citizenship; Nebius worth roughly $50 billion.
Volozh moved his own life in the same incremental way: Tel Aviv in 2014, Malta in 2016, marriage in Zikhron Ya'akov in 2017, and largely no more visits to Russia by around 2019. Nothing in that sequence was dramatic. All of it was preparation. Founders in politically exposed markets tend to think about exit only when the crisis is already on top of them, and by then every option is priced against them.
Tactic: Structure your holding company and your personal residency on the assumption that your home jurisdiction will one day become hostile, and review that structure once a year as if that day were next quarter.
Principle 4
Manufacture your own talent supply
The Yandex School of Data Analysis opened in 2007 as a free, master's-level program. The same year Volozh helped found and then headed the Department of Data Analysis at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The school later opened a branch in Tel Aviv. None of this was philanthropy in the ordinary sense. It was vertical integration of the company's most important input.
The payoff came twice. First, it fed MatrixNet, CatBoost, and the machine-learning culture that let Yandex keep up with Google in its home market. Second, and more surprisingly, it produced a group of engineers whose loyalty went beyond their employer. When the war came, about a thousand of them left Russia and followed Volozh. His statement at Nebius's launch, "Europe's challenge in the global AI race is competing for talent. This is what we have," was the return on a seventeen-year investment.
Tactic: If your growth depends on a scarce skill, fund a program that produces that skill under your name, and treat its graduates as an alumni network rather than a recruiting funnel.
Principle 5
Compete on the product, not on the competitor
In October 2011, as Google Chrome made it harder to switch default search engines and Yandex's Russian share fell from 64 percent to 61, Volozh told Kommersant: "Even after all this time, it is much more interesting for us to compete on product quality rather than to adjust our strategy based on what our competition is doing." He noted that Yandex had always let users run their query on rival engines directly from its own results page. He had lived through a similar distribution squeeze in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 Firefox's Russian builds switched their default from Google to Yandex.
This is not naive. Distribution matters, and Yandex fought for it through ad-network deals and browser partnerships. But Volozh's instinct, consistently, was that a superior product would outlast any distribution trick, and that adjusting strategy to every move by a stronger opponent was a way to lose slowly. The same thinking shaped Nebius, which presents itself not as a reseller or integrator but as a builder of its own racks, software, and data centers.
Tactic: When a stronger rival changes the rules of distribution, spend one week on a countermeasure and the next quarter on making the product so good that users will go around the obstacle themselves.
Abovsky's description is the most useful management detail in the record: a soft-spoken delegator who would "rip people to shreds for designing a button a certain way." Volozh handed off operations, stepping back from day-to-day management in 2014 while keeping the CEO title, but he did not hand off his judgment about what the product should feel like.
This is a deliberately lopsided way of running a company, and it has a weakness that the war exposed. When the Kremlin summoned Khudaverdyan on February 24, the founder who had delegated operations "could not decide," and the operator made the call. A delegated company acts according to the instincts of its operators. In a crisis, those instincts can diverge sharply from the founder's.
◐
What Volozh Kept vs. What He Gave Away
An asymmetric allocation of founder attention.
| Domain | Volozh's posture | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Product taste and interface | Intensely involved | Compounded |
| Talent pipeline and engineering culture | Personally founded | Compounded |
| Day-to-day operations after 2014 | Delegated | Efficient until stressed |
| Kremlin relations in Moscow | Delegated by distance | Came due in 2022 |
Tactic: Write down which decisions you will never delegate and which crisis decisions your operators must make without you, then rehearse the second list before you need it.
Principle 7
Treat every accommodation as a loan against future sovereignty
The golden share in 2009. The 2016 arrangement under which only state-registered media could appear in the top news slots. The 2019 compromise with the FSB over encryption keys. The 2019 restructuring, negotiated with Putin's personal involvement, that gave Kremlin-approved members more influence. Each could be defended at the time as the least bad option, and in a narrow sense each one was. Together they piled up a debt.
When the EU sanctioned Volozh, its reasons included the state banks among Yandex's shareholders, the state's veto over intellectual property sales, and the news product's handling of the war. The founder who had made those accommodations to protect the company found them listed as charges against him. "Has it always been possible to find the right balance?" he wrote in 2023. "Now, looking back, it is clear that something could have been done differently."
The lesson is not that compromise is always wrong. In some environments the only alternative is losing the company. The lesson is to account for it honestly: every concession to a powerful outside party reduces your future freedom of action, and you should keep track of the total.
Tactic: Keep a written ledger of every concession your company makes to a regulator, government, or dominant partner, and review the cumulative total, not just the latest entry, before agreeing to the next one.
Principle 8
Move the people before you move your mouth
Volozh's eighteen months of silence after the invasion is the most contested decision of his career, and his explanation for it is specific: he needed to relocate about a thousand employees first. A person close to him told The Bell that there had been "dozens of times" he wanted to speak, and each time something could be harmed. Whether that justifies the silence is a moral question this profile cannot settle. What is clear is the sequence: the people came out first, the statement came second, and the commercial deal came third.
The sequence carried real costs. He was sanctioned for more than a year and a half, his biography edit was publicly mocked, and he was accused of opportunism. It also had a coherent logic. A statement made while a thousand engineers were still in Moscow would have been made at their risk. Made afterward, it carried risk mostly to himself, and Putin's personal mention of him showed how real that risk was.
Tactic: When a public stand will put employees at risk, secure their safety before you speak, but set yourself a deadline so that protecting them does not become a permanent excuse for silence.
Principle 9
Carry the team across the border, not the product
In the partition, Russia kept the brand, the search engine, the taxis, the maps, the music, and 36,991 employees. Volozh left with a data center in Finland, a few side projects, cash, and the engineers. In the Accel interview he described starting with the team rather than the product, and Nebius is built on that approach: a group that had built cloud infrastructure together for years, moved onto the opportunity that had just opened.
One of The Bell's sources said it best: nationalizing factories is one thing, but "nationalizing brains is very different." The Russian state could take the products. It could not keep the people who knew how to build the next ones, once those people had left.
Tactic: If you are ever forced to choose between your product and your core team, keep the team. A good team can build another product faster than a product can find another team.
Principle 10
Read the new wave through the grammar of the last one
Volozh's case for AI is explicitly an analogy to his own past: "It's similar to the rise of the internet and search engines in the 1990s: a big change that happens once in a generation." His second analogy reaches further back: "This is something foundational, like the railways in the industrial revolution." He sees AI infrastructure as a utility, the pipes and rails underneath a new economy. It is a view that perhaps comes most easily to someone who began his career at a pipeline institute.
The value of having lived through one generational shift is that you recognize the second one early, and you know where the durable money ends up. In search it went to the indexer and the ad network, not to the portals. In AI, Volozh is betting it goes to whoever owns compute and power, and he moved on that, in the words of one acquaintance, because "he could feel where it was moving ahead of time."
Tactic: For any new technology wave, identify the layer of the last wave that kept its value longest, and look for the equivalent layer in the new one.
Principle 11
When supply is scarce, own the stack down to the rack
"We have our own technologies, we're not buying from different places, we are not the integrator," Volozh said at DLD. Nebius builds its own racks, writes its own software, and builds its own data centers, and it secured early access to Nvidia's leading GPUs through a long-standing partnership. In a market where GPUs, power, and permits are the constraints, vertical integration is not a luxury. It is how you get capacity built at all.
This contradicts the asset-light reflex that much of software has adopted. Volozh's view is that when the scarce input is physical, the company that controls the physical layer controls its own timeline. The Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia deals of 2025 and 2026 were, in effect, buyers paying for that control.
Tactic: Map the single scarcest input in your business, and if it can be owned rather than rented, own it before your competitors realize it is scarce.
Principle 12
Stay public when capital is the raw material
Nebius is an odd hybrid: a "startup," as Volozh likes to call it, that is also a Nasdaq-listed company with billions on its balance sheet. He kept the listing deliberately, describing it as the easier and cheaper way to raise capital in a business that consumes enormous amounts of it. Within a year of relisting, the company had raised $700 million in a private placement and $1 billion in bonds and had signed contracts that made it a Nasdaq-100 company.
Я
Two Companies, One Founder
The same founder, the same instinct, opposite starting conditions.
| Dimension | Yandex, 1997 | Nebius, 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Starting capital | Revenue under $100,000 | ~$2.5 billion cash, no debt |
| Core asset | Russian morphology | A Finnish data center and ~1,000 engineers |
| Market | One language, one country | Global AI builders |
| Scarce input | Linguistic expertise | GPUs, power, permits |
| Capital access | Private, then Nasdaq in 2011 | Nasdaq from day one |
| Political exposure | Kremlin | The chip wars |
The broader point is that the right capital structure depends on what the business consumes. Search was cheap to run and generated cash. AI infrastructure consumes cash on a scale that only public markets can supply. Volozh structured each company to fit what it would need.
Tactic: Choose your capital structure based on how quickly your business converts money into physical assets, not on what is fashionable among your peers.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Arkady Volozh, Nebius Group launch statement, July 16, 2024Overcoming the current AI infrastructure deficit is a challenge for the entire industry if the AI revolution is to deliver on its promise. This is something foundational, like the railways in the industrial revolution.
— Arkady Volozh, interview with Kommersant, October 10, 2011Even after all this time, it is much more interesting for us to compete on product quality rather than to adjust our strategy based on what our competition is doing.
— Arkady Volozh, to The Innovator, January 2025Nebius has rebuilt everything from scratch, but we are not starting from scratch.
— Arkady Volozh, statement of August 10, 2023There were many reasons why I had to remain silent. You can argue about the timeliness of my statement, but not about its substance. I am against war.
— Arkady Volozh, to The Moscow Times, 2005We used to create services as we wanted to use them. Now, we think of services that our children and parents would use.
Maxims
- Make the difficulty your moat. Choose the problem a global leader will treat as an edge case, and treat it as your main problem.
- Price the identity, not just the offer. Before you consider any number, decide whether you can accept the role you would hold the day after the deal closes.
- Build the hatch before the fire. Holding structures set up for capital can become exit routes, but only if they exist years before you need them.
- Produce your own scarce people. A school that bears your name can produce a team that will follow you across a border.
- Delegate the company, keep the button. Hand off operations, keep control of product taste, and rehearse who decides in a crisis.
- Keep a ledger of concessions. Every accommodation to power reduces your future freedom; track the total, not just the latest one.
- Sequence courage. Protect the people who would bear the risk of your statement, then make it, and do not let the protecting go on forever.
- Keep the brains, not the brand. A state can take your products but not the engineers who have already left.
- Read the new wave in the old one's grammar. Find the layer of the last revolution that held its value longest, and buy its successor early.
- Own the scarce layer. When the constraint is physical, whoever owns the racks controls the schedule.
