How Andrey Kosogov Formed a New Team When No Investment Professionals Were Available in Russia

Andrey Kosogov, Chairman, Alfa Capital Partners

In 1994 the Russian stock market began to go upwards for the first time, and the most part of the Alfa Capital team decided to leave the company. Perhaps they thought that they could easily get all the money on the market …

I came back from my vacations and was just told: “We are leaving”. At that very moment I decided that I would not try to keep them if they had made this decision. We managed to come to agreement about their compensations. Today it could even seem to be too generous, because I paid them everything they had earned withholding only fines for their breaking the rules.

Needless to say, it was absolutely not an easy thing to form a new team. There were no real professionals in the investment business at that moment in Russia. I could search only among my friends and acquaintances – talented people I knew and believed in. I began to bring them together “fishing” them out from the very different spheres, mostly from science, because almost nobody was engaged in business then. I persuaded them that they would have enough time in their lives to take their doctor’s degrees, and finally I succeeded to convince them to abandon what they were doing then and join me. Most of them have become very successful businessmen. And quite a number of them having become affluent are now devoting themselves to both business and science.

Russian original