I had lunch yesterday with Andres Susi, who runs the Moscow office of
Martinson Trigon Venture Partners[website, not a blogsite]. Allan Martinson, was the superhost of my visit with Rick Segal to Estonia a couple of weeks back. At the same time, less than five miles away, Bill Gates was speaking to an international audience at Stanford University, but I found this conversation much more interesting than what I read about the Gates talk.
While Gates talked about his battles with Apple and Google as well as his Third World philanthropies, Andres and I talked about how the US, Russia and former Eastern Bloc countries can do business together.
Andres is in Silicon Valley for several reasons, one of them being to visit a portfolio company called InvisibleCRM, which lets users to do all their Salesforce.com stuff without having to go online, or duplicating airplane passenger drudgery after landing. He asked me if there might be a problem in the Silicon Valley, because the company founders were Ukrainian.
The question surprised me and caused me to go off on one of those lengthy tangents often attributed to my age. But the short answer is that Silicon Valley for the most part is pretty agnostic to international politics. From a business perspective, we are pretty forgetful of the long and ugly years that were the Cold War. We look at the world we do not know as potentially untapped markets and the 16 or so countries that were the Soviet Bloc as a huge untapped bidirectional market. There is talent and technology over there to be tapped and there are fast-evolving markets into which our goods and services can be purchased.
Of course, I may be wrong. It is not a subject that I've previously given much thought to. But, if I am right, he and Allan Martinson and their venture firm are in one great catbird seat. Andres is an Estonian who speaks fluid English and Russian. He knows a great deal about the two cultures and he and Martin are more than a little interested in making East-West deals happen.
One of the reasons he invited me to lunch is that Martinson Trigon wants to build and nurture its US tech sector connections. They'd like to meet more smart people in Silicon Valley. They'd like to partner with an American venture firm on deals that can leverage assets in both hemispheres.
If I can help them, I will. If you'd like to be connected with them, I'd be happy to assist. Just email me here, and I'll start the ball rolling.
