I graduated from Stanford Business School. It was 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down. Three years after that, I joined the East European desk of the US investment bank Salomon Brothers in London. The opportunities were so great in that part of the world that, in 1996, I moved to Moscow to set up a hedge fund called the Hermitage Fund. I named it after the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where Russia keeps its most precious art treasures. Running the fund wasn’t smooth sailing. The companies we invested in were being robbed blind by Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials.
