Start-up investor Nick Belogorsky: a career in Silicon Valley and help to Ukraine

Photo: AIN.ua

Kharkiv Nikolay (Nick) Belogorsky has long lived in California. He worked on Facebook when he was still a startup, defended Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt’s personal accounts, and also collaborated with the FBI to help them catch Ukrainian hackers. Later he co-founded antivirus company Cyphort, among whose clients are Uber and Netflix.

However, in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet, Belogorsky is better known as a “business angel” - an investor who helps Ukrainian startups pave the way to life. However, some of the achievements went beyond the IT industry. When revolution broke out in Ukraine, Nikolai Belogorsky was one of the founders of the American volunteer movement to help the Maidan.

In addition, a startup investor stood at the origins of the charitable organization Nova Ukraine, which sets ambitious goals for itself - to raise a million dollars a year in humanitarian aid to Ukrainians, and also to build a world-wide Ukrainian diaspora, whose members will be proud of their origins.

“I am Ukrainian, but everyone considered me Russian, and it was easier for me to identify myself that way. But we can’t do this anymore,” says Nick in an interview with AIN.ua.

ForumDaily publishes excerpts from this first-person interview.

Moving from Ukraine to Canada

I was born in Kharkov in 1981, I studied at the Physics and Mathematics Department, then I entered the Kharkov Institute of Radio Electronics at the Faculty of Computer Systems, but I did not have to study there. When I was 16 years old, my mother left for Canada to study. My parents divorced when I was six. So in Vancouver we lived three of us with my younger brother and mother. She studied at the university and received a scholarship for which we all lived. I started working in Canada as soon as I could to help my mother. I wasn’t taken to MacDonald’s or to other places where I was trying to get settled, so the first job was gardening - weeding the beds and caring for the garden of one rich Canadian. The second job - a survey of public opinion on the phone. I had to call 50 people per hour and interview them on various political topics. There, I brought up English and computer skills, but at the same time I was pumping confidence because of these 50 people 49 immediately sent me or hung up. Then I graduated from college because it is cheaper than a university. This is not a degree, but already something. Immediately after college, my friend and I founded our first business, the company Randronics, which was engaged in web design. In parallel, I studied at the university - I entered immediately to the third year. Received a degree in programming and philosophy - I have always been interested in rhetoric, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on. With a local diploma of higher education, I was able to get a normal job in the specialty.

Career milestones and relocation to the USA

One of the biggest successes was getting an internship at Microsoft when I was still a student. Hundreds of my friends tried, but I was lucky. I think this is due to good recommendations from the first internship - I worked as a programmer for a Canadian IT company for two semesters. And it turned out that in the seventh month of the eight that I worked there, this company was bought by Microsoft. Accordingly, my friends there became employees of Microsoft, and when I applied for an internship, they could recommend me. At Microsoft, I worked on the Office team on Word. It was very interesting there, I learned a lot. And they paid good money - several times higher than the interns in other companies. This taught me, as they say, to shoot for the stars, that is, to grab at the most incredible possibilities.

After university, I worked for a Canadian IT company for two years and then started looking for something better. Then a recruiter from the Valley contacted me and offered to move to California. The offer presented it very cunningly: “You will work for the coolest antivirus company (Symantec), earn twice as much as you do now, and live in a city where 300 days a year are sunny and warm.” Vancouver is a fairly rainy city, where rain is called “our liquid sun.” So I gladly went to the interview, especially since my expenses were covered. I was offered $120 thousand a year, and I was happy with such a high salary. But now I understand that salaries here, in principle, start somewhere around $150, so they saved some money on me.

Having moved to America, I was convinced that this is indeed a country of possibilities, and Silicon Valley is the capital of opportunities specifically for a programmer. The third and perhaps most important success was when I was taken to Facebook in 2010. Then the competition was about a million people in place. When I looked at the HR database and saw these numbers, I was shocked.

There are tens of millions of applications and dozens of positions. I thought that this couldn't happen. But I’ll tell you a secret - such companies almost never hire people off the street; they hire first of all those they know. Therefore, if you want to get on Facebook, you need to move around in the “near-Facebook” environment, get acquainted, find contacts and prove that you are worth something.

It happened with me. I was an expert in computer security, often spoke at various conferences, and there I met with the guys from Facebook. We became friends, had dinner together, discussed a number of projects. And when they got the position of a specialist in viruses, they simply called me - without any competition and interviews. On Facebook, I started working for Chief Security Officer (Chief Security Officer) of Max Kelly, who then left Facebook and now holds a position at the NSA (US National Security Agency).

Photo: AIN.ua

Cybersecurity and collaboration with the FBI

Cybersecurity specialists, as a rule, become those who were hackers in school and hacked into websites. I never broke anything or wrote viruses - it was just a coincidence. My first job back in Canada was at the security company Fortinet. They didn’t hire me as a programmer, but a week later they called me and offered me the position of tester. I needed money - it had been a month since I graduated from university and I was looking for a job, it seemed to me that this was a very long time. I agreed. First he worked as a tester, then he became a QA lead, then a team manager. A year later, a position as an antivirus researcher became available, and I took the initiative to apply for the role. It was 2005. I have remained an antivirus researcher ever since. This is a person who does not write code, but disassembles other people’s malicious code into parts, understands how it works and how to find it - that is, an anti-programmer.

At Facebook, I worked in the cybersecurity department. Then, in 2010, there was the culture of a young Google: the smartest people, young ones, gathered. They were at work around the clock - they work without sleep, then they sit down to play computer games - having fun, in general. I worked at Security, my task was to find viruses that attack Facebook, take them apart and change the site so that they do not work. But I also assisted the investigative team that worked with the CIA, FBI, Interpol, police and various secret services. I cooperated with the FBI on a number of cases that they probably wouldn't want me to disclose. I still work with them regularly; they call specialists like me “an FBI agent.” That is, I am not their agent who receives a salary, but I advise them on issues of viruses, hackers, the same Anonymous.

Or when, for example, some new Ukrainian hackers appear and start breaking something, they attract me. They are hard to catch, because Ukraine does not issue them. Moreover, they may be among the highest ranks. Therefore, the FBI is watching them, waiting for them to come to rest in one of the southern countries, where Interpol takes them off the plane and arrests them. Unfortunately, it takes many years. Do not calculate the hacker, namely, to catch and arrest. There was a case when one hacker was called to a conference in Las Vegas to present something there, but in fact to grab him when he arrives. The world of Ukrainian hackers is perfectly described in the book 'KingPin' by Kevin Poulsen, the editor of WIRED magazine, who himself was a hacker in the past.

Zuckerberg and meetings with presidents

I try to constantly work on myself. Working at Facebook helped me a lot in this. In addition to the fact that it was incredibly interesting to work there, the company provided huge opportunities. Mark Zuckerberg's office has always been open to employees. Most were embarrassed to go to him - he is such a cool dude, a movie about him had already been shot by that time. And I was not shy and quite often went to him with various questions. One of my tasks was to protect his personal accounts and the accounts of his family, because they constantly tried to hack his father and friends. For example, the CEO of Google at the time, Eric Schmidt. They themselves coped poorly with this. Back then, Facebook was still a relatively small startup, with up to 1000 employees. And Mark was constantly bringing in famous people to lecture and answer questions. This format was called Q&A. I was at such sessions with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill Gates and many other people you read about in books and think that you will never meet them, and then they come to your work, talk to you , shake hands ... For me it was one of the important moments: I realized that, despite their fame and success, they are people like all of us. And that you can achieve everything if you want to. This greatly influenced my worldview.

Photo: AIN.ua

Anti-new generation

Since I left Facebook, I have been working in a team Cyphort and I am its co-founder. This is an antivirus startup that already has about 100 people. We are developing a new generation antivirus with future prediction algorithms - it can predict that a program is malicious even before our competitors start writing about it. While we do not disclose the size of the company's income - this is not customary in America, competitors can use this information to fight for the market. I can say that our income grew 3 times last year. We have many large clients, but most do not want us to name them. Among those who don't mind, I can mention Uber, Netflix, Modells Sporting goods, Tribune Media, which includes the Los Angeles Times and many large publications on the West Coast. These are customers who paid about half a million dollars each for our product. I developed this product, and for 5 years now this has been my main occupation. I hold the position of director of cyber threats, I go to conferences, speak, provide customer support, and help when they are hacked. Sooner or later, everyone will be hacked anyway - this cannot be completely prevented. Our product helps you find out that you have been attacked before you receive a letter from the FBI: “We have discovered that you have been hacked for two years now, all your information is being sold on the Internet, we recommend that you warn your clients and return the money.”

Investment activity

I promote Ukrainian IT startups and invest in them because I am Ukrainian and want to help my own people. Now we, Max Hurwitz and Zhenya Rozinsky, are creating a Ukrainian IT pavilion at the TechCrunch conference, where we will show what Ukrainians are capable of. I became interested in investing when I had money that I wanted to diversify. They were in Facebook stock, and once the company went public, I was able to sell them. I understood that Facebook would grow, and I didn’t really want to do it, but I also didn’t want to “keep all my eggs in one basket,” as the Americans say. I have noticed that people are happiest and most satisfied with life when they are doing something of their own. Moreover, a person is 10 times more productive when he works for himself. So I decided to find people who want and can do this, and give them this opportunity. Sometimes money is not enough - they need to be convinced that they can do it, because many talented people do not believe in themselves enough to take a risk.

I've read a lot about being an "angel". Here's an unusual test: if you think you're ready to make angel investments, open your wallet, take out all the money, set it on fire and watch it burn. I did so, but it didn’t scare me, and I started investing.

I really like it, although for now I’m just losing money on it. I see this process as my business school. I could go to MBA, pay $ 100-200 thousand at Stanford, and I can invest the same money in startups and learn much more. I have a 15 investment. While three startups fell apart, two were sold, but not expensive - I returned the money with a small percentage. Several companies have already raised the next round, have grown, and so far everything is working out for them. According to my expectations, somewhere from 15, 10 will fall apart, 4 will be sold, and the money that I have invested will most likely return. And if the 15 will shoot and sell much more expensively, it will cover all other investments and bring profit in 2-4, maybe 5 times. But this process takes 8-10 years, until the company either grows to an IPO, or sells, or dies.

A couple of years ago, I had a strategy to invest not only in startups, but also in companies that have already grown and will soon be released on an IPO. Through friends on Facebook, I managed to find people who sell such promotions in private. In 2015, I invested $ 50 thousand in Uber - it was already big, and many were dissuaded from me, they say, it will not grow again. But then I remembered that they said the same thing to me when I went to work on Facebook, and since then it has grown 10 times. Tried to invest in Slack, Niantic Labs, which made Pokemon Go, around which now such a tantrum. They had a conversation about investments, even when they were just about to leave Google. But these transactions for various reasons have failed. Now I look at Snapchat, maybe I’m investing in them.

Photo: AIN.ua

Ukrainian projects

The most important thing for an angel is dealflow - access to good deals, future facebook. I had such access through friends on Facebook. When Facebook came out for an IPO, I started investing in 3-4 companies every year. Checks from $ 20 to $ 100 thousand to one company at the pre-seed stage. For this money they give me 1-0,25% in the company. The cost of Ukrainian companies is estimated to be about 10 times less than American ones, because 10 is cheaper to live in Ukraine. But I did not invest in Ukraine until the Maidan happened.

I have four startups in Ukraine: Petcube, Rallyware, Capitan, Ecoisme. I talked with other startups, but either I didn’t, or they didn’t suit me. For me, this is more charity than the desire to earn. I invest in them a relatively small amount of money and do not expect that this money will return. I just find cool guys that I want to help. When they ask questions, I answer. Once a quarter, I send them a letter myself, asking for updates. Good project founders keep in touch with investors, involve them in all issues that they solve. In my experience, such projects survive and get results. And those who take the money and disappear, either go bankrupt, or say, they say, the money is over, give more. Naturally, I no longer give.

Attitude to the Maidan

For me, it all started in December 2013, when I saw a video where students were beaten. Something changed then both in Ukraine and in me. I always called myself Russian - I am from Kharkov, my father is Russian, and I speak Russian. Everyone on Facebook called me Russian Nick - I even had a login like this. But after those events, I realized that I would no longer respond to Russian Nick, changed all my logins and names.

In December, 2013, we organized a protest rally against Yanukovich in California, called it Maydan San-Francisco. They collected money to help Maidan, tried to somehow influence through officials - for example, they met with the secretary of the California senator. On the Maidan were our volunteers, we rented an apartment, where the wounded were treated by one of the hundreds. They put an American tent on Maidan, where shoes were handed out. One of the first began to broadcast live from the spot. It was a difficult time - I slept a maximum of several hours a day: during the day I worked, and at night we did organizational work for Maydan SF. We decided what to do next, what to collect money for and how to transfer it so that the authorities would not intercept it. For this we used bitcoin and the so-called Arabic method, when money is transferred by netting, bypassing all official channels. We bought helmets, medications.

When the Maidan won, we realized that we want to continue to help Ukraine humanitarian. Those who wanted to help the army stayed in Maydan SF, and I and part of the team created a new organization Nova Ukraine. I was very lucky to work with a wonderful team of volunteers, and Ostap Korkuna from Lviv, co-founders of Facebook, and Milena Naimark, an architect from Kiev who has lived in the USA for many years, became co-founders. She built the Grand Central Station in New York, many houses, skyscrapers and other projects.

Help Ukraine

20 August together with the organization Ukraine Relief we are doing a big festival-fair in Sacramento - Ukrainian Fair, dedicated to the Independence Day of Ukraine We plan to collect 10 thousands of people - this has never happened before. There will come musicians from Ukraine, famous politicians. But the main thing is that we will gather our diaspora together. We are helping to create an ecosystem of Ukrainians here, so that they do not hesitate to identify themselves. There are many such stories as mine, I am Ukrainian, but everyone considered me Russian, and it was easier for me to identify myself that way. But now we can no longer do that. We are looking for Ukrainians and want to communicate with them.

We want to collect much more money to help Ukraine. Maydan SF attracted up to $ 10 thousands. My goal is to bring humanitarian aid to a million dollars. Last year, we managed to collect only $ 40 thousand and ship to Ukraine for various humanitarian projects. When the Heavenly Hundred appeared, I personally set out to collect $ 100 thousand and hand over a thousand dollars to each family of the deceased on the Maidan personally from our volunteers. As a result, not all, but around 20 families received help from us.

We have a very strong and cohesive diaspora - about a hundred thousand Ukrainians in California, and in the whole of America there are more than a million. We are trying to find a connection with them, and if they want to help Ukraine, we are doing this so that this help will come, because everyone is afraid that the money will simply be stolen. Plus, since we are registered as a non-profit organization, we are authorized to issue receipts to our donors so that they can receive taxes back. America is good because no taxes are levied on charity. This doubles the ability of people to help.

Tips for Ukrainians

Honestly, it's better to leave. For people it is better. For the country in the near future, probably worse, but for me people are more important, and if they are better in America, Poland or somewhere else, let them go. I hope they will have the desire to help from abroad, there will be enough ties with Ukraine, and they will keep it in their heart. I think we will be able to build a world diaspora - so that the people would be good, and the country would be no worse. Therefore, I hope to somehow influence the Ukrainian government in order to introduce dual citizenship, at least with America and European countries, because now it is prohibited.

What works as a plus is that everything is very cheap. As a minus, even from outsourcing I see that it is still difficult for Ukrainians to compete with the same Indians. When I say in my company: “Let’s open an office in Ukraine, hire Ukrainians - they’re great,” I meet some resistance. In the United States, they believe that it is more profitable to work with India than with Ukraine, since Ukrainians speak English poorly and are more expensive than Indians. I'm trying to fight this opinion.

I hope that the number of foreign investors investing in the Ukrainian IT-sphere will gradually increase. Now it is at the initial level - up to $ 100 million. I am talking about billions to be on a par with Israel, Europe, and America. When the people who founded PayPal - Ilon Mask, Peter Thiel, Ukrainian Max Levchin - earned money on this, they sowed them into new startups and nurtured a new startup layer. That was 15 years ago. The next layer sows the Facebook mafia. And Facebook made millionaires not 10 and not 100 people, like PayPal, but thousands. And these people are now funding startups. Hopefully, Petcube-mafia or Readdle-mafia will appear soon in Ukraine. And there will be an ecosystem necessary for product companies to appear.

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