Victor Orlovsky is a unique person. He started his career as an IT specialist in one of the international banks in the city of Tashkent and managed one of the most large-scale and successful projects to build digital banking in the world. And over the course of his career, he became the founder of a major venture fund that invests in start-ups in the USA and Israel. Victor Orlovsky’s biography is a vivid example of a person who is ready to build a new business and take the risks of integrating and investing in breakthrough technology.
The Biography of Victor Orlovsky: Career in Uzbekistan and Russia
According to Wikipedia, Victor Orlovsky was born on April 12, 1974, in Tashkent. In 1996, he graduated from Tashkent University of Informational Technologies with a degree in “Automatic Telecommunications”, and in 2001, he graduated from the Moscow State University of Economy, Statistics, and Informatics, majoring in “Finance and Credit”.
Victor Orlovsky began his career in the technological department of ABN AMRO Bank, one of the world-famous banks in Tashkent. He worked as a student during his last years of university, but it didn’t prevent him from successfully defending his diploma and becoming a manager of the IT department of a branch of a major bank.
As Orlovsky himself says, being a young IT specialist, he already had to solve tasks that are quite difficult and complex.
“You harden and grow as a professional much faster in this kind of environment. When initially people expect actions and responsible decisions from you, there is no time to be scared – you have to deal with doubt and take risks in integrating new technologies, and this is how you grow quickly within the organization. But it is important to understand that I had high demands placed on me right from the start: I became an IT department manager at 22 in one of 70+ bank locations throughout the world. In comparison, the next youngest manager at the same position was over the age of 40.”
A few years later, the first drastic changes in Victor’s biography happened. First he moved to Amsterdam, and then he moved to the Moscow office of ABN AMRO Bank.
Life got into a groove, and his career was successfully developing. He was in charge of managing transformation programs and created an IT campaign for a major bank from scratch, which allowed him to build a new digital ecosystem on a national scale and make a never-before-seen world-class breakthrough in digital banking.
Moving to California and Development in the Field of Venture Investments
The career of a corporate bank manager is great, but Victor Orlovsky always wanted to start his own business. You cannot fully understand the complexity of organizing a business without trying to build your own company from scratch. Victor was always passionate about innovations.
He deeply believes that it is to technological progress that we owe all the wonderful benefits of our civilization to: from a longer life expectancy to the ability to take a peek into the depths of the cosmos and your own consciousness.
Victor considers the world of digital technology and innovations to be his element.
Victor was able to see in practice what incredible effort it takes for breakthrough innovations to make their way into the corporate world, which is usually also bureaucratic and intolerant of anything new.
Today we need to build the future, which will be mainstream in 7-15 years. And to build it, we need to have intuition and knowledge, as well as a deep understanding of innovations and developmental trends of business and society as a whole. This is the essence of venture business.
In 2015, Victor moved to California and created a venture business, the goal of which was to invest in prospective start-ups in the USA and Israel. Moreover, Victor became the author of a bestseller, according to the Wall Street Journal: “From Rhino to Unicorn: How Fortune 500 Companies Can Evolve for the Digital Era”, which became a handbook for many businessmen on the topic of integrating innovations in organizations. The book has also received the honorary award “The Book of 2020 in Russia”, according to PWC. Victor wrote many articles and created a unique lecture course (together with a professor at Stanford University, Ilya Strebulaev) for those who are interested in the topic of venture investments, which includes both investors and entrepreneurs (www.neic.com).
Victor Orlovsky speaks about the venture business as follows: “We do not seek alpha, we create it together with talented people – founders of start-ups. Venture business is a deep asymmetry of knowledge and information, in which access to the best deals is limited and requires serious insights. Venture business is basically legal insight trading.”
It is venture capital that creates the future for mankind, and therein lies the deep meaning of the philosophy of business, to which Victor dedicates his present and his future.
