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Classmate Profiles |
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Vasily Sidorov, W'93
Going back to Russia was an obvious choice in '93: feeling home-sick, eager to re-establish a proper private life after two academically intense years at Wharton, and willing to get at least part of the privatization-related action. Leading a corporate life for long was not easy: establishment of a market economy was in full swing, and not going entrepreneurial was almost sinful. After several friendly and some hostile buyouts, turnarounds, and successful exits it felt like it was finally time to sell out, and it was by pure coincidence that the sale of my boutique investment ?ompany happened to coincide with the market's pre-2003 all-time high of 1997.
Then it was finally time to vow allegiance to a specific industry, as being investment anything was becoming an increasingly big-boys' game. George Soros's purchase of a 25 percent plus one stake in Svyazinvest, the national telecom holding, turned out to be the defining moment in the choice of industry. The temptation of becoming the CFO of a company with over 6 billion in U.S. dollars in sales and a market cap of almost 7 billion dollars at the tender age of 26 was irresistible. Being part of transforming a state-owned ministry-like company into a semi-public one was a great challenge; subsequently becoming part of a team that was building the largest private telecom holding - an even greater one. Being at the center of activity in the most M&A-active sector in the country instilled in me an unprecedented level of cynicism as well as a belief that nothing was impossible. But deal-making responsibility pressures were doomed to pale in comparison to being entrusted with managing the "jewel-in-the-crown" asset of Sistema, a diversified Russian financial-industrial group with a distinctly personified ownership structure.
In my present position as the CEO of a NYSE-listed company (MBT) with 18,000 plus employees and a market cap of over 10 billion dollars, I occasionally wonder whether it was the curriculum or the war zone-like campus surroundings that turned Wharton into such an ideal training ground for surviving and succeeding in the real world...probably both.
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of 1993
