Pavel Khodorkovsky

Pavel Khodorkovsky (born 1985) is a Russian businessman and political activist who has lived in the United States since 2003. He is the son of Russian businessman and former political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the richest persos in Russia. In 2010, the younger Khodorkovsky co-founded Enertiv, an energy monitoring firm for commercial facilities.

The younger Khodorkovsky, who like his father is a fierce critic of the regime of Vladimir Putin, is the founder of the Institute of Modern Russia, an NGO that is devoted to the cause of freedom in Russian.

According to the New York Observer, Khodorkovsky “possesses the familial resolve.”^[1] In April 2014, Jewish Business News wrote: “It is always difficult to follow in the footsteps of a successful father, and that is what Pavel Khodorkovskiy has done, successfully too.”^[2]

Early life and education

Khodorkovsky was born in 1985 to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his first wife.^[3] He was Mikhail Khodorkovsky's eldest son. His parents were divorced when he was three years old. He is one of four children of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who also has a 19-year-old daughter and twin 11-year-old sons by his second wife.^[4]

The younger Khodorkovsky later described his childhood relationship with his father as “excellent” and said that his mother often let him see his father after the divorce.^[4] Khodorkovsky told Le Figaro in 2013 that his father had “always struggled not to spoil his children. He wanted the rewards to be progressive. Because if it was immediately the best toys, the best cars…we would no longer want anything. I will do the same thing with my daughter.”^[3]

At the age of 14, Khodorkovsky was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.^[3] He attended the school for four years,”^[5] after which he decided to continue his studies in the U.S. According to the Moscow Times, Khodorkovsky “said he chose to study in the United States on his own and his decision was not connected with what was going on with Yukos,” his father's firm, which had come under pressure from the Russian government. Khodorkovsky later said that his father had “advised [him] to study at a university abroad” but that the decision to go to the U.S. was his own. Khodorkovsky moved to the U.S. at age 18 in the autumn of 2003 to study business administration at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which is near Boston.^[4]

Khodorkovsky later said that he saw his father “frequently” in Moscow during the summer of 2003 before leaving for the U.S. At the time of his departure, he later said, Yukos was plainly “under pressure, but it was unclear how serious the attack against the management would be.” In September 2003, his father visited him in Massachusetts. At that time, according to the younger Khodorkovsky, “his father seemed to sense his looming arrest.” The younger Khodorkovsky later told the Moscow Times:“I asked him how things were going, and he said that imprisoning him was the only thing left to do.” Still, the younger Khodorkovsky said, “it seemed so unreal at the time. A merger with Sibneft was under way. They were making the world's fourth-largest company by production volume.… And it seemed that things would come out all right and nothing would happen.”^[4] In a 2011 interview, he told Forbes: “When I left for Boston, I knew there was a problem but it wasn’t critical.”^[5] Mikhail Khodorkovsky's visit to his son in Massachusetts in the September 2003 marked the last time the two would see each other before the senior Khodorkovsky's arrest on October 26, 2003.^[6]

At the time of the arrest, the younger Khodorkovsky was 18 and “had just been really getting to know his dad, who was divorced from his mother and had spent much of Pavel’s childhood building his business and fortune.”^[5] According to the Daily Telegraph, one of Pavel Khodorkovsky's “greatest regrets is that his father's imprisonment came just as he was beginning to understand his passion for business, spending the odd day as a teenager at the offices of Yukos.”^[6] Khodorkovsky's was distraught by his father's arrest and imprisonment and “had to learn to make his way alone.”^[3] The ensuing “decade-long separation” between the younger Khodorkovsky and his father “defined his adult life,” stated The Telegraph in December 2013.^[6]

He graduated in 2007 with a degree in business administration.”^[5]

Career

In 2007, after receiving his bachelor's degree from Babson, Khodorkovsky moved to New York City. He began working as a project manager for New Media Internet, a firm owned by Russian businessman Vladimir Gusinsky, who had relocated to the U.S. New Media Internet oversees technical support for Russian news websites. This was Khodorkovsky's first job.

Interviewed in New York in November 2010, Khodorkovsky said, “I never thought that I would stay here. I had another plan initially,” namely to “return to Russia after graduating from college.” Following his father's arrest, however, “coming to Moscow made no sense anymore.” According to The Moscow Times, he “received word through his father's lawyers” after the arrest “that he should stay away from Russia for safety's sake.”^[4] The Telegraph later stated that he had decided it was unwise to return to Russia, even for a visit, because he feared arrest or official harassment. His only contact with his father during the latter's incarceration was therefore by letter and telephone.^[6] In January 2011, Khodorkovsky told the New York Observer that he was afraid “to go back to Russia” because if anything happened to him “it would break my father.” He expressed concern, moreover, that a “bag of coke could end up in my luggage,” and pointed out that there “is very little recourse in Russia” in cases of unjust persecutions.^[1] He told Le Figaro in 2013 that the reason why he had not returned to Russia was that he had feared “being sent for military service.”^[3]

Enertiv

In 2010, Pavel and his Babson classmate Connell McGill Jr. co-founded Enertiv, a firm that manufactures “smart-meters and energy-saving software” to remotely monitor energy consumption. Enertiv provides services for businesses and organizations to monitor the amount of electricity consumed by every circuit in a building and help bring down energy costs. As of September 2010, the firm reportedly had no U.S. rivals.^[2][4][6] Enertiv was one of five finalists in the NYU Stern New Venture Competition. It lost the competition in April 2011, but later that week won its first big contract “from a school in New Haven where it had completed a pilot project.”^[5]

Khodorkovskiy serves as chief technical officer., while McGill is Chief Executive.^[7]

The firm's offices are headquartered in New York. Investors in Enertiv include Vaidya Capital Partners and R/GA Ventures, the latter of which was set up by branding agency R/GA, part of The Interpublic Group. Other investors include Jerry Kestenbaum, president of BuildingLink; Cameron Drummond of Mastodon Capital Management; Daniel Feldman, a New York investor; Stephen Plumlee, chief operating officer of R/GA and manager of R/GA’s venture unit; and Asad Husain of Bald Eagle Capital and Interpublic Group.^[7] Part of Khodorkovsky's job with the firm involves “flying around the country and running around New York City installing Enertiv’s hardware devices in customer locations like schools and office buildings.”^[7]

In April 2014, Enertiv predicted that it would soon be ready to complete its first round of seed funding, in which it hoped to raise between $500,000 and $750,000. Industry reports stated that there appeared to be “no shortage of potential investors.”^[2] In July 2014 it was reported that the firm had “just closed on a $700,000 seed investment round.” The investment, said Khodorkovsky, provided “validation from other investors,” including his father, who had invested in the company “as part of a $550,000 friends-and-family round.”^[7]

Khodorkovsky said that his father had not originally been impressed by his plan to launch the firm. “He was very skeptical for a while,” the younger Khodorkovsky said. “He thinks in different orders of magnitude.” But when the firm managed to raise money, his father “believed we were on the right track.”^[7] After his father was released from prison, the younger Khodorkovsky said he was optimistic to discuss plans with him. He said that his father had been “giving me advice through the years, but now we are able to have a proper conversation, I'm going to be picking his brains a lot, you can bet on that.”^[6] The elder Khodorkovsky has encouraged the younger to expand the venture's goal to eventually cover global electronic needs.^[7] His father, he told Le Figaro in 2013, “is tougher than me in business. Sees everything, thinks quickly. He keeps telling me that this is the key to success in business. He often criticizes me for not going fast enough and that I have a tendency to 'think too much about my decisions!'”^[3]

References