#89 Ilya Fushman

Ilya Fushman #89 Partner, Kleiner Perkins Born in the USSR (now Russia), Ilya Fushman and his family immigrated to Israel, Germany, and then the US. That exposure to new languages, cultures, and friends helped prepare him for a career in startups and as a VC, he said. “Building companies isn’t dissimilar to taking immigration-scale risks,” he wrote in his profile for Kleiner Perkins. He added, “My childhood experiences have given me a deep empathy.” A Stanford and Caltech-trained physicist, Fushman was an early employee and head of product at Dropbox, and he landed at Index Ventures before moving to Kleiner Perkins in 2018. “I love building, but I love helping others build even more,” he said in his company profile. Fushman was an early investor in Slack, which has since gone public and was sold to Salesforce for $27.7 billion. He has also backed the workplace video-messaging startup Loom, which is valued at $1.53 billion. Source: businessInsider