How a Ukrainian tech entrepreneur created a new startup from a Russian prison

Serge Faguet, a Ukrainian tech entrepreneur who studied at Stanford and co-founded Russian booking service Ostrovok in the early 2010s, made a public confession last week in a Medium post. 

In the summer of last year, a Russian customs agent at the Moscow airport found five tabs of acid — in addition to a US-physician-prescribed capsule of amphetamine salts — in Faguet’s luggage. This was enough to accuse him of “theft or extortion of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances.” 

In his post, the businessman describes his months in a Russian prison, where he “felt like Burning Man.” He tells how he still managed to recruit and fundraise for a new startup while being in jail, and shares the “surprisingly many lessons” for entrepreneurial leadership that came out of this experience.

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