From Russia to Singapore, this serial entrepreneur’s 21-year journey is astonishing

Singapore is internationally known as a popular destination of choice when it comes to starting a business. All it takes is a stroll down Orchard Road, a major shopping street, and you’ll no doubt bump into people from all over the world who have immigrated to the Lion City to set up shop.

Still, it must take something special for a born-and-bred Russian to move out from the motherland and fly halfway across the world to reach the island-state. For Serguei Beloussov, founder and CEO of data protection firm Acronis, it was an obvious choice informed by what started off as a student’s typical summer job.

As an adolescent, Beloussov was still in love with the hard sciences, and wanted to go to the University of Turin to pursue the study of physics. He fondly recalls taking a summer job with a company selling PCs assembled from components in order to earn money for that trip.

Little did he know, Beloussov turned out to be quite the salesman, and eventually became a partner in the company. He got his first taste of success in what would eventually become one of the largest PC and electronics retailers in Russia, a company called Sunrise.

It was only eight years later that the Singapore connection materialized. “By that time, we already had a purchasing company in Singapore, sourcing PC components for our business, so Singapore was an obvious choice for starting my next business,” Beloussov explains. He clearly was, and continues to be, a huge fan of the city-state:

We already knew it – it was stable, wealthy, had a reasonable tax system, was well-connected to the rest of the world, and hospitable to new talent. Freedom of global travel provided by the Singaporean passport was a great bonus – visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 170 countries and territories makes it one of the best in the world.

The rest, as they say, is history. 2014 marks the self-made entrepreneur’s twenty-first year building, growing, and leading multinational tech companies across three continents – North America, Europe, and Asia. But the road he chose to take as an undergraduate was by no means smooth.

A serial entrepreneur is born

Beloussov spent two years at Sunrise establishing its operations across Russia. By the time he left the company in 1994, it had 10 subsidiaries in all of the country’s major cities. Armed with this experience, he founded his own electronics manufacturing company, Rolsen, together with his partner Ilya Zubarev.

By 1997, he had built Rolsen into a company raking in several hundred million dollars in profitable revenue. Beloussov founded another company called Solomon Software SEA in 1996, which was eventually sold to Microsoft and is now known as Microsoft Dynamics.

Here’s the astonishing part: he brought each of these companies to profitability within a year of their respective founding.

Ironically, Beloussov says that he managed to achieve this in part because of a lack of external funding. “The companies had to be profitable because they had no external funding, and so had no choice than to be profitable,” he says.

With a string of successes under his belt, Beloussov turned his attention to Singapore in 2000. It was then that he founded software development company SWsoft.

Complications arise

Return to Acronis

Doing everything, one thing at a time