Pavel Khodorkovsky
Pavel Khodorkovsky is the president of the Institute of Modern Russia, an organization he founded to continue the work his father Mikhail Khodorkovsky began through the Open Russia Foundation. Since his father’s arrest in 2003, Khodorkovsky says he has been unable to return to Russia for fear of political persecution and actions against him. [1]
Khodorkovsky was 18, a freshman at Babson College near Boston, when his father was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He graduated from Babson in 2007 with a degree in business administration; a trust set up by his father for his education paid his tuition (he still has enough left to get his MBA). He then moved to New York City where he got a job at New Media Internet, the owner and publisher of a leading Russian news website NewsRU.com. In 2010, Pavel Khodorkovskiy was a co-founder of Enertiv Inc., an energy monitoring firm for commercial facilities[2].
The company closed on a $700,000 seed investment round, in late Jul 2014. Pavel, who had moved to the U.S. to attend college shortly before his father’s imprisonment, remained in the U.S., graduated, started working and has a family. The younger Khodorkovskiy says that he has spent less time at the foundation recently to focus on his startup. Part of his job is flying around the country and running around New York City installing Enertiv’s hardware devices in customer locations like schools and office buildings. Pavel said his father, who earlier invested in the company as part of a $550,000 friends-and-family round, urges him to think bigger as he develops his business. [3]
