Marina Kolesnik
Founder and CEO
Travel.ru
Founder and CEO of Travel.ru Marina Kolesnik is a serial entrepreneur with a great track record. Before Travel.ru, the graduate of the Harvard Business School and former McKinsey & Company executive previously worked in the online travel space at DataArt and founded Mail.ru before launching her current exploit in 2010. The company has since closed on more than $25 million in venture capital and won numerous awards, including a nod from Fast Company in 2013 a the most innovative company in Russia.
Travel.ru is emerging as the Booking.com of Russia according to a recent story in Venture Village. “Booking.com has only just [started] coming into our space, which meant that there was no big established online travel brand, [and] we saw that there was room for a Russian market leader,” Kolesnik says. “We’ve been lucky in that we actually have strong international partners, too — we were the first Russian site that TripAdvisor partnered with, for example.”