Natalya Kaspersky

Natalya Ivanovna Kaspersky (Russian: Наталья Ивановна Касперская; born 5 February 1966) is a Russian IT entrepreneur, President of the InfoWatch Group of companies and co-founder and former CEO of antivirus security software company Kaspersky Lab. In addition, she is one of the wealthiest women in Russia and one of the most influential figures in the Russian IT industry.

Natalya Kaspersky (maiden name Stutser) was born on 5 February 1966 in Moscow into a family of engineers and Soviet defense research institute employees.

Natalya was elected as a member of her school pioneer council, and later as a member of the district pioneer headquarters, and was also a Komsomol member and organizer. Alongside her main education, Natalya also played basketball in the Children's and Youth Sports School and seriously intended to become a veterinarian until giving up on the dream because of difficulties with studying chemistry.

In the eighth year of her education, Natalya moved from an ordinary secondary school to a physics-mathematical school run by the Moscow Aviation Institute.

After finishing this school, Natalya took the entrance exams for the Lomonosov Moscow State University but was not enrolled, missing out by half a point. However, her results were good enough to gain entry into the Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building (MIEM), where she studied applied mathematics (1984-1989), and the topic of her diploma was a mathematical model of a nuclear reactor cooling system. Later, she earned a bachelor's degree from the Open University in the UK. During her studies at the MIEM, she met her first husband Eugene Kaspersky, whom she married in 1986.

After graduating from the institute, Natalya was assigned to the Central Scientific and Construction Bureau in Moscow, where she worked for half a year as a research scientist before going on maternity leave. Natalya started her career in IT at the age of 28, when she took on a job, in January 1994, as a salesperson for a computer accessories and software firm with a 50-dollar monthly salary. The job was based in a newly opened store in the KAMI Information Technologies Center created by a former professor of Natalya's ex-husband, Eugene Kaspersky, from a Higher School of the KGB during the Soviet epoch. She believes that all personal data, such as search history, geolocation, contacts, correspondence, photo and video materials, should belong to the State.

In September 1994, Natalya became head of a distribution department of AntiViral Toolkit Pro (AVP), which had been under development by Eugene Kaspersky's team since 1991. Over two or three years, Natalya successfully built distribution channels and a technical support network and entered international markets, with sales growing rapidly from an initial $100–200 per month in 1994, to more than $130,000 after a year, over $600,000 in 1996 and more than $1 million in 1997. Revenue was divided between the team and the mother company until 1997, when the future founders of 'Kaspersky Lab' decided to start their own business.

Natalya launched the Kaspersky Lab foundation in June 1997, was key to the naming of the new company, and worked as CEO for more than 10 years. Shares in 'Kaspersky Lab' were initially split between Eugene Kaspersky (50%), his two teammate programmers Alexey De-Monderik and Vadim Bogdanov (20% each), and Natalya Kasperskaya (10%). In 1997, Kaspersky Lab sales started to double yearly, with turnover reaching around $7 million in 2001 and exceeding $67 million in 2006.