Oleg Suitin is recalling the early '90s when he watched Communism in Russia suddenly collapse, leaving millions of people unemployed and disoriented. "It was not too easy to start a business," says Mr. Suitin, who, at the time, was himself on the street after his employer, the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, shut down because it had no government funding. "None of us had anything to do; so we were all selling bread or other food, whatever we could do to make additional income."

In this scorched economic landscape, with 300 percent inflation and interest rates of more than 400 percent, Mr. Suitin started his first entrepreneurial endeavor. Using a $7,000 bonus he had received from the government for a previous invention, he founded a fledgling test-and-measurement company in 1992 called Screen. After just a year, Mr. Suitin added PC manufacturing to Screen's repertoire and renamed the company NCTC, the Nizhny Novgorod Computer Technologies Center. From 1993 to 1996, he was able to grow NCTC's revenue to more than $2 million a year, and break into the highly competitive Moscow market. It was no McDonalds on Gorky Street, but for post-Communist Russia, it was a whopping

At this time in Russia's history, most local companies were what Mr. Suitin calls "gray businesses," companies that operated within the legal margins, manipulating tax law, and rejecting generally accepted accounting principles. "They were not 100 percent legal," explains Mr. Suitin. "But I said if I'm going to do business with multinational companies, I am going to structure my business in a different way." In August of that year, Mr. Suitin founded Nizhny Novgorod Software Technologies Lab (NSTLab), a software development company. From the start, it adhered to a higher accounting standard. He was so diligent about Russia's evolving tax laws that NSTLab occasionally acted as an informal consultant to the state on tax policy. His strategy worked. After signing deals with companies like Philips and Motorola, NSTLab caught the eye of Intel in 1997, and the business really took off.

Over the next three years, NSTLab did an increasing amount of software development for Intel, until folks at the American chip giant finally decided to buy the company in 2000. Mr. Suitin became general manager of the new venture. Now called the Intel Nizhny Novgorod Lab, the lab is the first multinational software development subsidiary in Russia.

Today, at age 43, Mr. Suitin is responsible for 250 people. "My motivation in joining Intel was to gain an understanding of how companies like this work," he says. Working within the confines of a large bureaucratic company like Intel has not been an easy transition for Mr. Suitin, who complains that "things that used to take days to decide now take months." For those who remember Russia's Communist past, the irony of that statement is as subtle as a hammer and sickle.

Sources From:RED HERRING 2002