European Investors Put Adventure Back Into Venture Capital

The life of a European venture capitalist is usually pretty civilized, punctuated by trips to the converted warehouses of London’s trendy Silicon Roundabout neighborhood or Berlin’s stately Prenzlauer Berg district, where entrepreneurs swap ideas in Vietnamese restaurants and faux-dive coffee shops.

Not so for Dmitry Chikhachev of Moscow-based Runa Capital, who lives a less posh existence. Visiting cloud-computing software provider Jelastic, one of his investments, means a flight to Kiev, Ukraine’s dusty capital, followed by a 100-mile drive on post-Soviet roads to the provincial town of Zhytomyr -- a city perhaps best known for its museum of Cosmonaut memorabilia.