Ostrovok is an online travel website for Russian consumers that has become one of the country’s fastest-growing e-commerce companies. There are 300 million Russian-speaking consumers in the world — a population that boasts explosive technology adoption as well as a higher rate of disposable income than American middle-class consumers on average due to low levels of consumer debt. Yet Russia remains the only major global economy that does not have a trusted online solution for travel. Ostrovok was founded in late 2010 by Faguet and Kirill Makharinsky, both Russian entrepreneurs who studied at Stanford and Oxford Universities, worked at Google and Slide, and founded Silicon Valley companies Tokbox, YouNoodle and Quid.
