Teaching at Princeton might have been the capstone of a three-decade-long career in academia, but after eight years it wasn’t enough for Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal. “If you look at it one way, it was a paradise,” says the 71-year-old physicist, acknowledging that teaching the same class every semester wasn’t too taxing. “But some people don’t enjoy living in paradise.” So he left the university to strike out on his own, hoping to apply his intellect to “real life.” So in 1996, he turned his attention to the Internet, which was about to explode. “What I wanted,” he says, “was an adrenaline rush.”
I enjoyed teaching, but there was not enough excitement. I wanted something new.
The Moscow-born entrepreneur started the first of four companies, finding success right away. “It was sheer luck that I survived,” he says. Right out of the gate, he and his team won the 1999 “Best of What’s New” award from Popular Science. Their innovation? A browser tool that let you “zoom, pan, and rotate 3D images” on “more than a dozen websites.” Migdal now holds 10 patents in laser scanning and 3D data compression and transmission. He sold his first three companies, moving onto technology to predict the stock market. Today, he walks to his office at WeWork Empire State, his colleagues scattered around the world. “Things have changed,” he says. “You no longer need to be together in the same office.”
Photos: Emanuel Hahn