Nuri Katz was a 24-year-old college student when he moved to Moscow in 1990 from his native Montreal. Though he didn’t plan to stay long, he ended up living there for two decades—long enough to watch the Soviet Union come apart at the seams.
“I would have looked at you like you were crazy if you’d told me it was going to happen,” the founder of Apex Capital Partners told Fortune in an interview, calling in from a financial compliance conference somewhere in his perpetual blur of travel. “I watched the Soviet Union fall apart, and it fell apart because Ronald Reagan outspent them and they went into such huge debt that they spent themselves out of a country.”
