Leonid Reiman is a telecommunications expert, entrepreneur, and consultant known for his role in developing Russia’s modern communications infrastructure. Born on July 12, 1957, in Leningrad, he graduated as a telecommunications engineer from the Bonch-Bruevich Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute of Communications. He began his career in engineering roles and contributed to early mobile communications projects, including the launch of Delta Telecom, one of Russia’s first cellular operators.
Reiman later held senior government positions, including Minister of Communications and Information Technology, where he helped shape national telecom policy during a period of rapid industry growth. His work included expanding internet access, modernizing infrastructure, and supporting the transition to digital broadcasting.
Since 2008, he has worked as a private consultant and investor, focusing on telecommunications, digital infrastructure, and complex technological systems. He also holds a Doctorate in Economics and has authored publications on infocommunications and digital development.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
I don’t measure productivity by the number of meetings or emails. In large-scale technology projects, that’s a poor metric. What matters is different: what decisions you made, what risks you took off the table, and what started moving faster as a result.
My day usually revolves around information, people, and choosing priorities. In projects like these, there are almost always more tasks than resources. So the key question isn’t what else could be done, but what decision today will effectively shift the trajectory of the work. If you don’t ask that question, you can stay busy for years without actually moving forward.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I don’t start with the technology—I start with the constraint that’s getting in people’s way. Why does internet access outside major cities cost more and deliver worse quality? Why does a school in a remote area have fewer digital capabilities than one in a big city? Why does a service technically exist, but the average user can’t actually make proper use of it?
From there, the idea has to pass the test of scalability—whether it can be replicated across different conditions. A good pilot proves nothing if you can’t reproduce it in hundreds of cities and thousands of organizations.
That’s why what always mattered to me wasn’t just the first successful connections. The real signal came when the internet reached all schools in the Magadan Region. That’s a tough area for any infrastructure project: the distances, the cost of connectivity, and the maintenance requirements immediately show whether the model holds up or falls apart.
At that point, it becomes clear that the idea is no longer just a proof of concept. It’s become a system people can rely on every day.
What’s one trend that excites you?
There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence these days, but I’m less interested in individual applications and more in the systemic consequences. What matters isn’t how many new apps will emerge, but how AI will reshape networks, security, identification, traffic analysis, and user protection.
This is especially evident with phone and digital fraud. Artificial intelligence strengthens both sides. It helps detect suspicious patterns faster, but it also allows fraudsters to devise more convincing schemes. The next stage is an environment that can recognize risk before any damage is done
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
I try to look not at the project’s launch, but at the life of the solution after it goes live. What will happen to it in five years? Who will maintain it? Who will pay for its development? How will it behave under increased load?
These questions seem simple, which is why people often skip them. Especially in the regions where weaknesses in the model show up more quickly. If a solution only works under ideal conditions, it’s not an infrastructure solution—it’s just a successful experiment.
What advice would you give your younger self?
I wish I’d understood earlier that technology isn’t built by engineers alone. An engineering solution can be technically correct, but that’s not enough.
A large project is about aligning interests. Carriers, government, investors, local teams, users, contractors—everyone has their own agenda. If coordination is weak, technology alone won’t deliver results.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?
I believe that a real technological revolution often looks boring. It doesn’t always start with a new device or a flashy announcement. Sometimes it starts with a service becoming widespread, predictable, and accessible.
Mobile communications didn’t become truly important when they first appeared—they became important when they stopped being a luxury. The internet didn’t start changing countries when people began talking about it—it started when it reached schools, companies, regional offices, and homes.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Test your idea against an ordinary day of operation. Not against a presentation, not against a first demo, not against a pilot—but against a situation where thousands of people are using the system, and no one is making allowances for how difficult it was to build.
If you don’t know who will maintain the solution, how much it will cost, where it will break, and who’s responsible—then the idea isn’t ready.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I break the problem down into manageable tensions. In complex tasks, there are almost always several nodes: economics, access, quality, regulation, responsibility, operations. As long as they’re all mixed into one big problem, the task seems insurmountable.
For example, rolling out internet across a large country can’t be solved with a single measure. If access is too expensive, you need to look at competition and pricing. If quality is poor, you look at backbone networks and the last mile. Scale becomes manageable only when each problem has an accountable party and tools to address it.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Seeing things through to a result—not stopping at a well-organized process. In large-scale projects, it’s very easy to mistake motion for progress: everyone’s working, meetings are piling up, documents and interim decisions are being produced—but none of that in itself means you’re getting closer to the goal.
I try to define clearly from the start where we need to end up, and keep that target in focus at all times. If the chosen path stops leading to the goal, change it. If a solution is convenient within the process but doesn’t help achieve the goal, let it go.
To me, a result is the moment when you can honestly say: the problem is solved—not just that it’s been worked on for a long time. This approach keeps you from getting stuck at intermediate stages and speeds up decision-making.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
One tough lesson was about how easy it is, in large infrastructure projects, to overestimate the significance of the first visible result. When a project moves from planning to actual work, attention almost always shifts to timelines, equipment, and early metrics. Everyone wants a quick, visible outcome.
But going live isn’t the finish line—it’s the first stress test. I’ve run into situations where a solution was technically sound, but once it was up and running, questions came up: who’s responsible for channel quality? How quickly are problems fixed? Are the roles of regional teams, operators, and contractors clearly understood?
It didn’t look like one big, dramatic failure, but it was an important management lesson. You can’t consider a project successful on the day it starts working. Success begins when the system holds up under normal load—and when a problem gets resolved before it turns into a public crisis.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
I’d look at protecting small businesses from phone fraud. Large companies can build their own security systems, bring in analytics, and work with carriers and banks. Small businesses often don’t have that kind of protection—and for them, losing customer trust can be critical.
What’s needed is a straightforward service that combines number verification, call labeling, suspicious-scenario analysis, CRM integration, and customer alerts. This isn’t abstract cybersecurity—it’s a concrete infrastructure service.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
I wouldn’t single out any one trendy tool. To me, the important thing is the combination: calendar, documents, a note-taking system, and a solid way of handling information. In large projects, the problem isn’t too little data—it’s too much, and it loses context quickly.
A good tool helps you reconstruct the logic behind a decision: why it was made, what arguments were considered, and who was responsible for what. Without that, the team ends up rehashing old ground a few months down the line.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?/
I bought a backup power supply for my home router. Completely uninteresting purchase: a box, a cable, an indicator light—sits under the desk, and on a normal day you don’t even think about it.
But a couple of times this year, the power went out at home, and that box just quietly did its job. The router kept running, the meeting didn’t drop, the document went through, and the day didn’t fall apart over one small household glitch.
It cost less than an hour of downtime. What I like about it is the simplicity: no wow factor, no technology showcase. Just a small thing that, at the right moment, kept the system from breaking.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
I’d recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It’s a book about the origins of the internet, but its value isn’t just in the historical details. It shows that big technological changes rarely emerge as finished products. They come out of experiments, debates, engineering discipline, competing approaches, and people who know how to operate amid uncertainty.
What I value in this book is the logic of how the network came into being: first it’s a narrow technical problem, then it becomes an architecture, and eventually it’s an environment that changes the behavior of millions of people. That’s how it often goes with truly infrastructural technologies.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
The first thing that comes to mind is the Soviet film The Taming of the Fire. It’s about a rocket designer, but at its core, it’s about what it costs a person to carry a large project over a lifetime—the decisions that have to be made, what you have to let go of, how you hold onto a goal for decades while circumstances, resources, team, and priorities keep shifting.
What resonates with me is this: the protagonist isn’t an inventor in a lab—he’s someone who assembles a system around a large goal. He understands that an idea is worth nothing without people who believe in it, without an organization that can sustain it, and without the willingness to keep going when the result isn’t yet in sight.
The film captures very accurately how managing a complex, long-term project actually works—regardless of which industry you’re in.
Key learnings
- A pilot proves nothing if it’s not clear who will maintain the solution five years down the road.
- Reliability is under-appreciated because its main outcome is the absence of failure.
- In large technology projects, coordination is part of the product—not bureaucracy.
- Technology becomes significant not at the moment it launches, but rather when it lowers the access barrier for millions of people.
- AI becomes truly useful when it helps the system respond before a problem turns into a crisis.