DST is no stranger to Mr. Zuckerberg. The company is a longtime, well-known stakeholder and owns almost 10% of the company.
And apparently DST and Goldman aren't strangers either, although their connection is a bit more subtle.
A ton of the DST's employees are former Goldmanites.
We hear that these employees, while at Goldman, were working closely with DST on a number of projects, and eventually jumped camps. That is, it was friendly.
In the last two years, two high profile tech bankers from Goldman's European technology banking group, another executive and at least two others decamped to Yuri Milner's business.
John Lindfors was a Goldman veteran who spent 17 years with the firm in the London and New York offices. He began as an analyst there in 1993, and later, was a partner and head of the European technology investment banking practice.
Alexander Tamas worked in Goldman’s London office in the investment banking division and joined DST as a partner in '08.
At Goldman he headed up "numerous technology and Internet IPOs in Europe and Russia, mergers and acquisitions in the Internet and software sectors and fundraisings for high-growth companies across Europe," according to TechCrunch.
Another, Verdi Israelian joined DST as a partner in 2009. Before that, he co-headed CIS operations of European Special Situations Group at Goldman Sachs in Moscow.
Others we found include "Rahul. M" - a principal at DST who was an analyst at Goldman. He went straight from a gig at the bank to DST in 2008. Ekaterina Nekrasova went from Goldman, to DST, back to Goldman again.
Also, when DST made the decision to list its email service provider Mail.ru in London last year, it hired Goldman as its lead underwriter. And Goldman itself has a 1% stake in Mail.ru.
The Wall Street Journal reported that DST played a central role in brokering this current deal.
And there's obviously one other glaring part to the story: it can't just be us - don't Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and DST CEO Yuri Miller look like they could be related??
Same smile? Same male pattern baldness? And both hailing from Eastern Europe by ancestry (Milner's dad is from Ukraine)? Just saying...