Holivar. History of Runet. Part 3. Search engines: Yandex vs Rambler. How not to make an investment
Holivar. History of Runet. Part 1. Start: California hippies, Spout and the dashing 90s
Holivar. History of Runet. Part 2. Counterculture: populi, marijuana and the Kremlin
“Well, I won’t give in right away, at least you press.”
Programmers Dmitry Kryukov and Sergey Lysakov created Rambler.ru - the main Russian-language search engine of the late 90's. Rested "kings" of Runet then as well as mere mortals. To barbecue and songs to the guitar.
The founders of Rambler worked at the Research Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms in Pushchino, Moscow Region.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“The institute had and still has a collection of microorganisms, the task was just there, a lot of these very microbes, to describe. There was a mental reserve for what to do next. "
"From this was born a search engine"?
"Well, from microbes, yes, like everything on Earth."
Lysakov and Kryukov were typical representatives of the scientific and technical intelligentsia. They were interested in ideas more than money. Indexing microorganisms, they wrote a search algorithm on the basis of which rambler.ru was created - the most visited RuNet website of the late 90s.
"There was not a single investor who demanded a sharp return and no one hung and did not breathe there, uh, when the return ... And then the first 100 dollars earned in 1998 on advertising were already there, that was also cool."
The breakthrough idea of ​​Kryukov was the traffic meter on the Rambler TOP 100 website, it was also called puzomerka on the Internet. Hanging a counter on your website has become a symbol of prestige. And Rambler thus collected statistics and increased recognition.
"We were shy all the time to talk about what we did."
"Happy New Year, you fool!"
"With new happiness! Listen, you and I will have so much happiness that you and I will fuck this year. ”
In this video, the founders celebrate the 1999 offensive in their research institute. They already know that a completely different life will begin soon.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We were one year old, but from a different environment. I’ve been engaged in banking business in the 90s for ten years, and they still sat in their research institute, but there they shook something on their knees. But they urged such and such a little thing, which became the most visited website of Runet. But I must actually say that it was all so relative enough. Yes, Rambler was the most visited Runet site, but Runet was no more than 1% of the population of the whole country. "
Sergei Vasiliev and his partner, Peruvian Victor Huaco, invested $ 10 million in Rambler and received a controlling stake. The company moved from Pushchino to the Science Park of Moscow State University. On the occasion of the arrival of investors, long-haired Kryukov cut his hair and put on a suit.
Dmitry Kryukov, co-founder of Rambler
“The Internet in Russia is no longer a child, so let's drink for the Russian Internet itself. Hurrah".
Victor Huaco, investor
“We have big plans for Rambler and we plan to turn it into Russian Yahoo.”
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We did everything according to the analogs of American patterns. Rambler we tried, like Yahoo. Mail.ru, Zhenya Goland, copied Hotmail. Vkontakte copied Facebook. Jura Milner did molotok.ru, similar to ebay. Or, for example, our store Ozone, copied Amazon. In this regard, America, as a country, the creator of some new ideas, both technological and communication, it really set such a tone and looked at it and actually on these analogies and this skeleton of Runet was created. "
The copy-paste method was not perfect, along with the pluses, the minuses were also copied. Just a few months after the deal in the USA, the so-called .com bubble burst. The Nasdaq index collapsed and dozens of Internet companies went bankrupt. Investors' enthusiasm in Runet has diminished, and with it the desire to invest.
Arsen Revazov, owner of IMHO Online Advertising Agency
“Russia then looked completely to the west, in the west a bubble inflated, in Russia, too, the bubble was supposed to inflate. But since it was a matter of being late in Russia, he did not have time to pout, he had already burst in the west. And here the investments stopped in hard mode right away, in general. They survived with difficulty, I sat without any dividends at all, I received a salary of either $ 1,000 or $ 2,000, before that everything was completely different. ”
Yuri Milner, global investor, co-owner of Mail.ru Group in 2001-2012
Such a nuisance happened, namely the complete disappearance of global investors from this sector, the share price of our company, which at that time was already Mail.ru, fell by 97%. And we actually had to start from scratch, we also had to significantly reduce the scale of the operation, unfortunately, we had to lay off 80% of all employees, leaving only a few engineers. "
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
When the Nasdaq crashed, generally speaking, the first impression was that no one would ever come here again. Not in the sense of Russia, but generally on the Internet. Inside the company, there are 4 groups of 3-4 teams all the time generating some ideas, they seem to be good, but there was not enough money for all these ideas, since there was no return on these ideas. It seems you invest, but there are no incomes, you need to cut bones, reduce, what to reduce? You cut one - these are offended, the other - these are offended, many offenses and some kind of such nerves. "
The owners of Rambler invited the Runet stars, but the confusion from this became only greater. Anton Nosik was engaged in strategy, Igor Ashmanov improved search technologies. Spout suggested that Rambler close his own search, replacing it with a search for competitors breathing in the back.
“Perhaps, of course, the ideas that Anton said they were correct. But we had to truthfully say: “Listen, let's put Yandex or Google in the portal, leave the first place and never take the first place, take the third, fifth and will be content with it.” But it was then impossible to tell us, the founders. Well, this is to lose. We are number one. ”
The first could not stand it and the Peruvian investor sold his share. Following it, the founders followed, they wanted to develop a search, and the new owners made a portal based on the Yahoo model.
“It's no secret how much you sold your share to them? Millions "?
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“Well, there’s some penny. A million with a little. "
- "Why so cheap"?
“Andrei, I repeat again, the goal was different, we did not reach the main goal. And the money there was secondary, tertiary. It’s clear that there isn’t much, but they always have a price, either you get money for something really done, or you sell your soul and then painfully remember that you could do this now. We did not go this way. Did not want".
In the early 90s, the owner of CompTek, Arkady Volozh, decided to create a program that could search for information in large texts, taking into account the morphology of the language. The team of four developers was headed by a classmate at the physics and mathematics school, Ilya Segalovich. The Bible became a demonstration project; it did not require copyright.
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“Then there was a feeling that a cultured person should read the Bible, although I don’t know why I thought so. In addition, it was a popular Russian text. Well, what to take there? Tolstoy was not, Pushkin? Little Pushkin, the weight of 2.5 megabytes is all the verses, and the Bible is what we need. Therefore, we were happy to come up with the idea that we need to take a text that will show that we are talking about a search. Such a text in which you can search. "
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“We began to think what else to do with this, and in 1997, Rambler appeared in the winter. That is, the Russian search, he did not know anything about morphology, but at least he meant that he understood something about the Russian web. And so Arkady went to Rambler saying what the guys mean, let us give you a morphology and the search will be better. And Rambler said that yes, everything is fine with us. ”
“They offered different companies to invest, buy Yandex. Well, let's say for $ 15,000 we were ready to completely surrender, in the sense that we would get the programmers as we were and the project would be them, but somehow everyone thought that 15,000? No, no, no ... ”
Having failed to sell the technology to Rambler and other companies, the Yandex team decided to launch their own search engine on the Internet, and the good would not disappear. So the future leader of Runet was born.
Artemy Lebedev, designer of All Russia
“Nobody knew them. It was a company CompTek, which sold some kind of telecommunication equipment, that is, as boring as possible. But they were very nice people, nice and open, and they were interested. I wrote them the first website, made the first logo. They started, and then there was Rambler, he was, like Google, a great and huge structure that overshadowed everyone who earned some first huge money. And Yandex is so naive and small, which had nothing but Russian morphology and just nice people. ”
Yandex DNA has not only the technical and business talents of the founders, but also the social community. All of them came from a family of Soviet technical intelligentsia.
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
Segalovich showed an article that was signed by Segalovich, it was the journal "Questions of Geology", this is their dad. They wrote there together about something. It is clear that all three of us were brought up in approximately the same way, on the same books, concepts and so on. Learned not to lie - you don't lie, if you learned to have responsibility, that is, if you promised something - you have to do it. You do it. Well, it’s clear where the people in Yandex came from, Volozh in the beginning was looking for his friends, his friends were looking for their friends. Now Yandex is just a big company, and the Internet is already an ordinary thing. And at the beginning of Yandex it was such a technological cultural phenomenon. "
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“Formally, they had to dominate the essential, the main. And it was a very important point. In everything. Starting from clothes. Dress code, dress code in Yandex is like this - it’s customary to come dressed in Yandex. This is very ridiculous stupidity, well, in the sense of such an anecdote, it’s about the main thing, the main thing is how you work, and not how you shock or don’t shock others with your appearance. ”
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“I had one simple test, I printed it for myself from“ The Elephant in the Boa ”from“ The Little Prince ”, well, where it is not an X-ray, but where it is just a boa that ate an elephant. And she showed people and asked what it was. People who said that a hat is everything, so you could not take it. Then there was no big stream, there was no need to take a lot. People who saying “this is the little prince” they immediately knew what to talk about. ”
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“We don’t have service cars, we have a flat one, the rule for traveling is that“ business “if more than 6 hours, less than 6 hours“ economy ”, regardless of status. It is neither bad nor good, it is just such a solution. It’s democratic, which is very important. ”
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“I never had an office at all, Ilyusha never had an office either. Well, Arkady was persuaded that it was necessary to get with glass doors, so that it was visible. I remember once German Gref (president of Sberbank) came to us and booked a meeting room for 2 hours, Volozh sits there, everything means bosses, well, Gref was interested and everyone was talking there. After 2 hours, people come and say “sorry Arkady, we have a conference room booked here.” Arkady says: “Yes guys, I'm sorry, we dragged on here,” and says, “Well guys, come to my office.” And Gref, he later told people at home, we found out, “you represent what company, there you can come to the general and say your time is over”. Because Gref has his own separate floor in Sberbank, judging by the stories and there all the vice presidents are tiptoeing, and here, well, I'm sorry. ”
In 2002, Rambler changed owners, the company was led by financiers from Wall Street with Russian roots. Igor Lopatinsky and Oleg Radzinsky, son of playwright Oleg Radzinsky. They did not understand anything in technology, but they were well versed in investments.
Oleg Radzinsky, investment banker, writer, co-owner of Rambler Media Group in 2002-2006
“I lived quietly in Princeton, New Jersey, near New York, raising children. And then at this time my financial partner informed me that we, as a group, made an investment in Rambler, I honestly did not know anything about Runet, nor about Rambler, I did not use the Internet especially and still do not really like it. Lopatinsky said, “you know, we still plan that in 3 years we will become a public company, so we need people who understand investment banking.” One of the things that I did while working on Wall Street, I don’t know how exactly it will be in Russian, is take a company public. That's when the company becomes a public company. ”
- "They say they are going to IPO."
“In Russian, yes, IPO ... I would say that the Old Slavonic word IPO is found in chronicles. Are we brothers not destined to start a harsh story about IPO? ”
Bankers tightly optimized their Internet costs, but partly invested in the creation of the Rambler-TV network channel, it was possible to sell a media company more than an Internet portal. No one else remembered the search. It was at that moment that Rambler lost the championship to Yandex. Since then, its market share has only narrowed.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We wanted to create an analogue of Yahoo, which was the number one company, it seems that there was nothing wrong with this idea, because you are making an analogue of the coolest company, the most expensive. But it turned out to be wrong, it turned out to be wrong in fact in Rambler, but it turned out to be wrong in Yahoo, because Yahoo collapsed. She collapsed under the pressure of a young audacious company Google. One search line and nothing more, but it turned out this killer model was not immediately understood. "
When it became clear that Yahoo would not work, Vasiliev sold his shares to the new owners, without earning anything. Now his favorite brainchild is the estate of the princes Kurakin, which he bought in ruins and carefully restored.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“When we sold Rambler, we got together with friends to wash this story. I also remember the toast, which one of my friends said that let's drink for our Great Patriotic War, because the story lasted 1480 days between the time we decided to buy Rambler and the way we sold it. About as long as the Great Patriotic War lasted. ”
The last of the old Rambler team left Igor Ashmanov, trying to improve the search, then he wrote about his work in the company a satirical book “Life inside the bubble”.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“I read it, I don’t understand why he was wasting time. Apparently hurt him. Well hurt and hurt ... He believed that after our departure, he would become mistress of the sea. But he was forced to leave behind. ”
"Vladimir Vladimirovich, I am from this side."
Now Igor Ashmanov is an ardent supporter of the isolation of Runet and a fighter with American dominance. He has a particular dislike for Google; he refused to give an interview.
Igor Ashmanov, IT entrepreneur, executive director of Rambler in 1999-2001
“So it means I want to comment on the statement that Google is a commercial company and it will be guided by profit considerations. In my opinion, this is not true; they are in fact the ideological weapons of the United States. This must be understood. The profit there, in fact, is secondary. And the Americans have intelligence by themselves, and Google is intelligence, it must be self-sufficient, exist on pasture, and it also earns money. There the CIA on drugs, and these on the information. And you need to understand that Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. they’re not platforms where some bad people just post illegal content for money, they’re participants in the war. ”
Invest Bankers at Wall St. worked like a clock, put Rambler out after 4 years on an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, then sold it to the structures of the oligarch Potanin for $ 230 million.
Oleg Radzinsky, investment banker, writer, co-owner of Rambler Media Group in 2002-2006
“The idea was:
but). Build a good media company, not the Internet, but a media company.
b) The second is that this company should be profitable. To make three-year GAP-ov standards, that is, General Accounting Practice, which Rambler did not have naturally and enter an IPO.
Yes, we have completed the entire program. Before that, the company was run by programmers, and this is not a derrogative, yes, they were not concerned about profit, and for them it was a lifestyle. And now let's see how we write the algorithm and that’s it. And so they sit down and spend time and resources on it. And rightly so, they should be doing this, but we had a different task, especially since we are not programmers. We are financiers. ”
Oleg Radzinsky now lives between a house in London and a villa in Nice, devoting most of his time to what he dreamed of all his life - writing books. His partner Lopatinsky is growing grapes in Bordeaux. A successful deal with Rambler is just one of many others. Wall Street invest bankers are probably the only beneficiaries in the history of Rambler. The new owners closed the television channel a year later, and another two years later removed the stocks that fell in price from the London stock exchange.
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“Rambler sold faster than us and they immediately sold control, they generally became much richer than us and very quickly left Rambler because you just can't live like that, you need to dig up carrots because you already need money, they change representation. Here he is, Rambler, who was respected for the technical side, lost that technical side because the founders left, and the founders are those people who have ideas. ”
- “If we talk about the fate of Ramler and Yandex. Why Yandex remained a search engine and became number one, why do you think? ”
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“Well, the key point of Rambler was our departure, and the reason for our departure is clear. He died as a search engine. Volozh did not make our mistakes, he did not give a controlling stake to anyone, so far at least. ”
The group of first investors Yandex was headed by Leonid Boguslavsky, a mathematician by education, back in the 70s he wrote a monograph entitled "Managing Data Flows in Computer Networks."By the end of the 90s, Boguslavsky was a senior partner at PwC with top manager salaries and brilliant prospects, but his love for information technology turned out to be stronger.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a multinational corporation offering consulting and auditing services.
Boguslavsky attracted Western funds and created a company for investing in RuNet, which he called Runet Holdings.
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For some three-year period, they bought an advertisement on TV and again invited me to play in this advertisement, which was absolutely good ... Now it could not have happened in any way, I would have gone through no casting, never in my life, not even for fun, no one I wouldn’t take it off naturally. And then I shaved baldly, I was even finished up to a gangster and actually the slogan “Yanedks - there is everything” went from this video.
Volozh finally left the stable, but boring offline CompTek offline in a stormy and unpredictable online. A year later, the company became the largest in Runet, but did not learn to earn money right away.
Arkady Volozh, co-founder and CEO of Yandex
We fought for the audience, no one thought how to make money, and the investments were coming to an end and somewhere in 2002 it became clear that we had money for another six months, nine months and now we had an audience, what next? And it was also a difficult moment, where to get money, what to do next, where is the monetization of the Internet, and then we deployed this large model, which today is known as contextual advertising. "We started with contextual advertising very early, back in 1998, but it was not a business model, and it became a real business model somewhere in 2002 and by the end of 2002 we became a profitable company."
“Are you good with math?” What is written? 400 years! Come on! Look, see? In other words, if you are a regular, you have the right to demand that you be vacated. ”
- Soon Rogalsky will be written here?
“No, don't.”
One of the oldest and most successful runet projects is auto.ru, the programmer Mikhail Rogalsky bought a domain name in 1997. The first three years he worked alone combining the functions of the sales, marketing and development departments.
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“In the morning I woke up, got behind the wheel, drove all of my advertisers, collected money and drove papers, somewhere around 6-7 pm I returned home, and actually until 3 o’clock in the morning I sat writing. I wrote everything, I wrote a conference, I wrote a car sales database, I wrote a tire and disk sales database, I wrote a banner system. I wrote all the software that was on auto.ru well, maybe until 2001-2002, because after that I had already started taking professional programmers. ”
The works were rewarded, by the year 2000 auto.ru became one of the most visited sites on the Russian Internet, and honors fell on Rogalsky. Intel Award and Rambler Award for the billionth entry on the page on the Rambler TOP 100 counter.
“The Rambler Internet Hiring diploma is awarded to the www-conference of the Automobiles of Russia server www.auto.ru as the resource on which the billionth reading of the Ramre TOP 100 rating counter, Mikhail Rogalsky, was recorded.”
Following the honors came money. For 16 years, Rogalsky stubbornly developed his project and as a result sold it to Yandex for 175 million dollars. Auto.ru was the most expensive purchase in the history of Yandex.
German Klimenko, Internet entrepreneur
“Auto.ru was just a dumb service, I’m sorry, to be honest, no one ever took it seriously, it was 100 years old and somehow it’s not really special, only when it sold itself to Yandex for 175 million all at once ... It survived very good, he held out well. There it is generally a separate story of the transaction. He finally waited for a war between Avito and Yandex, and on this, in the presence of a war of two large buyers, he upturned the price so that little seemed to anyone. ”
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“I proved that I can make a rather interesting project from scratch, I can raise a fairly large business. You know, that’s enough for me, it’s enough for me that I have proved to myself. ”
Having proved to himself everything, Rogalsky went to London, where he leads the life of a wealthy pensioner, walks with a dog, travels with his wife and buys shares in public foreign companies. If Yandex believed in the Rogalsky project, then Rogalsky himself does not believe in Yandex.
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“It happens that I buy something on time and then, when I need to do this, even the very same alibaba Chinese went for an IPO, I bought their shares accordingly, they now have already risen in price about two times. Microsoft, too, at some point bought normally when they were just hosting. Apple is the same. Yes, honestly, I did not buy Yandex. I did not buy Yandex after the IPO and accordingly I tried not to buy Russian securities. I just understand what is happening, I also understand politics, I understand the economy and for myself I just realized that I do not want, I do not want to take risks, I want to sleep peacefully. ”
“It is a great honor for me to welcome Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in the world, and one of the most innovative companies in Russia, to celebrate the IPO and the first day of trading.”
In 2011, Yandex held a successful IP0 on the Nasdaq New York Stock Exchange, making founders and large shareholders multimillionaires and billionaires. We will tell in more detail about the fate of the company and its co-owners in future series.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“I can say that yes, it’s not solid, I’ll try to set it up ... Do not breathe only” ...
“Well, this is actually the hardware, here the Rambler servers actually stood. Here Dima Kryukov actually gave birth in agony. Well, there were a lot of people here, now ... But the table remains. ”
Leaving Rambler, Lysakov and Kryukov created one of the first data centers, and also developed a new turtle search engine, but did not manage to finish it. At the age of 48, Dmitry Kryukov died in his workplace from extensive brain hemorrhage.
“Do not leave, my dear, life is sad for me without you. Make a goodbye promise that you will not forget me. Tell me, tell me that you love me, that you love me. Tell me, tell me that you love me ... And now Layla "...
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Holivar. History of Runet. Part 2. Counterculture: populi, marijuana and the Kremlin
“Well, I won’t give in right away, at least you press.”
Programmers Dmitry Kryukov and Sergey Lysakov created Rambler.ru - the main Russian-language search engine of the late 90's. Rested "kings" of Runet then as well as mere mortals. To barbecue and songs to the guitar.
The founders of Rambler worked at the Research Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms in Pushchino, Moscow Region.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“The institute had and still has a collection of microorganisms, the task was just there, a lot of these very microbes, to describe. There was a mental reserve for what to do next. "
"From this was born a search engine"?
"Well, from microbes, yes, like everything on Earth."
Lysakov and Kryukov were typical representatives of the scientific and technical intelligentsia. They were interested in ideas more than money. Indexing microorganisms, they wrote a search algorithm on the basis of which rambler.ru was created - the most visited RuNet website of the late 90s.
Disclaimer . This article is a transcript of the wonderful film "Holivar" by Andrey Loshak. There are people who save time and love text, there are those who cannot watch videos at work or on the road, but happily read Habr, there are hearing-impaired people for whom the sound track is inaccessible or difficult to understand. We decided for all of them and you to decrypt excellent content. Who still prefers the video - link at the end.
"There was not a single investor who demanded a sharp return and no one hung and did not breathe there, uh, when the return ... And then the first 100 dollars earned in 1998 on advertising were already there, that was also cool."
The breakthrough idea of ​​Kryukov was the traffic meter on the Rambler TOP 100 website, it was also called puzomerka on the Internet. Hanging a counter on your website has become a symbol of prestige. And Rambler thus collected statistics and increased recognition.
"We were shy all the time to talk about what we did."
"Happy New Year, you fool!"
"With new happiness! Listen, you and I will have so much happiness that you and I will fuck this year. ”
In this video, the founders celebrate the 1999 offensive in their research institute. They already know that a completely different life will begin soon.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We were one year old, but from a different environment. I’ve been engaged in banking business in the 90s for ten years, and they still sat in their research institute, but there they shook something on their knees. But they urged such and such a little thing, which became the most visited website of Runet. But I must actually say that it was all so relative enough. Yes, Rambler was the most visited Runet site, but Runet was no more than 1% of the population of the whole country. "
Sergei Vasiliev and his partner, Peruvian Victor Huaco, invested $ 10 million in Rambler and received a controlling stake. The company moved from Pushchino to the Science Park of Moscow State University. On the occasion of the arrival of investors, long-haired Kryukov cut his hair and put on a suit.
Dmitry Kryukov, co-founder of Rambler
“The Internet in Russia is no longer a child, so let's drink for the Russian Internet itself. Hurrah".
Victor Huaco, investor
“We have big plans for Rambler and we plan to turn it into Russian Yahoo.”
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We did everything according to the analogs of American patterns. Rambler we tried, like Yahoo. Mail.ru, Zhenya Goland, copied Hotmail. Vkontakte copied Facebook. Jura Milner did molotok.ru, similar to ebay. Or, for example, our store Ozone, copied Amazon. In this regard, America, as a country, the creator of some new ideas, both technological and communication, it really set such a tone and looked at it and actually on these analogies and this skeleton of Runet was created. "
The copy-paste method was not perfect, along with the pluses, the minuses were also copied. Just a few months after the deal in the USA, the so-called .com bubble burst. The Nasdaq index collapsed and dozens of Internet companies went bankrupt. Investors' enthusiasm in Runet has diminished, and with it the desire to invest.
Arsen Revazov, owner of IMHO Online Advertising Agency
“Russia then looked completely to the west, in the west a bubble inflated, in Russia, too, the bubble was supposed to inflate. But since it was a matter of being late in Russia, he did not have time to pout, he had already burst in the west. And here the investments stopped in hard mode right away, in general. They survived with difficulty, I sat without any dividends at all, I received a salary of either $ 1,000 or $ 2,000, before that everything was completely different. ”
Yuri Milner, global investor, co-owner of Mail.ru Group in 2001-2012
Such a nuisance happened, namely the complete disappearance of global investors from this sector, the share price of our company, which at that time was already Mail.ru, fell by 97%. And we actually had to start from scratch, we also had to significantly reduce the scale of the operation, unfortunately, we had to lay off 80% of all employees, leaving only a few engineers. "
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
When the Nasdaq crashed, generally speaking, the first impression was that no one would ever come here again. Not in the sense of Russia, but generally on the Internet. Inside the company, there are 4 groups of 3-4 teams all the time generating some ideas, they seem to be good, but there was not enough money for all these ideas, since there was no return on these ideas. It seems you invest, but there are no incomes, you need to cut bones, reduce, what to reduce? You cut one - these are offended, the other - these are offended, many offenses and some kind of such nerves. "
The owners of Rambler invited the Runet stars, but the confusion from this became only greater. Anton Nosik was engaged in strategy, Igor Ashmanov improved search technologies. Spout suggested that Rambler close his own search, replacing it with a search for competitors breathing in the back.
“Perhaps, of course, the ideas that Anton said they were correct. But we had to truthfully say: “Listen, let's put Yandex or Google in the portal, leave the first place and never take the first place, take the third, fifth and will be content with it.” But it was then impossible to tell us, the founders. Well, this is to lose. We are number one. ”
The first could not stand it and the Peruvian investor sold his share. Following it, the founders followed, they wanted to develop a search, and the new owners made a portal based on the Yahoo model.
“It's no secret how much you sold your share to them? Millions "?
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“Well, there’s some penny. A million with a little. "
- "Why so cheap"?
“Andrei, I repeat again, the goal was different, we did not reach the main goal. And the money there was secondary, tertiary. It’s clear that there isn’t much, but they always have a price, either you get money for something really done, or you sell your soul and then painfully remember that you could do this now. We did not go this way. Did not want".
In the early 90s, the owner of CompTek, Arkady Volozh, decided to create a program that could search for information in large texts, taking into account the morphology of the language. The team of four developers was headed by a classmate at the physics and mathematics school, Ilya Segalovich. The Bible became a demonstration project; it did not require copyright.
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“Then there was a feeling that a cultured person should read the Bible, although I don’t know why I thought so. In addition, it was a popular Russian text. Well, what to take there? Tolstoy was not, Pushkin? Little Pushkin, the weight of 2.5 megabytes is all the verses, and the Bible is what we need. Therefore, we were happy to come up with the idea that we need to take a text that will show that we are talking about a search. Such a text in which you can search. "
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“We began to think what else to do with this, and in 1997, Rambler appeared in the winter. That is, the Russian search, he did not know anything about morphology, but at least he meant that he understood something about the Russian web. And so Arkady went to Rambler saying what the guys mean, let us give you a morphology and the search will be better. And Rambler said that yes, everything is fine with us. ”
“They offered different companies to invest, buy Yandex. Well, let's say for $ 15,000 we were ready to completely surrender, in the sense that we would get the programmers as we were and the project would be them, but somehow everyone thought that 15,000? No, no, no ... ”
Having failed to sell the technology to Rambler and other companies, the Yandex team decided to launch their own search engine on the Internet, and the good would not disappear. So the future leader of Runet was born.
Artemy Lebedev, designer of All Russia
“Nobody knew them. It was a company CompTek, which sold some kind of telecommunication equipment, that is, as boring as possible. But they were very nice people, nice and open, and they were interested. I wrote them the first website, made the first logo. They started, and then there was Rambler, he was, like Google, a great and huge structure that overshadowed everyone who earned some first huge money. And Yandex is so naive and small, which had nothing but Russian morphology and just nice people. ”
Yandex DNA has not only the technical and business talents of the founders, but also the social community. All of them came from a family of Soviet technical intelligentsia.
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
Segalovich showed an article that was signed by Segalovich, it was the journal "Questions of Geology", this is their dad. They wrote there together about something. It is clear that all three of us were brought up in approximately the same way, on the same books, concepts and so on. Learned not to lie - you don't lie, if you learned to have responsibility, that is, if you promised something - you have to do it. You do it. Well, it’s clear where the people in Yandex came from, Volozh in the beginning was looking for his friends, his friends were looking for their friends. Now Yandex is just a big company, and the Internet is already an ordinary thing. And at the beginning of Yandex it was such a technological cultural phenomenon. "
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“Formally, they had to dominate the essential, the main. And it was a very important point. In everything. Starting from clothes. Dress code, dress code in Yandex is like this - it’s customary to come dressed in Yandex. This is very ridiculous stupidity, well, in the sense of such an anecdote, it’s about the main thing, the main thing is how you work, and not how you shock or don’t shock others with your appearance. ”
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“I had one simple test, I printed it for myself from“ The Elephant in the Boa ”from“ The Little Prince ”, well, where it is not an X-ray, but where it is just a boa that ate an elephant. And she showed people and asked what it was. People who said that a hat is everything, so you could not take it. Then there was no big stream, there was no need to take a lot. People who saying “this is the little prince” they immediately knew what to talk about. ”
Ilya Segalovich, co-founder of Yandex
“We don’t have service cars, we have a flat one, the rule for traveling is that“ business “if more than 6 hours, less than 6 hours“ economy ”, regardless of status. It is neither bad nor good, it is just such a solution. It’s democratic, which is very important. ”
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“I never had an office at all, Ilyusha never had an office either. Well, Arkady was persuaded that it was necessary to get with glass doors, so that it was visible. I remember once German Gref (president of Sberbank) came to us and booked a meeting room for 2 hours, Volozh sits there, everything means bosses, well, Gref was interested and everyone was talking there. After 2 hours, people come and say “sorry Arkady, we have a conference room booked here.” Arkady says: “Yes guys, I'm sorry, we dragged on here,” and says, “Well guys, come to my office.” And Gref, he later told people at home, we found out, “you represent what company, there you can come to the general and say your time is over”. Because Gref has his own separate floor in Sberbank, judging by the stories and there all the vice presidents are tiptoeing, and here, well, I'm sorry. ”
In 2002, Rambler changed owners, the company was led by financiers from Wall Street with Russian roots. Igor Lopatinsky and Oleg Radzinsky, son of playwright Oleg Radzinsky. They did not understand anything in technology, but they were well versed in investments.
Oleg Radzinsky, investment banker, writer, co-owner of Rambler Media Group in 2002-2006
“I lived quietly in Princeton, New Jersey, near New York, raising children. And then at this time my financial partner informed me that we, as a group, made an investment in Rambler, I honestly did not know anything about Runet, nor about Rambler, I did not use the Internet especially and still do not really like it. Lopatinsky said, “you know, we still plan that in 3 years we will become a public company, so we need people who understand investment banking.” One of the things that I did while working on Wall Street, I don’t know how exactly it will be in Russian, is take a company public. That's when the company becomes a public company. ”
- "They say they are going to IPO."
“In Russian, yes, IPO ... I would say that the Old Slavonic word IPO is found in chronicles. Are we brothers not destined to start a harsh story about IPO? ”
Bankers tightly optimized their Internet costs, but partly invested in the creation of the Rambler-TV network channel, it was possible to sell a media company more than an Internet portal. No one else remembered the search. It was at that moment that Rambler lost the championship to Yandex. Since then, its market share has only narrowed.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“We wanted to create an analogue of Yahoo, which was the number one company, it seems that there was nothing wrong with this idea, because you are making an analogue of the coolest company, the most expensive. But it turned out to be wrong, it turned out to be wrong in fact in Rambler, but it turned out to be wrong in Yahoo, because Yahoo collapsed. She collapsed under the pressure of a young audacious company Google. One search line and nothing more, but it turned out this killer model was not immediately understood. "
When it became clear that Yahoo would not work, Vasiliev sold his shares to the new owners, without earning anything. Now his favorite brainchild is the estate of the princes Kurakin, which he bought in ruins and carefully restored.
Sergey Vasiliev, investor, co-owner of Rambler in 1999-2003
“When we sold Rambler, we got together with friends to wash this story. I also remember the toast, which one of my friends said that let's drink for our Great Patriotic War, because the story lasted 1480 days between the time we decided to buy Rambler and the way we sold it. About as long as the Great Patriotic War lasted. ”
The last of the old Rambler team left Igor Ashmanov, trying to improve the search, then he wrote about his work in the company a satirical book “Life inside the bubble”.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“I read it, I don’t understand why he was wasting time. Apparently hurt him. Well hurt and hurt ... He believed that after our departure, he would become mistress of the sea. But he was forced to leave behind. ”
"Vladimir Vladimirovich, I am from this side."
Now Igor Ashmanov is an ardent supporter of the isolation of Runet and a fighter with American dominance. He has a particular dislike for Google; he refused to give an interview.
Igor Ashmanov, IT entrepreneur, executive director of Rambler in 1999-2001
“So it means I want to comment on the statement that Google is a commercial company and it will be guided by profit considerations. In my opinion, this is not true; they are in fact the ideological weapons of the United States. This must be understood. The profit there, in fact, is secondary. And the Americans have intelligence by themselves, and Google is intelligence, it must be self-sufficient, exist on pasture, and it also earns money. There the CIA on drugs, and these on the information. And you need to understand that Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. they’re not platforms where some bad people just post illegal content for money, they’re participants in the war. ”
Invest Bankers at Wall St. worked like a clock, put Rambler out after 4 years on an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, then sold it to the structures of the oligarch Potanin for $ 230 million.
Oleg Radzinsky, investment banker, writer, co-owner of Rambler Media Group in 2002-2006
“The idea was:
but). Build a good media company, not the Internet, but a media company.
b) The second is that this company should be profitable. To make three-year GAP-ov standards, that is, General Accounting Practice, which Rambler did not have naturally and enter an IPO.
Yes, we have completed the entire program. Before that, the company was run by programmers, and this is not a derrogative, yes, they were not concerned about profit, and for them it was a lifestyle. And now let's see how we write the algorithm and that’s it. And so they sit down and spend time and resources on it. And rightly so, they should be doing this, but we had a different task, especially since we are not programmers. We are financiers. ”
Oleg Radzinsky now lives between a house in London and a villa in Nice, devoting most of his time to what he dreamed of all his life - writing books. His partner Lopatinsky is growing grapes in Bordeaux. A successful deal with Rambler is just one of many others. Wall Street invest bankers are probably the only beneficiaries in the history of Rambler. The new owners closed the television channel a year later, and another two years later removed the stocks that fell in price from the London stock exchange.
Elena Kolmanovskaya, chief editor of Yandex until 2012
“Rambler sold faster than us and they immediately sold control, they generally became much richer than us and very quickly left Rambler because you just can't live like that, you need to dig up carrots because you already need money, they change representation. Here he is, Rambler, who was respected for the technical side, lost that technical side because the founders left, and the founders are those people who have ideas. ”
- “If we talk about the fate of Ramler and Yandex. Why Yandex remained a search engine and became number one, why do you think? ”
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“Well, the key point of Rambler was our departure, and the reason for our departure is clear. He died as a search engine. Volozh did not make our mistakes, he did not give a controlling stake to anyone, so far at least. ”
The group of first investors Yandex was headed by Leonid Boguslavsky, a mathematician by education, back in the 70s he wrote a monograph entitled "Managing Data Flows in Computer Networks."By the end of the 90s, Boguslavsky was a senior partner at PwC with top manager salaries and brilliant prospects, but his love for information technology turned out to be stronger.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a multinational corporation offering consulting and auditing services.
Boguslavsky attracted Western funds and created a company for investing in RuNet, which he called Runet Holdings.
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For some three-year period, they bought an advertisement on TV and again invited me to play in this advertisement, which was absolutely good ... Now it could not have happened in any way, I would have gone through no casting, never in my life, not even for fun, no one I wouldn’t take it off naturally. And then I shaved baldly, I was even finished up to a gangster and actually the slogan “Yanedks - there is everything” went from this video.
Volozh finally left the stable, but boring offline CompTek offline in a stormy and unpredictable online. A year later, the company became the largest in Runet, but did not learn to earn money right away.
Arkady Volozh, co-founder and CEO of Yandex
We fought for the audience, no one thought how to make money, and the investments were coming to an end and somewhere in 2002 it became clear that we had money for another six months, nine months and now we had an audience, what next? And it was also a difficult moment, where to get money, what to do next, where is the monetization of the Internet, and then we deployed this large model, which today is known as contextual advertising. "We started with contextual advertising very early, back in 1998, but it was not a business model, and it became a real business model somewhere in 2002 and by the end of 2002 we became a profitable company."
“Are you good with math?” What is written? 400 years! Come on! Look, see? In other words, if you are a regular, you have the right to demand that you be vacated. ”
- Soon Rogalsky will be written here?
“No, don't.”
One of the oldest and most successful runet projects is auto.ru, the programmer Mikhail Rogalsky bought a domain name in 1997. The first three years he worked alone combining the functions of the sales, marketing and development departments.
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“In the morning I woke up, got behind the wheel, drove all of my advertisers, collected money and drove papers, somewhere around 6-7 pm I returned home, and actually until 3 o’clock in the morning I sat writing. I wrote everything, I wrote a conference, I wrote a car sales database, I wrote a tire and disk sales database, I wrote a banner system. I wrote all the software that was on auto.ru well, maybe until 2001-2002, because after that I had already started taking professional programmers. ”
The works were rewarded, by the year 2000 auto.ru became one of the most visited sites on the Russian Internet, and honors fell on Rogalsky. Intel Award and Rambler Award for the billionth entry on the page on the Rambler TOP 100 counter.
“The Rambler Internet Hiring diploma is awarded to the www-conference of the Automobiles of Russia server www.auto.ru as the resource on which the billionth reading of the Ramre TOP 100 rating counter, Mikhail Rogalsky, was recorded.”
Following the honors came money. For 16 years, Rogalsky stubbornly developed his project and as a result sold it to Yandex for 175 million dollars. Auto.ru was the most expensive purchase in the history of Yandex.
German Klimenko, Internet entrepreneur
“Auto.ru was just a dumb service, I’m sorry, to be honest, no one ever took it seriously, it was 100 years old and somehow it’s not really special, only when it sold itself to Yandex for 175 million all at once ... It survived very good, he held out well. There it is generally a separate story of the transaction. He finally waited for a war between Avito and Yandex, and on this, in the presence of a war of two large buyers, he upturned the price so that little seemed to anyone. ”
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“I proved that I can make a rather interesting project from scratch, I can raise a fairly large business. You know, that’s enough for me, it’s enough for me that I have proved to myself. ”
Having proved to himself everything, Rogalsky went to London, where he leads the life of a wealthy pensioner, walks with a dog, travels with his wife and buys shares in public foreign companies. If Yandex believed in the Rogalsky project, then Rogalsky himself does not believe in Yandex.
Mikhail Rogalsky, creator of auto.ru
“It happens that I buy something on time and then, when I need to do this, even the very same alibaba Chinese went for an IPO, I bought their shares accordingly, they now have already risen in price about two times. Microsoft, too, at some point bought normally when they were just hosting. Apple is the same. Yes, honestly, I did not buy Yandex. I did not buy Yandex after the IPO and accordingly I tried not to buy Russian securities. I just understand what is happening, I also understand politics, I understand the economy and for myself I just realized that I do not want, I do not want to take risks, I want to sleep peacefully. ”
“It is a great honor for me to welcome Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in the world, and one of the most innovative companies in Russia, to celebrate the IPO and the first day of trading.”
In 2011, Yandex held a successful IP0 on the Nasdaq New York Stock Exchange, making founders and large shareholders multimillionaires and billionaires. We will tell in more detail about the fate of the company and its co-owners in future series.
Sergey Lysakov, co-founder of Rambler
“I can say that yes, it’s not solid, I’ll try to set it up ... Do not breathe only” ...
“Well, this is actually the hardware, here the Rambler servers actually stood. Here Dima Kryukov actually gave birth in agony. Well, there were a lot of people here, now ... But the table remains. ”
Leaving Rambler, Lysakov and Kryukov created one of the first data centers, and also developed a new turtle search engine, but did not manage to finish it. At the age of 48, Dmitry Kryukov died in his workplace from extensive brain hemorrhage.
“Do not leave, my dear, life is sad for me without you. Make a goodbye promise that you will not forget me. Tell me, tell me that you love me, that you love me. Tell me, tell me that you love me ... And now Layla "...
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