Disclaimer . This article is a transcript of a video interview of Leonid Parfyonov with the Bukhman brothers, the founders of Playrix, the original video can be viewed on the Parthenon channel . 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. Whoever prefers the video is the link at the end.
Hi, I'm Leonid Parfyonov. This is Vologda, the center of the Vologda Oblast, where I was born and raised and which for me is, first of all, Russia.
Saint Sophia Cathedral of the 16th century:
And this is Dublin, Ireland. St. Patrick's Cathedral, founded in the XII century. And it seems that there is nothing in common between these cities ... Now there is. The richest Vologda residents for all nine centuries of Vologda's existence have moved here from here:
Brothers Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, developers of computer games, owners of Playrix. The world's leading world agency Bloomberg estimates their business at 2.8 billion dollars, 1.4 billion per brother. The business was built in Vologda, but now the company has been moved by the Bukhman brothers to Dublin.
Leonid Parfyonov: “The dashing 90s, two brothers grow up in Vologda in a family of modest affluence. How did you get your first computer? ”
Igor Bukhman: “We ourselves could not afford to buy the first computer, and our grandfather bought it or gave it to us.”
LP: “Just for your savings”?
Dmitry Bukhman: “Remember how before all older people lived in a paradigm that you have to save money all the time, that is, every month they earned money with their grandmother, put off - at some point they gave us such a gift.”
IB: "This was a turning point for us in life."
LP: “Did you already play toys then?” Did you have a dandy, or what? ”
DB: "We played, we had the prefix" Dandy ", we liked, like, in general, all the other children with whom we talked."
IB: “The answer to the question about the computer: in the first year we played more, then we became more interested in programming, and then I went to the university for“ Applied Mathematics ”(this was the Vologda Pedagogical University before).”
LP: "The family didn’t have money for you to go to Moscow or St. Petersburg?"
DB: “And it wasn’t, and ... As we grew up, it seemed to us something so incomprehensible, complicated. To go somewhere? It was not even considered. ”
LP: “And this infection that you can write games yourself, you brought from the institute”?
IB: "There was a teacher who was quite an advanced person at that time, and he said that yes, you can write programs, not necessarily games."
DB: “It was 2001.”
LP: “And you come home and say” ...
IB: “He told me. I came and said to Dima: now, it turns out, you can write some kind of program and sell it. We wanted to try. ”
DB: “Not necessarily a program. You can just write something and make money via the Internet, which seemed like something incredible, magical, especially from Vologda. ”
IB: "Especially because at that time we did not use the Internet at all."
LP: “Wait, did you have internet in your apartment?”
IB: “Modem. When you connect, and from there the sound - "pee pee ...", you call, quickly check your mail and disconnect - a minute. We took the night Internet (it was just summer) unlimited, and we switched to a night lifestyle for about a month or two months. Just figured out how everything works and we already had the first game written at that moment (we wrote it ourselves). ”
DB: “I also want to say how Igor and I lived: we had an apartment, parents, we had one room with him all our life. That is, the computer was in this room, all this happened in such a confined space. They got up at night, lay down: here is a computer, here is a bed. ”
IB: “We wrote the first game, we sent it out just at night. At that time there were many small sites where you could send, and it appeared in the directory of these sites. Sometimes someone found them. ”
DB: “Like shops, these were only online sites.”
LP: "Who was the first to buy?"
DB: “I remember, we wrote, we did all this ... And they waited. And yes, I received an email, I remember ... Notification! The man was from America, a woman. I remember studying every line: from America, from what state ... I woke you up or you told me (addresses your brother) or you told me: look, a letter, it cannot be! I still remember the feeling - who it is, someone paid $ 15 for this, what we did. "
LP: "And off and on"?
DB: “Well, yes. We earned $ 60 in the first month. ”
LP: “And how much did Mom get then”?
DB: “I don't remember.”
IB: “It seems to me less than two hundred. But something about two hundred, mom and dad got. I even think that less - 150, probably. "
DB: “I wanted to tell a story. These 60 dollars came, they sent them to us, mind you, by check, that is, we received a check in Vologda that we should be given 60 dollars. I took this check. I went to some bank. I said: "Here is the check." The cashier called out to another: "We do not know." We kind of have a check, but they never saw that. It was the year 2001. Something from America, they understood for a long time, but in the end they took it. ”
Galkinskaya street in Vologda, under Soviet rule - Voroshilov street. Such a typical Russian regional development. It’s here the Bukhman brothers grew up and here they started their own business from the room of the parental apartment. And it always seems in such places that they are from the rest of the world, well, completely separate - not only for thousands of miles, but in a different dimension, in another century. And probably, to the touch, offline, it really is. They seem to be connected online. Well, if you wish, at least 18 years old, since 2001, as in this last entrance, the first 15 dollars from America flew into the Buchman.
LP: “To what level of business did you work in your parental apartment”?
IB: “Three years before I graduated from university. We worked. Then we bought a second computer - it immediately doubled the performance. If we talk about money, then I remember that by the time we opened a legal entity already (I graduated from university - we opened a company) ”...
DB: "We still lived, by the way, at that moment with my parents together."
IB: “Yes, it was. Ten thousand dollars, we had income for two. And the salary was 200 dollars "...
DB: "Per month"!
IB: “We could hire employees. So, actually, we are so quietly, intuitively started "...
LP: “Have you decided that you still need to learn, and not just then get money” ?!
DB: “I just could not imagine that a person can ... If I entered a university, how can I not finish it? Grandfather and grandmother - those who gave us the computer - when I finished, they said: "Well, here you are now finished - finally, you will find a normal job!" Although we already earned then 10 thousand dollars a year in 2004, and then it was already more ... They’ve left that forever in their head: now this nonsense will end - finally, you will go and find a normal job, as it should be. ”
LP: “You will go to 9:15, with a lunch break, then you will become a senior engineer” ...
DB: “You will make an understandable career, as it should be a good boy.”
“Do not leave the room, do not make a mistake. Why do you need a swing if you work remotely? ”
LP: “Do you remember when you became aware of yourself as millionaires”?
IB: "Do you remember?"
DB: "Yes, literally a million."
IB: “This is interesting, by the way. We took our condition for a very long time, how much we conditionally have cash, money, cache. And the value of the company we only a few years ago ... Maybe 7 years ago we realized that this company costs more than we have accumulated money. I don’t remember this moment specifically, but we realized that we were millionaires when we had one million dollars in our accounts for two. ”
LP: "Everyone."
DB: “No. We had everything in common: this million seemed to each of us to be our own. That is, everyone has a million. ”
DB: “Further, the gaming industry market developed, and we also developed. We understood. There was the first period when (without going into details) we made a product that doubled what we then earned. This was the first such step. And after him we have already moved ”...
LP: "What kind of game is this?"
DB: “This game was called Township. She was on social networks, we did it on Facebook. Probably, one could imagine what kind of games were popular on Vkontakte or Odnoklassniki, that is, we made this game on Facebook, the American social network, which essentially doubled our income. You can make a product that doubles everything that we did before. And after that, a powerful leap is when we ... "
LP: "Irish children, Irish children run around."
DB: “There was the next leap when we entered the mobile market, for the Androids, for the iPhones, and there everything went quickly, exponentially - both in how we earned and how many employees. The company began to grow rapidly. ”
And this is Puteyskaya street in Vologda, a three-minute walk from the house of the parents of Bukhmanov, all near the station. For a long, long time, they did not crawl out of their neighborhood. They built their very first office here: here is Playrix, it has been here for a long time, one of many scattered around the world.
But only in this first office did a story happen to them that only happens to Russian businessmen in their homeland.
IB: “We found a land plot there, we bought it on an ad. Then we prepared the project for about a year. A year later, when our project was ready, we found the one who will do it (the company), concluded an agreement, started building, and built the foundation. And then it turned out that this land belongs to both us and the government of our city. ”
LP: “But, wait, when a person was selling, she was in the register, and the city authorities hold this register. Then you make a purchase, you are entered into the register as land owners. Next, you must coordinate the construction - it's all in the same government. ”
IB: “Well, they did not say that it didn’t belong to us, but that it belonged to someone else — then they hadn’t looked, apparently”
DB: “Wait, not really. When we bought it, there was a re-registration, and at that moment ... I do not know what happened, but we were told that everything was registered and gave confirmation. In this moment, apparently, something was not quite as it should have been.
Something was not quite right. But then everything was as it should, that is, the OBEP (Department for Combating Economic Crimes) arrived - this is the main nightmare of Russian business and the most important figure in Russian business, and interrogations, charges, and seizures of computers began. And then “solvers” arise, they propose to decide everything, to smear it - for a share in the business, of course. Few in Russia did not pass this.
IB: “Three months later, these employees were fired for extorting money from Cherepovets entrepreneurs.”
LP: “But you don’t understand that they also extort from you”?
DB: “What is interesting is that we were so naive people that we never paid bribes to anyone. We even did not immediately understand what was happening. It was immediately obvious that we bought everything in good faith. ”
The matter was resolved by the fact that the Bukhman brothers paid for this land again, and the building of their headquarters, now the former, was completed. In Dublin, where there is no UEP, the building of the current Playrix headquarters is in a high-tech technology park with huge oaks. On the contrary, there is a Microsoft office, and the Buchmans are proud of the neighborhood.
LP: “Is this a map of conquering the world?” And this is Vologda ”?
DB: "Yes, in fact, not everything is here."
LP: "This is Petersburg, this is Moscow."
DB: "This is Ireland."
IB: “In fact, apparently, yes, these are our offices, and the places where our employees are located are far from all, because there are employees in more than six hundred cities. The company is quite unconventionally built. Many of our employees work remotely - from home, from some other locations, from cafes - wherever they want. And we also have a lot of offices, now about twenty. All different. This office is big enough. ”
LP: “And here is Vologda, where.”
IB: “Other offices are much smaller. There are offices from ten people, there are from a hundred people. The largest office we have in Vologda - there are about 170, I think. And also, by the way, we have a rather large office in Serbia. There are also about 150 people there now. ”
LP: “I just don’t understand one thing. And in such offices are not supposed the offices of billionaires? There were negotiation rooms - is that enough for you? ”
IB: “We actually work ... Mostly using a laptop most often. Part of the time we work in the meeting room, we call mainly on Skype.
LP: “So you don’t need an office, reception, personal assistant, driver”?
DB: “We don’t, no one in the company.”
LP: “And what can be negotiated in the negotiation room”?
IB: “In fact, we often have interesting meetings: we call up on Skype and several people call at once. Not one on one. If, for example, you need to call the six, then everyone sits in six different places. "
And this is a technopark of the Vologda provincial government since Soviet times. Then there was the Regional Executive Committee.
Here are the Regional Committee of the CPSU and the Regional Committee of the Komsomol.
By the way, under the Soviet regime, it was clear to me why there were so many of them. Well, all the same in state ownership, and the government is responsible for the city-forming enterprises, and for the last canteen, for some newsstand there. Well, go ahead and steal every carved palisade. But now capitalism is in the yard: steel is being boiled, and a cow is milked without the participation of the authorities, this is the responsibility of the private owner, and the authorities need no less space. It is also known that the current Russian bureaucracy is twice as large as the Soviet bureaucracy, even though the current Russian Federation is two times smaller than the USSR. The criteria for their activities are completely incomprehensible to me. It is clear that no one sneezed in these offices from the fact that "young promising investors moved their business from Vologda to Ireland." They even, here - the elementary function of a night watchman with a mallet doesn’t work out very well - but judging by how they keep their land registry. And there is no opposition in these words, well, nothing! In addition to painful perplexity ...
DB: “There are always Moscow techies around us, someone else. They were surprised that someone could do something in Vologda. For the people of the capitals, it seemed: yes, you and people are not smart! But for us, as the people who lived in Vologda, it was clear that there are a lot of smart people, they are, and they are nothing, to put it mildly, inferior to other people living in the capitals and somewhere else. At one time, I remember, even remember, that they said that this is our advantage - we understand that smart people are everywhere. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons why we got remote work: because we understood that talented people are everywhere, and now we need to understand how to make it reach them, how to make it so that they can with us work. So, Igor said that in our top management there are many Vologda, indigenous guys who nonetheless today create successful products for the whole world. Such, as it seems to me, is an unusual story. ”
LP: “Do you offhand remember the beginning of the song“ Vologda-where? ”
IB: "Letters ... I carry ..."
LP: "I carry letters, letters personally, as if I were a novel ..."
IB: "I continue to write."
LP: “I know, I know exactly where my addressee is” ...
IB: “In the house where the carved palisade is. But everyone knows this, not only Vologda residents. ”
LP: “Tell me, have you ever been told in Vologda that, well, you are Jews”?
IB: “Not many times. They spoke literally a couple of times. In a bad context, does that mean, right? So let's say: there is no anti-Semitism in Vologda. Everything is normal with that. "While we were growing, there were literally a couple of situations where they said ... which, if you look now, were completely harmless, so small, but they made a pretty strong impression on us."
DB: “Our grandfathers went through such, well, normal, anti-Semitism, which was more systemic in the Soviet Union. For them it was the norm, it affected them. Further, this also affected our parents - apparently less, but enough. Starting from admission to a university with quotas and other things. Therefore, we grew up, I knew that this could be and expected that it could be, but it was specifically with us, as I said, ”...
IB: "It never concerned us, but there were a couple of everyday situations when they let us know about it, that we are like that."
And this is Vologda - Blagoveshchenskaya street, and here under Nicholas II a rather large synagogue was built in Vologda. When it was closed during the Soviet era, the building of the Car Repair Plant club was in the building, then this hospital was opened.
But the memory of the place lived, because in the late Soviet Vologda I found a very biased attitude towards Jews in journalistic and writing circles, then very extensive. And they considered all the names of Soviet streets Jewish. Here, the Annunciation was Klara Zetkin - a Jew. Well, what do you say, a Jew? She was German! One crap!
And here are all these streets: Uritsky, Menzhinsky. Well, no doubt, terrible names, they were KGB executioners. But only Uritsky was a Jew, and Menzhinsky was a Pole. One crap!
And then, when the old names returned, the joy of this was under the same dressing, and an old acquaintance explained to me that there are no more names for these Jewish streets - Uritsky, Menzhinsky. “How much do you repeat that Menzhinsky was a Pole! And how much do you repeat that ... one crap "! In general, there is no longer this Jew Menzhinsky, and the old Russian street name is Predtechenskaya. Forerunner! So John the Baptist was certainly a Jew! “Well, you, a Jew of existence!” - usually all such disputes ended with this argument.
LP: "Have you never heard that you are rich because you are Jews?"
IB: "Seriously - no, not once."
DB: "Personally in the comments to me - I have already seen, but I do not pay attention to this."
IB: "Well, we'll see, I think."
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And most importantly, to what extent the Russian regions are rescuing the Internet, and moreover, it is human capital that is involved - the main thing is our national treasure. Not oil and gas, but 140 million, still the largest European population with a good education.
And that means, if it is possible to build a global IT company from Vologda, then it will be possible to keep it in Vologda or in some other region. Here is what I wanted to say in the end. So be healthy! And by the way, live richly! Happily.
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