Meeting poSEEDelki in Yandex

On November 10, #poSEEDelki, an informal meeting of entrepreneurs organized by GreenfieldProject, was held for the first time in the Moscow office of Yandex, where representatives of Yandex told how they managed to preserve the spirit of creativity in startups in a large company and revealed some details of the internal cuisine. And on the traditional discussion of new business ideas from the participants, seven projects were presented at once.

More than 70 people gathered at poSEEDelki in Yandex, so I even had to urgently look for a bigger audience. While the guests were waiting for representatives of the company, meeting leader Petr Tatishchev from GreenfieldProject attracted them into a discussion that pushes people to create a startup. As it turned out, the desire to change the world for the better is often mixed with the desire to get rid of boredom or to meet the spirit of the times, greed and other human weaknesses and weaknesses.

Tigran Khudaverdyan , head of Yandex portal services, and Grigory Bakunov , deputy head of development, came to talk with the guests. The topic of their speech was rather free, and most of the time they answered questions and criticized the professional community. We managed to talk about Google and Rambler, about the approach to launching new services, why Yandex is not going to release its browser, about the development of mobile Yandex.Maps and much more. The full performance is available in video .
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Grigory Bakunov said that Yandex may be primarily interested in startups of a certain direction. For example, engaged in multimedia technologies or developing methods for studying user behavior on the Internet ( more ). Tigran Khudaverdyan noted that in the external environment they are more often looking for people, not projects. According to him, several dozens of projects are being developed within the company, and some of them are employees' startups.


We also talked about how Yandex managed to preserve the “creative spirit” inherent in young projects. Based on their experience, the guys gave some tips to a business that is growing from a startup into something more:

• Motivate each employee: he must believe that he is doing the most important thing in the world. Support their desire to create, because people are always behind the success of the company. Positive on the attitude of people may affect the rejection of many hard and fast rules that prevent you from creating something new.
• Protect the backbone of creativity from excessive red tape and bureaucracy.
• If your users have habits of using the service, you should not break them. For example, when Yandex began to show the exchange rate with two digits after the decimal point instead of four, this caused discontent among the mass of accountants, who compared their calculations with the dollar rate on the portal's main page. As a result, it was decided to return to the version with four decimal places.

After an interesting conversation with representatives of Yandex, which lasted about an hour, any of the participants in the event could speak to an audience. As a result, seven people told about their business ideas or start-up projects, which was a record of poSEEDel'ok.


The guests of the event discussed the following projects: printing advertising on napkins , which will be provided free of charge to cafes and restaurants; Darru.ru is a gift giving operator that was formed at the Harvest startup tournament in October and has already been nominated for the Startup of the Year 2010 award; TRIONA is a niche SaaS service that allows you to automate the management of a beauty salon; arpool-service "NetProb" , whose team is ready to help the Moscow City Hall to solve transport problems; an automatic car wash project where payment is automated and the owner washes the car; GiftMaster is a recommendation service and gift aggregator that can “shoot” as an application for social networks; and Grigory Bakunov sold the idea of ​​a dating site for a bottle of soda, where a male audience would pay for each action.

The following poSEEDelki will also be visiting and will be held on October 20th at the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. Participants will talk about the ideal office for a startup, as well as be able to explore the campus of the school.