Startup in Russian: today and tomorrow

Here is the sixth “ Internet Guide ”. The theme of the issue is “Startup in Russian”. We could not touch it, because only lazy people are not talking about startups right now. It is safe to say that everyone who follows what is happening on the Runet, and in particular the start-up himself and his sympathizers, should read the start-up edition of the “Internet Guide”.



We tried to look at the emerging domestic market of start-ups from different sides, and we think that we have coped with the task. Unfortunately, some ideas were not implemented (for objective reasons, it was not possible to talk with Skolkovo representatives); we hope this will not prevent the reader to form his own idea of ​​the situation with startups in Russia.



The most famous figures of start-up parties expressed their opinion on the problems of the market, shared the plans of their projects, gave their advice to beginning Russian entrepreneurs.

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Russia's main startup investor Arkady Moreynis ( Glavstart ), together with Olga Grinevskaya , tells the Internet Guide about StartUpWeekend , the problems of start-up Russian entrepreneurs, and how investors are attracted:

... The main problem of the market now is the lack of people willing to work. Because with a team of good specialists, even an unviable idea can be somehow screwed up in the process, and the project will not die. And if there is no team, not even the most brilliant idea realizes itself.

... In general, in Russia there is a very funny situation: we do not have projects looking for an investor, but investors are looking for projects. Our activities and collect so many investors for a very simple reason: we have sane projects.

Charismatic Alena Popova and Marusya Podlesnova (and for Marusya, as it turned out, this was the first official interview!) - the founder and leader of Startup Playbill , respectively - told us about how they met, why they decided to start a project, and that waiting for the participants of the "Startup Poster" in the near future:

... Today, besides attracting investment in start-up projects and finding worthy ideas for investing, I would call finding people in a project team, a shortage of analytics on the market as a whole, a housing issue, an assessment of the quality of events and getting a profile education are important problems. We are actively working on new services, the launch of which we will announce in September. It will be a bomb, believe me!

Maria Kulintseva, an analyst at StartupPoint , answered our questions about the largest startup community of Runet, spoke about the project’s work format and how StartupPoint changed over time:

... We adapt to market development. Our base is expanding, more and more new partners are emerging. We try new formats of work, the site is changing (new opportunities appear), Points are changing. Soon (I think, in September) we will present a new concept of our work with start-ups (for now, it’s a little early to talk about it) - this will be significant.

True industry experts (Valentin Dombrovsky, Sergey Mitrofanov, Yevgeny Kalinin, Dmitry Kalaev, Alexey Krol), in addition to their comments, gave answers to start-up questions about the development of ideas, the choice of investors:



Evgeny Kalinin (IT business consultant, trainer, mentor):

If you yourself know in advance what business you want to do, and be content with this knowledge - you have a problem. Almost at every startup show there is a project, after which the presenter asks the audience: “Does anyone understand what this startup is about?” And the author of the project alone raises his hand.

Dmitry Kalaev (Advisor to the Minister of Economy of the Sverdlovsk Region, one of the initiators of the project "Ural IT Cluster"):

An investor should be spiritually and emotionally close to you - this is a person with whom you will have to communicate regularly for three to five years. No wonder sometimes investments are compared with marriage.

Startup Market Today

Arkady Moreynis:

The main features of Russian startups are a different approach to work, a smaller percentage of technical founders and almost complete legal illiteracy. Strangely enough, the very ideas of start-ups, that in Russia, that in the USA are almost the same. But people work differently.

Maria Kulintseva:

The market is now in its infancy (still). Constantly there are new players, someone disappears. Much more people began to show interest in this business, to come to it (according to the latest trend - more and more “age-related” people). Large companies began to look closely at start-ups (they realized that sometimes it was cheaper to buy a project than to develop technology on their own).

Sergey Mitrofanov, head and partner of the Russian division of the international consulting company BRANDFLIGHT, an expert in the field of brand building:

But the biggest problem of startups in Russia is that startups do not see their project as a business. They see it as an Internet project, some kind of toy, a “feature”, but business is making money. Start-ups unduly focus on investors, forgetting about the market, and this leads to complication of relations between them. Coming to an investor, they propose an idea, rather than participation in business.

Just a party or something more?

Maria Kulintseva:

Much is now being adopted from the West, there is still an opportunity to simply copy some Western service and “take off”. We are now preparing a report on our study of investments in Runet startups. When the data will be known, it will be possible to talk about something, it is too early to do an analysis. The market is still growing, and the future is seen as “bright and joyful”: many investors are turning to this area because they understand that the future is behind it.

Alena Popova:

“What will startups be in the future? I believe in Smart Grid and cloud technologies. ”

Marusya Podlesnova:

And I vote with all my hands and feet for mobile applications, because I believe that we will soon all leave the web as such in applications. It does not matter whether it is iOS or Android, it is important that all our needs will be closed by various applications in our phones with you.

Sergey Mitrofanov:

The future of the Russian start-up market, of course, is. This is evident by how good, the intellectual ideas of our children are in demand in Western corporations. Intellect is what will drive our startups. When the optimal infrastructure is built in Russia: now it is a problem for startups, not so much IT projects, but also venture ones, in the field of science and technology, which is experiencing particular difficulties in creating prototypes of its products.

You can get acquainted with the materials of the issue on our website (PDF and issue.com).