Our Stanford Day Fourth and Fifth

The fourth day was semi-final, i.e. and I didn’t have a good rest, and to work (there were more productive days - first , second and third ). We helped the guys from Stanford Business School make a presentation about us, exchanged impressions about local specifics, etc. Therefore, I will immediately move on to a much richer fifth day.







Obviously, this was told to us by a man from Yahoo, whom we met the next day, but this is already the next story that I can write only on weekends, since I write reports with a slight delay, and tomorrow we will fly away from here.



I also want to add that I asked all investors about Google - that, they say, in Russia, everyone thinks that soon Google will become everything, and that you literally open your eyes - and everything around will be Google - Google toothbrush, Google toothpaste, and even google water will flow from the tap. What they all said that not only this, of course, will not happen, but even Google’s dominance in the search engine market will most likely not be in 10 years, because Google’s algorithms are fairly simple and old, and a newbie can easily appear on the market who can offer something newer. In principle, it is clear that, given the rather old age of all these very investors, they think a little differently than we do - each of them has seen many ups and downs of very serious projects and understands that sooner or later a new cycle begins in the IT industry .

')

It is possible that the heightened interest in us from such a large number of people unexpectedly for us is an indicator that the countdown has already been launched and people are looking for a new team that will be able to offer something new. Maybe we will somehow be involved in this, at least I want to believe in it.

		On the fifth day, we met with three investors. In addition to the investors themselves, at the first meeting there were a lot of people, a fair amount of whom turned out to be willing to join our project in various roles. Investors knew these people and it was clear the desire to invite them to the meeting, because it immediately became clear that control over strategy, especially marketing, was important to them, since they do not believe much in Russian. However, perhaps deserved, because we all understand that in Soviet times we didn’t have any marketing and we only learn how to promote products as a nation. For us, this communication was interesting from the point of view that we actually saw people who not only believe that our ideas can really be promoted to the market, but also claim that they know how to do it. In general, their ideas boiled down to the fact that we need to move along a strategy that they called vertical-by-vertical, i.e. to focus at first only on one niche of search, then on the second, etc., until we come to what we will be perceived as a search engine, which searches well in all niches. I'm still not very sure that what they told us is right, because in subsequent meetings, we were often told that venture capitalists should be filtered.
		The second investor talked with us more about the presentation that the students are doing than about our project. He stressed that in any presentation it is necessary to tell not only about the bright future, otherwise one hand-waving comes out, but also to explain what the value of the already existing technology is. Honestly, I do not really agree with him, because if there is a good team, a good idea, then at the moment when it already has a fully developed technology, ready for an industrial start, investors are not really needed, so buying a stake in such a team may already be too expensive and, on the other the parties are still almost as risky as before when everything was finally created. However, the speech was reduced to the fact that it would be good to prove that if a company is engaged in R & D (ie, research and development), then this is r & D, and not R & D, i.e. that the main problems have already been investigated and the matter is only about coding, and not vice versa - there are ideas, but how to implement them is not clear, therefore research is required.
		Then came the third investor, John. He was very different from the previous ones - perhaps because he was from England and only recently moved to Palo Alto - after he launched a bunch of successful projects. I habitually began to ask him about the options of marketing and other strategies, to which he asked us - and what do we ourselves want from the project?
		It made our students think. The fact is that there is only one of maybe 10-15 businesses remaining independent and survives until entering the stock exchange or the level of liquidity when the stock is no longer needed, and the rest are sold to a strategic player, the project’s founders lose control of it, and in general, they most likely stop working there. Do we want to play the all-or-nothing game, or do we want to quickly glance at something, sell-resell and then go into a similar business.
		We said that there is no - we want to play our game ourselves, we don’t want to be sold to anyone. To this, John replied that in this case we do not need to listen to venture capitalists, but we must finance the development ourselves for as long as possible, and then take the money, if it really requires, on our own terms, since these funds have their own strategy, and they don’t like it when the company’s management suddenly has its own strategy that does not coincide with their interests. John had in mind, it is obvious that these capitalists may turn out to be unpleasant sausages for us, but obviously did not say this, because himself - one of them.