David Yang: Yossi Vardi called Cybiko the largest invention of mankind after MP3
You will find the original and audio recording of the interview in this blog.
My questions are answered by the founder of the company ABBYY, the company Cybiko - not so long ago sensational in the USA with its innovative development.
His name is David Yang and he is one of the most famous entrepreneurs working in the IT field in Russia. His biography is included in the American reference book Who is Who - 2001. David Yang is the laureate of the Government of Russia award in the field of science and technology.
David Yang - Founder of ABBYY
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In addition to the IT-sphere, David is also engaged in the restaurant business. Among his projects are FAQCafe and ARTEFAQ - institutions for meetings of creative people and a pleasant pastime. But it is far from IT to go, and therefore David and Co. recently launched a new project called IIKO, the restaurant business management system.
If you want to get closer acquainted with the extraordinary personality of David Yang - read the interview.
Recently, young people do not want to go to study, and immediately rushes to work. What is your opinion about this trend?
It is true, I see it very often among students, the desire to do "something interesting" and not to learn. But I think that at first people should make efforts to overcome this reluctance and force themselves to unlearn. And moreover, to do this not for graduation studies, but in order to gain knowledge, which many will never receive in their lives.
Much more depends on the university, on the environment where you go. It is very difficult to study alone, when everyone else does not study around, but only go to discos and cafes.
It is necessary to overcome all these temptations, try to get involved as much as possible, gain knowledge and skills, and learn self-discipline. Then it will help in real work.
David, what did you get from studying at MIPT?
I and my friends who graduated from MIPT, I think, would not have happened if they had not received this school. We had a peculiar situation, since we were obsessed. We first studied 3 years in the physics and mathematics school and while studying in this school, we went to electives in physics. Graduates of our school, who entered the Physical and Technical Institute, returned for vacations in the summer and conducted electives with us. We were obsessed, we participated in competitions, we are a third of our class of 30 people. And most of us as a result went to the Physical and Technical Institute. 12 people came from our school, which was a historical record, more were received only from the Moscow 18th School.
If you get to the Physical and Technical Department, then you have to learn, otherwise you just fly out. And it disciplined, we studied at night. The system is arranged there, you will not be allowed to the crediting session, if you have not passed the so-called puzzles. The atmosphere in which we were - forcing us to learn. At some point, the desire to implement some projects overpowered. Honestly, from the 3rd class I wanted to be a physicist and went to the Physical-Technical Department and until the last year I continued to be sure that I would be engaged in science, in particular, solid state physics.
Initially, when the idea of ​​an electronic Lingvo dictionary appeared, there was no idea to leave physics and leave the Physical and Technical Institute. There was a desire to make a program on holidays and return to physics. Then life turned differently, but the years before this were taught to work when it was not desirable, this is what I said about self-discipline. Life will have to do this all the time. The “bad news” for young people is that life is designed in such a way that you spend 90% of your time on a routine and 10% on your creative work, regardless of what you do: writing a book, visual arts, physics or business.
If you do not learn to pull the strap, to be a marathon at an early age, you will not be able to learn it in life.
Universities is mostly technical knowledge. Where did you get knowledge of the business environment and work in it?
University - technical knowledge ... partly yes. But there is such a phrase, which I first heard from parents who studied at the Moscow State University Physics Department: “In the university, they are not teaching themselves knowledge, but about where they can be read about them.” The actual knowledge that you acquire is a small part of what you acquire in a good university. In a good university you acquire the ability to learn, the ability to set goals yourself and achieve them. You study the model of thinking, the main thing that is taught at the Physics and Technology Institute is how to think about a problem, how to investigate it, how to achieve a result. And this is what you need in business and medicine, in everything. Fiztech was created in the image and likeness of MIT (massachusetts institute of technology).
I was recently at MIT and talked with the management, with the students, a really very similar atmosphere. There, however, more attention is paid to the visual arts, contemporary art. There is a famous Media Lab, an open Seymour Papert, where docking of art, science and technology takes place. At the Physics and Technology Institute, the emphasis on technical disciplines is greater, although there are a huge number of artists and artists who have left the Physics and Technology Institute. Starting from Filippenko, ending with Vladimir Smolyar - a famous performance artist-artist or Alexander Ilichevsky - a fashionable young writer who 4 days ago received the Booker Prize - the highest award in literature.
I do not agree with the fact that they mainly provide technical knowledge. They learn to think, they learn to achieve goals.
I gained self-education in business and economics, as well as all my friends who graduate from the Physical and Technical Institute, but are not working now in the field of physics.
If you have been taught to learn, then you can read and understand this on your own. My friend Karen Musaelyan is the managing partner of Merrill Lynch, one of the hundred most famous US bankers. He got on Wall Street from Road Island, where he studied physics after the Physics and Technology Institute. In an airplane, after reading two financial and market management talmudas and passing the entrance test at JP Morgan is better than the MBI.
As a result, they took him and he quickly got the position of vice president of JP Morgan. He was also asked: “Where did you learn this way and are there any other such financiers at the same physics department?”
The main thing is to learn how to gain knowledge and achieve goals, and everything else will follow.
Do your specialists at ABBYY take specialists from MIPT?
No, we have no qualification for a university, which a person must complete. We have several stages of admission. The first stage is a summary, when eliminated by external signs. Then there are several interviews. Then - the entrance exam, these are tasks that need to be solved. And according to the results of solving the problems, the candidate is invited to the interns. The internship runs from 1 to 6 months. After that, the qualification exam is taken and after the qualification exam, a person becomes a full-time employee.
Six months ago, we collected statistics on those who passed the exam in the field of programmers-engineers, and 30% were graduates of the Physics and Technology Institute, 30-40% were several faculties of Moscow State University, and the remaining 30% are all other universities in Russia.
We still have a large department of applied linguistics, mostly people from the RSUH and a number of other universities associated with applied linguistics get into it. Recently there have been people from the Moscow State University philology department, there are strong guys from RUDN, and so on.
Currently, there are programs that understand, recognize the meaning of the printed text? Or has science not reached this yet?
This is done by a large number of research groups in the world, research in the field of semantics. Goals are different. You can not create a system that will understand everything. It is necessary that she understood in the application of a goal. One thing is to create an expert system, the definition of the symptoms of the diagnosis. Another thing - to understand, to distinguish spam from non-spam. The third is to try to understand the correspondence associated with the preparation for terrorist acts or by correspondence to understand about the attempt of any violations in the financial sphere. There is a need for search engines to index and search by meaning.
There is a direction associated with document annotation, i.e. for the works of scientific and other plans, you must have a brief summary of the document to enable the reader to get acquainted with this or that document.
There is a direction associated with machine translation from language to language. And in order to create a system that translates with a quality close to the quality of a human translator, it is necessary to understand what the primary document was about, then formulate the same thing in another language.
Of the very serious areas related to semantics, there is still little research, but this understanding of continuous speech, which is important to be able to recognize it without tuning to the voice of the speaker, is of imminence. This is one of the most difficult tasks - recognition of continuous speech without tuning to the voice of the speaker, which is called Speaker Independent Continuous Speech Recognition.
The particular difficulty of this task lies in the fact that in the speech signal. If you investigate the sound wav file that you have registered, it turns out that up to 70% of the information in the file is already missing, it is not in the physical signal, but there are some 30% there. However, you understand me almost 100%, recognize what I am saying, because your brain recovers the lost 70% of information. Check it out is easy. If I start to speak something in Armenian, I will dictate some address in Armenian. The volume of the signal will be the same, the signal-to-noise ratio is the same, but to recognize what I have spelled, you will succeed, maybe the very 30% of information. You will be able to recognize some vowels, but you cannot recognize 70% because you will not be able to recover lost information.
To teach a computer to recognize this kind of text, you need to learn how to understand what the announcer says. This is further complicated by the fact that oral speech has ragged sentences, in the general case does not contain complete grammatically correct forms, etc.
Semantic analysis is complicated many times because the parsing, which must precede the semantic, is very difficult. This direction, which could describe what you called the "understanding" of the printed text.
In each of these areas there are research groups that are trying to do something, somewhere more successfully, somewhere less successfully. Now science is not aware of the current system that would solve all these tasks.
Our company has been engaged in research in the field of applied linguistics and semantics for 12 years. And we create something that can figuratively be called a semantic universe. This is a kind of system based on a universal semantic hierarchy. This is a kind of model of knowledge about the world, which has a hierarchical system of language-independent semantic classes. At the deepest levels of nesting of this tree, language-dependent elements appear, i.e. lexemes
After some time, we will be able to officially announce that this will be the application. But I can't do it now. Officially, we will begin to talk about how this technology will be applied in an applied sense. This information will be available later, I think, by 2008.
Tell us, what is the situation with the NLC project now?
I started talking about him in the previous question. This is a kind of technology in the field of applied linguistics and semantics. We are now on the threshold of the beta version. In 2008, we plan to demonstrate in the work a beta version of a commercial product.
And who will test the beta version?
We have partners with whom we have agreed on this topic and in the beginning this will be done by a limited circle of people.
How advanced are you in the development of artificial intelligence? What has been achieved during the existence of ABBYY?
In terms of the public, the word artificial intelligence is perceived with some futuristic touch. And in fact, this is the name of a certain class of technologies, which was given by the founding fathers of this trend in 1956 and in general does not include anything supernatural. All technologies associated with recognition, as a rule, belong to the technology of artificial intelligence.
The technology used in FineReader belongs to the class of artificial intelligence technologies. All sorts of technologies related to the classification, with the decision, to the extent that the methods of artificial intelligence are used in the Electrolux washing machine, which makes a decision - how long to wash and how much powder to fill.
Specifically in our company it is FineReader. Our latest version is more accurate, smarter, better recognizes low quality texts, knows how to deal with defects, even when the letters are cut in half. This is the most basic achievement.
A number of methods used in the NLC for the analysis of the proposal, analysis and synthesis - they also belong to the methods of artificial intelligence, but it is too early to attribute to the achievements. When a commercial product appears, then it will be possible to talk about achievements in this area.
What types of information can FineReader recognize?
The program doesn’t care where the source of the graphic information comes from: a scanner, a camera, whatever. Its task is to turn graphic information into an editable text file. At some point, PDF was added to the number of such formats. Not only raster graphic information, but also vector graphic information has become recognized, transformed into editable text.
Are all the developments of your company successful or are there any that have been minimized?
It all started with electronic dictionaries, it certainly has survived. Then we began to make a morphology, spell checker, which organically entered the Lingvo, FineReader and NLC systems. Then OCR is the whole direction of recognition of not only unstructured documents, but also structured documents: bank payment orders, accounts, invoices, invoices, questionnaires. At the same time - handwriting recognition technology.
All that is listed - we started and continue to actively apply.
Some of the lexicographic areas can be attributed to such things that we have suspended with a very big stretch. We are not only the authors of the program that manages the Lingvo dictionaries, but also the authors of a number of dictionaries that are included there. Of the 130 dictionaries that are included in Lingvo, some of them were created by our experts, our lexicographers. And we licensed a part from the authors.
And at some point we stopped work on highly specialized content, strengthened the team and started working on general-purpose content. In particular, we recently released, together with the publishing house Russian Language Media and Drofa, a large English-Russian dictionary on paper. This is a two-volume large English-Russian dictionary, the most relevant today in vocabulary.
But in the near future, the suspended part in the field of content and lexicography will be revived again on a completely new professional level.
The fact is that we founded the company ABBYY Press, which will specialize in the publishing business. Within this company we will create our own content, our own dictionaries, reference books, various informational materials. And we will publish them not only in electronic form, but also on paper.
Thus, having suspended a part of our highly specialized lexicographic activity in the field of ABBYY, we after some time moved this area to a dedicated division - an independent company.
We understood what we do, we must do well and be the best in our field. Realizing that within the framework of a programmer company, it would be too expensive for us to achieve the high quality of highly specialized content, we decided to create a special professional structure, having recruited specialists from this field there.
Maybe we should also talk about platforms. We released FineReader version 5.0 for Mac and after that we didn’t move in this direction. We are reproached for this, people demand our products for the Mac platform and so far, unfortunately, we have nothing to answer. Because it is very expensive.
We considered the cost of development and so far we can not afford it. But I think that this is still a temporary phenomenon, after some time we will again revive this trend and release our products for Mac. Because this platform impresses us, it is very dynamic and we would like to see our products under Mac.
What are the most memorable stages you can highlight from your business activities?
Hard times are remembered, hard times are in a good, creative sense when there is a lot of work. When everything is calm and good - less settles in the memory. The first thing that comes to mind is the beginning, when Sasha Moskalev and I were sitting together in Chernogolovka, doing Lingvo. As we ran, we looked for our first investors, then it was the center of NTTM, which helped us with a loan for the start of our work.
As we sold our first programs directly to the organizations, it was in Soviet times before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Start of work for Kostya Anisimovich, Vadim Tereshchenko and Kostya Zuev on the FineReader system.
The first stages of promotion to the Western market, organized by Sergey Andreev, our first contacts with German, American and Ukrainian partners, which led to the creation of ABBYY Ukraine, ABBYY Europe and ABBYY USA.
Later, of course the project Cybiko.
Cybiko handheld computer This is a very bright, very difficult life stage. When in 1998 came the idea of ​​creating a handheld communication computer that allowed young people to get to know each other at a distance and send messages to each other.
At that time there was no sms, bluetooth was on paper in the form of specifications, experienced chips were only released, wifi was the size of a large PCMCIA card and consumed so much energy that not a single pocket device could pull it. This is such a dense time. We created a company, we launched a product on the market, we did mass production, we sold a quarter of a million copies to Cybiko in 4 months. It was a very dramatic and interesting time. We were recognized on the streets of New York. The total circulation of all publications about the Cybiko project was about 650 million copies. I met Steve Case - CEO of AOL (America On Line), a Time Warner company, after which they invested in Cybiko.
I met Yossi Vardi - the founder of ICQ.
Yossi Vardi and David Yang And Yossi Vardi then said that Cybiko is the biggest invention of mankind after MP3. It was very nice to hear on the forum in Arizona.
These were very interesting years, when I slept for two hours a month and I had dreams in reality. For the first time in my life I experienced this phenomenon when I walked around the airport in Zurich and saw a dream, while walking down the corridor. It was a very tense time. This is when, after just entering the US market, the NASDAQ collapsed, there was a crisis in America, half a million people lost their jobs. Realizing that this is a protracted history in America, just having got out, we entered the European market with Cybiko, and at that moment there was the September 11 terrorist attack, and that’s all. The recession rolled into the European market and we had to restructure the company.
These are the things that come to mind.
I remember the beginning of FAQCafe, also a great time - 2004. A little inappropriate direction to me, more like a hobby. But in terms of finance, FAQCafe is a very successful project.
Now the market has divorced many miniature programs that perform unpretentious tasks. Advise Russian software product developers in which direction they should go? Should they develop such programs or focus on serious software products?
Both are necessary. Sometimes having developed a small program, people recognize you and it becomes springboards to big business. So you can say about Lingvo and ABBYY. Still, Lingvo should be attributed to small programs. It was such at the beginning, along with 10 different dictionaries that existed at that time in Russia.
What not to do is not to dwell on it. Having developed a small niche program and reaching a certain popularity, you need to capitalize it.
What is capitalize in this case? This is to create a team, because one in the field is not a warrior. It’s impossible all the time to hope that my friend Petya and I will be doing small programs all my life. What's next?Be sure to happen a breakdown. Either Peter leaves or Microsoft comes out with a similar program and this business closes as a class.
If you were lucky, you managed to make a small niche program that shot and became popular - you need to immediately move on. We need to recruit people, we need to look for investors, we need to popularize the brand and release some more programs under this brand. If the founder soberly feels that he lacks some entrepreneurial qualities or professional qualities, then you need to hire a manager, you immediately need to move, seize the moment.
As for large programs. It does not work out right away to develop a large program. Even if you develop it, you still need to know how to sell it. A large program - it also costs a lot. And if there is no name, if there is no background, if there is no track records - who will buy it?
Or in this case it is necessary to immediately enlist the support of a large customer, a large customer. There are relationships that have developed on a different basis. There was a big company that sold computers, serviced 1C, large points of Gazprom and developed professional and trusting relationships. And this company said: Yes, solve just such a management task, we will buy it from you for 100 thousand. dollars.
Then, you can try to take a chance, type a team, start developing. Maybe something will work out. But not always succeeds, even if there is such a customer who is willing to pay.
The risks will be that it will not be possible to recruit professional people, it will be possible to recruit middle-quality people who will put the wrong decisions into the architecture. It will take six months, the prototype will appear. And it will become clear that he is slowing down (in the sense that the program is slowly running), that he does not satisfy the customer’s needs for scalability.
We will have to start everything all over again, and time is lost, and the customer in 6-8 months starts to get nervous: Well, where, where? You said that everything will be.
You admit that two months ago it was decided to throw everything out and start all over again. It turns out that two or three years have been lost, the customer is dissatisfied, the relationship is spoiled, the team has not been created, there are no new customers.
And naturally there are investors who, the customer is not stupid, to pay all this money in advance. He will pay 10-20 percent and will wait.
And to make the program need more money. And under this money is being dragged by friends and acquaintances, such angel investors who say: Look, you see an order of 100 thousand dollars, give me 20 thousand dollars, I will hire a couple of programmers.
As a result, these investors are completely upset by the situation, what is called disappointed, their money was gone.
In general, trying to start right away with large programs is a very big risk, even if there is a customer. If there is no customer, then the risks are even greater, because, apart from all the indicated risks, the risk is added that the task has not been precisely set.
This is not an idle question, I know such situations, they are very often. Nevertheless, the company, believing that it knows how to solve this problem, begins to solve it on its own, but it does not have enough analytics, not enough substantive knowledge to do what the market really needs. It gives some kind of solution that is trying to sell. The first customers peck at it, try to use it and here they discover that it does not solve this, this, this, and this is generally not convenient, and this is generally wrong. Some things can be corrected, and some things concern the architecture, the very foundation, and this cannot be changed in principle, it needs to be rewritten again. And then what to do?
Therefore, here, as in any innovative business, the holy word is the team. In Jim Collins’s book Good to Great (in the Russian translation “From Good to Great”), it is written very clearly, “first - who, then - what”. First, decide who your team is, who you go to battle with, who you will work with, and then decide what you will do. This is a perfect truth that every young entrepreneur needs to understand.
You have repeatedly said that a successful business is the right team. Give some tips on how to choose the right team to develop a business?
I would very much like to see simple recommendations, simple tips that could, like a litmus test, identify the right person or the wrong one. Of course, the task is more multidimensional and recommendations that are suitable in one situation are not suitable in another.
I recently read a book by Danny Meyer called Danny Meyer's High Cuisine, which is translated into Russian. This is one of the most successful American restaurateurs. He talks about how they created their first restaurant and how they made the rest of the restaurants. Restaurants that very quickly ranked among the top 20 US restaurants.
This is a man of legend, very successful financially, very successful in terms of business, quality of cuisine, etc.
He tells how he selected a team for his business in the hospitality market. He says that at some point he realized that there are things that cannot be taught to a person. Either they are from birth or not given. There is no need to waste time on such people, you need to tell them - thank you and continue with those who have it. He calls this principle 49 to 51. He came to the conclusion that if a man existed 100% fit to work in the hospitality business, then he should have had 51% innate hospitality and hospitality and 49% of technical professionalism. It is in this ratio, hospitality and hospitality a little more professional part.
He used to think that a professional is a professional, a 100% professional should work. No, that's right - 51% congenital cordiality and 49% professionalism.
And then he chose so. He said: “You never teach him the 51st percent of cordiality. If you take a candidate and see that he has 51% cordiality, but not 49% of professionalism, then take him and teach. And sooner or later he will become a good employee. If the opposite is true, then you never teach him kindness, just don’t waste time on it. ”
The funny thing is that this logic applies to business in general, only you have to be replaced by the desire to make the best company, the best product. If he has a desire to make the best company, the best service, the best product, but there is no 49% professionalism, then take it and teach.
But if he does not have the desire to make the best company, the best product, then he should not be taken, certainly not at first.
This is extremely important for a startup, for a young company. To the first core consisted of people obsessed with the idea of ​​doing a better job, contrary to their own interests. To the interests of the case stood above personal interests.
It may be lofty words and they may seem meaningless to someone, but in fact they are very practical.
Morale and personal qualities of a person in the early stages of the project are absolutely crucial moment. Professional skills are also extremely important, but with skills you can teach them over time.
Having created such a team of people who are inspired to do something great, even if it will locally contradict their personal interests, who are willing to compromise, sacrifice personal ambitions, but the main thing is to do it.
With such people you can go into battle and build a business. Then, gradually it is necessary to pick up a team of high professionals and the ratio of 51 to 49 should somehow be maintained.
We are trying to ask questions and understand from the interviews what is the main goal of life for people, do they see this goal? How do they see the goal for the next year, for the next five years, for the next 30 years. We ask these questions, we listen to their answers and try to understand whether they will work in harness, whether they will be team players or whether they are lone wolves. We try not to take lone wolves. You can work with them piece by piece, remotely, they are very effective in the short term. If you need to do something quickly, such lone wolves, working remotely, give a very fast result. But if they are taken to the office, they spoil the team, they destroy the team with their individualism, their assessments of people and the demonstration of superiority in their field.
If we take on managers, we look to see if people were engaged in social work at school or an institute. A person does not change in any way since the time of school and even kindergarten. A person with an active lifestyle, as a rule, in school and university time is in sight, literally - the head of the group.
We look at the ability and desire of a person to improve, to learn, to self-discipline.
School grades show not so much about knowledge, but about a person’s internal discipline. If a person was a troechnik this is a signal, this is a property of his character. This does not mean that we will not take it, we will look very closely at his personal capacity for self-organization and self-discipline.
There are such guys, a head on a place, very clear, fast, impudent mind, but at the same time in bad grades to school: two, three. The person says: “Yes, I understood everything, but I didn’t have a relationship with teachers, I didn’t like to learn.”
This does not mean that we definitely will not take it, this means that we will be looking very closely at it.
Sometimes such a person is a good seller, but it’s unlikely that such a person is ready for a long hike, for a heavy strap for several years, to work on the same project, not to get off anywhere, to live in such a family. So many parameters from his past life very clearly symbolize what will happen in the future.
You once said: "I do not think we have succeeded." What is success for you?
Honestly, I do not really remember what it was said for. I think this was taken out of context by a journalist for a catchy headline. What is success? I don’t know ... If you asked me what happiness is, I would tell you that happiness is the right way to go. Happiness is not a state, it is a process. You can not achieve happiness, you can go to it ..
The process of achieving this is real happiness, and the fact of achievement is temporary satisfaction.
As for success, this is all relative. Of course, our employees are pleased to realize that there are 30 million FineReader users in the world, 5 million Lingvo users. It pleases, this is what makes many work more intensively and with greater dedication. Because successful business can take place only when the company is engaged in a business that is useful for people. The main goal of any company should be customer satisfaction, this is the primary goal.
And all financial indicators and financial goals are a consequence, a secondary goal.
I am categorically against the wording, when financial goals in some business are put on the first position.
This is a short-term business shabashka. Let's go - earned - fled.
And if we want to create a company for many years, epochs, “for eternity”, then we should set the most important goal - to make people happier, improve the lives of people around. If we set this goal and achieved it, we will be able to find a way to get money from it.
Here is an example Wikipedia should be indicative or an example of Skype, which we currently use.
Initially, Wikipedia existed as an absolutely non-commercial phenomenon. The Wikimedia Foundation are people who were inspired by the idea of ​​giving everyone the opportunity to access information and knowledge. And now there are many options for how to get money on this. They went the most direct way to Donations and people who are willing simply give money.
The same, a well-known recent example of the English group, which posted its new album for free on the Internet, with an appeal to fans who liked the album to pay for downloading any amount they deem necessary. As a result, they earned several million dollars in 2-3 days.
I think this applies to everything that happens, not only business, not only their business activity, but people in general.
Some develop projects in order to earn a lot of money, others, such as Sergey Brin, want to be known and remembered as the leaders of big changes. What is the purpose of your business activity?
ABBYY's mission is to improve people's lives. By creating artificial intelligence technologies and programs for entering data into a computer and translating from one language to another, we turn information into useful knowledge.
Paraphrasing this wording in other words, we help people better understand each other. Indeed, we are inspired by this, believe it or not.
We want people to understand each other better, on which continents they would not be, what languages ​​he would not speak. So that they better understand not only contemporaries, but also their predecessors.
With the help of our technologies, millions of books are introduced into information systems, published both today and hundreds of years ago, and books are becoming available.
First, the data is on the dusty shelves of the library, then the data are transformed into information, and the information into knowledge. One of the definitions of information states that information is usable data. And knowledge is information suitable for decision-making. Here it is the genesis. All our technologies are designed to make this happen.
This chain can be formulated as follows: person - knowledge - information - data - information - knowledge - person. From person to person, in whatever epoch he is, in whatever language he speaks, wherever he is geographically located, he passes this knowledge to another person through this chain.
We are encouraged to create a set of technologies that allows it to create faster, better, expand boundaries and lower barriers in this process. How to make money on this? We'll find.
We don’t need money for the money itself. The vast majority of all that we earn, we invest in further development.
All that is done now, it is done on our own reinvestment. Compared with our turnover, we received scant investments.
Of the $ 100 we once invested with Sasha Moskalev, we now have: 650 people in the world, 7 offices in 7 countries, millions of users.
We did all this with our own money, which we invested in the process.
Blood is necessary for the existence of an organism, a biological being. Money is blood for a creature by name - a business, it is by no means an end in itself, for us at least.
I think that this view is shared by a large number of employees. In the company itself, we talk a lot about this topic and we built it from the very beginning. Most people who are now in the management of the company - from the very first days in the company, since 1991, since 1992.
Starting from CEO of Chief Executive Officer - General Director Sergey Andreev, continuing as Financial Director Vadim Tereshchenko, Director for Research and Development - Konstantin Anisimovich, Aram Pakhchanyan - Vice President for Corporate Projects, Vladimir Seleghey - Director for Linguistic Technologies, Kostya Zuyev, Kostya Zuyev, .d I can list people for a long time. These are all the guys who have worked in the company almost from the very beginning, they have been working in the company for more than 15 years.
What is the reason for the backlog of our country from the west? For example, why your former project Cybiko did not see Russia?
The fact that Cybiko did not see Russia is not directly related to the situation in Russia. It was a purely technical moment, it was a matter of time. As for the backlog of Russia. Of course, the reason for the backlog is the Soviet era. It is not only the socialist economy itself. There are consequences of this era, which complicate the rapid development of the economy today, when the socialist system is no longer there. It seems to me that today it is a problem of the lack of people who can commercialize technology, innovation.
By the number of brilliant people, Russia has always been ahead. There has never been a shortage of geniuses, talented people, in particular, talented engineers. But we also need people who can build a business on these ideas. I think that gradually the situation is normalizing.
Do you plan to launch anything innovative like Cybiko?
Two and a half years ago, I and my partner founded a small software company and this company should create a new software management system.
My questions are answered by the founder of the company ABBYY, the company Cybiko - not so long ago sensational in the USA with its innovative development.
His name is David Yang and he is one of the most famous entrepreneurs working in the IT field in Russia. His biography is included in the American reference book Who is Who - 2001. David Yang is the laureate of the Government of Russia award in the field of science and technology.
David Yang - Founder of ABBYY
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In addition to the IT-sphere, David is also engaged in the restaurant business. Among his projects are FAQCafe and ARTEFAQ - institutions for meetings of creative people and a pleasant pastime. But it is far from IT to go, and therefore David and Co. recently launched a new project called IIKO, the restaurant business management system.
If you want to get closer acquainted with the extraordinary personality of David Yang - read the interview.
Recently, young people do not want to go to study, and immediately rushes to work. What is your opinion about this trend?
It is true, I see it very often among students, the desire to do "something interesting" and not to learn. But I think that at first people should make efforts to overcome this reluctance and force themselves to unlearn. And moreover, to do this not for graduation studies, but in order to gain knowledge, which many will never receive in their lives.
Much more depends on the university, on the environment where you go. It is very difficult to study alone, when everyone else does not study around, but only go to discos and cafes.
It is necessary to overcome all these temptations, try to get involved as much as possible, gain knowledge and skills, and learn self-discipline. Then it will help in real work.
David, what did you get from studying at MIPT?
I and my friends who graduated from MIPT, I think, would not have happened if they had not received this school. We had a peculiar situation, since we were obsessed. We first studied 3 years in the physics and mathematics school and while studying in this school, we went to electives in physics. Graduates of our school, who entered the Physical and Technical Institute, returned for vacations in the summer and conducted electives with us. We were obsessed, we participated in competitions, we are a third of our class of 30 people. And most of us as a result went to the Physical and Technical Institute. 12 people came from our school, which was a historical record, more were received only from the Moscow 18th School.
If you get to the Physical and Technical Department, then you have to learn, otherwise you just fly out. And it disciplined, we studied at night. The system is arranged there, you will not be allowed to the crediting session, if you have not passed the so-called puzzles. The atmosphere in which we were - forcing us to learn. At some point, the desire to implement some projects overpowered. Honestly, from the 3rd class I wanted to be a physicist and went to the Physical-Technical Department and until the last year I continued to be sure that I would be engaged in science, in particular, solid state physics.
Initially, when the idea of ​​an electronic Lingvo dictionary appeared, there was no idea to leave physics and leave the Physical and Technical Institute. There was a desire to make a program on holidays and return to physics. Then life turned differently, but the years before this were taught to work when it was not desirable, this is what I said about self-discipline. Life will have to do this all the time. The “bad news” for young people is that life is designed in such a way that you spend 90% of your time on a routine and 10% on your creative work, regardless of what you do: writing a book, visual arts, physics or business.
If you do not learn to pull the strap, to be a marathon at an early age, you will not be able to learn it in life.
Universities is mostly technical knowledge. Where did you get knowledge of the business environment and work in it?
University - technical knowledge ... partly yes. But there is such a phrase, which I first heard from parents who studied at the Moscow State University Physics Department: “In the university, they are not teaching themselves knowledge, but about where they can be read about them.” The actual knowledge that you acquire is a small part of what you acquire in a good university. In a good university you acquire the ability to learn, the ability to set goals yourself and achieve them. You study the model of thinking, the main thing that is taught at the Physics and Technology Institute is how to think about a problem, how to investigate it, how to achieve a result. And this is what you need in business and medicine, in everything. Fiztech was created in the image and likeness of MIT (massachusetts institute of technology).
I was recently at MIT and talked with the management, with the students, a really very similar atmosphere. There, however, more attention is paid to the visual arts, contemporary art. There is a famous Media Lab, an open Seymour Papert, where docking of art, science and technology takes place. At the Physics and Technology Institute, the emphasis on technical disciplines is greater, although there are a huge number of artists and artists who have left the Physics and Technology Institute. Starting from Filippenko, ending with Vladimir Smolyar - a famous performance artist-artist or Alexander Ilichevsky - a fashionable young writer who 4 days ago received the Booker Prize - the highest award in literature.
I do not agree with the fact that they mainly provide technical knowledge. They learn to think, they learn to achieve goals.
I gained self-education in business and economics, as well as all my friends who graduate from the Physical and Technical Institute, but are not working now in the field of physics.
If you have been taught to learn, then you can read and understand this on your own. My friend Karen Musaelyan is the managing partner of Merrill Lynch, one of the hundred most famous US bankers. He got on Wall Street from Road Island, where he studied physics after the Physics and Technology Institute. In an airplane, after reading two financial and market management talmudas and passing the entrance test at JP Morgan is better than the MBI.
As a result, they took him and he quickly got the position of vice president of JP Morgan. He was also asked: “Where did you learn this way and are there any other such financiers at the same physics department?”
The main thing is to learn how to gain knowledge and achieve goals, and everything else will follow.
Do your specialists at ABBYY take specialists from MIPT?
No, we have no qualification for a university, which a person must complete. We have several stages of admission. The first stage is a summary, when eliminated by external signs. Then there are several interviews. Then - the entrance exam, these are tasks that need to be solved. And according to the results of solving the problems, the candidate is invited to the interns. The internship runs from 1 to 6 months. After that, the qualification exam is taken and after the qualification exam, a person becomes a full-time employee.
Six months ago, we collected statistics on those who passed the exam in the field of programmers-engineers, and 30% were graduates of the Physics and Technology Institute, 30-40% were several faculties of Moscow State University, and the remaining 30% are all other universities in Russia.
We still have a large department of applied linguistics, mostly people from the RSUH and a number of other universities associated with applied linguistics get into it. Recently there have been people from the Moscow State University philology department, there are strong guys from RUDN, and so on.
Currently, there are programs that understand, recognize the meaning of the printed text? Or has science not reached this yet?
This is done by a large number of research groups in the world, research in the field of semantics. Goals are different. You can not create a system that will understand everything. It is necessary that she understood in the application of a goal. One thing is to create an expert system, the definition of the symptoms of the diagnosis. Another thing - to understand, to distinguish spam from non-spam. The third is to try to understand the correspondence associated with the preparation for terrorist acts or by correspondence to understand about the attempt of any violations in the financial sphere. There is a need for search engines to index and search by meaning.
There is a direction associated with document annotation, i.e. for the works of scientific and other plans, you must have a brief summary of the document to enable the reader to get acquainted with this or that document.
There is a direction associated with machine translation from language to language. And in order to create a system that translates with a quality close to the quality of a human translator, it is necessary to understand what the primary document was about, then formulate the same thing in another language.
Of the very serious areas related to semantics, there is still little research, but this understanding of continuous speech, which is important to be able to recognize it without tuning to the voice of the speaker, is of imminence. This is one of the most difficult tasks - recognition of continuous speech without tuning to the voice of the speaker, which is called Speaker Independent Continuous Speech Recognition.
The particular difficulty of this task lies in the fact that in the speech signal. If you investigate the sound wav file that you have registered, it turns out that up to 70% of the information in the file is already missing, it is not in the physical signal, but there are some 30% there. However, you understand me almost 100%, recognize what I am saying, because your brain recovers the lost 70% of information. Check it out is easy. If I start to speak something in Armenian, I will dictate some address in Armenian. The volume of the signal will be the same, the signal-to-noise ratio is the same, but to recognize what I have spelled, you will succeed, maybe the very 30% of information. You will be able to recognize some vowels, but you cannot recognize 70% because you will not be able to recover lost information.
To teach a computer to recognize this kind of text, you need to learn how to understand what the announcer says. This is further complicated by the fact that oral speech has ragged sentences, in the general case does not contain complete grammatically correct forms, etc.
Semantic analysis is complicated many times because the parsing, which must precede the semantic, is very difficult. This direction, which could describe what you called the "understanding" of the printed text.
In each of these areas there are research groups that are trying to do something, somewhere more successfully, somewhere less successfully. Now science is not aware of the current system that would solve all these tasks.
Our company has been engaged in research in the field of applied linguistics and semantics for 12 years. And we create something that can figuratively be called a semantic universe. This is a kind of system based on a universal semantic hierarchy. This is a kind of model of knowledge about the world, which has a hierarchical system of language-independent semantic classes. At the deepest levels of nesting of this tree, language-dependent elements appear, i.e. lexemes
After some time, we will be able to officially announce that this will be the application. But I can't do it now. Officially, we will begin to talk about how this technology will be applied in an applied sense. This information will be available later, I think, by 2008.
Tell us, what is the situation with the NLC project now?
I started talking about him in the previous question. This is a kind of technology in the field of applied linguistics and semantics. We are now on the threshold of the beta version. In 2008, we plan to demonstrate in the work a beta version of a commercial product.
And who will test the beta version?
We have partners with whom we have agreed on this topic and in the beginning this will be done by a limited circle of people.
How advanced are you in the development of artificial intelligence? What has been achieved during the existence of ABBYY?
In terms of the public, the word artificial intelligence is perceived with some futuristic touch. And in fact, this is the name of a certain class of technologies, which was given by the founding fathers of this trend in 1956 and in general does not include anything supernatural. All technologies associated with recognition, as a rule, belong to the technology of artificial intelligence.
The technology used in FineReader belongs to the class of artificial intelligence technologies. All sorts of technologies related to the classification, with the decision, to the extent that the methods of artificial intelligence are used in the Electrolux washing machine, which makes a decision - how long to wash and how much powder to fill.
Specifically in our company it is FineReader. Our latest version is more accurate, smarter, better recognizes low quality texts, knows how to deal with defects, even when the letters are cut in half. This is the most basic achievement.
A number of methods used in the NLC for the analysis of the proposal, analysis and synthesis - they also belong to the methods of artificial intelligence, but it is too early to attribute to the achievements. When a commercial product appears, then it will be possible to talk about achievements in this area.
What types of information can FineReader recognize?
The program doesn’t care where the source of the graphic information comes from: a scanner, a camera, whatever. Its task is to turn graphic information into an editable text file. At some point, PDF was added to the number of such formats. Not only raster graphic information, but also vector graphic information has become recognized, transformed into editable text.
Are all the developments of your company successful or are there any that have been minimized?
It all started with electronic dictionaries, it certainly has survived. Then we began to make a morphology, spell checker, which organically entered the Lingvo, FineReader and NLC systems. Then OCR is the whole direction of recognition of not only unstructured documents, but also structured documents: bank payment orders, accounts, invoices, invoices, questionnaires. At the same time - handwriting recognition technology.
All that is listed - we started and continue to actively apply.
Some of the lexicographic areas can be attributed to such things that we have suspended with a very big stretch. We are not only the authors of the program that manages the Lingvo dictionaries, but also the authors of a number of dictionaries that are included there. Of the 130 dictionaries that are included in Lingvo, some of them were created by our experts, our lexicographers. And we licensed a part from the authors.
And at some point we stopped work on highly specialized content, strengthened the team and started working on general-purpose content. In particular, we recently released, together with the publishing house Russian Language Media and Drofa, a large English-Russian dictionary on paper. This is a two-volume large English-Russian dictionary, the most relevant today in vocabulary.
But in the near future, the suspended part in the field of content and lexicography will be revived again on a completely new professional level.
The fact is that we founded the company ABBYY Press, which will specialize in the publishing business. Within this company we will create our own content, our own dictionaries, reference books, various informational materials. And we will publish them not only in electronic form, but also on paper.
Thus, having suspended a part of our highly specialized lexicographic activity in the field of ABBYY, we after some time moved this area to a dedicated division - an independent company.
We understood what we do, we must do well and be the best in our field. Realizing that within the framework of a programmer company, it would be too expensive for us to achieve the high quality of highly specialized content, we decided to create a special professional structure, having recruited specialists from this field there.
Maybe we should also talk about platforms. We released FineReader version 5.0 for Mac and after that we didn’t move in this direction. We are reproached for this, people demand our products for the Mac platform and so far, unfortunately, we have nothing to answer. Because it is very expensive.
We considered the cost of development and so far we can not afford it. But I think that this is still a temporary phenomenon, after some time we will again revive this trend and release our products for Mac. Because this platform impresses us, it is very dynamic and we would like to see our products under Mac.
What are the most memorable stages you can highlight from your business activities?
Hard times are remembered, hard times are in a good, creative sense when there is a lot of work. When everything is calm and good - less settles in the memory. The first thing that comes to mind is the beginning, when Sasha Moskalev and I were sitting together in Chernogolovka, doing Lingvo. As we ran, we looked for our first investors, then it was the center of NTTM, which helped us with a loan for the start of our work.
As we sold our first programs directly to the organizations, it was in Soviet times before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Start of work for Kostya Anisimovich, Vadim Tereshchenko and Kostya Zuev on the FineReader system.
The first stages of promotion to the Western market, organized by Sergey Andreev, our first contacts with German, American and Ukrainian partners, which led to the creation of ABBYY Ukraine, ABBYY Europe and ABBYY USA.
Later, of course the project Cybiko.
Cybiko handheld computer This is a very bright, very difficult life stage. When in 1998 came the idea of ​​creating a handheld communication computer that allowed young people to get to know each other at a distance and send messages to each other.
At that time there was no sms, bluetooth was on paper in the form of specifications, experienced chips were only released, wifi was the size of a large PCMCIA card and consumed so much energy that not a single pocket device could pull it. This is such a dense time. We created a company, we launched a product on the market, we did mass production, we sold a quarter of a million copies to Cybiko in 4 months. It was a very dramatic and interesting time. We were recognized on the streets of New York. The total circulation of all publications about the Cybiko project was about 650 million copies. I met Steve Case - CEO of AOL (America On Line), a Time Warner company, after which they invested in Cybiko.
I met Yossi Vardi - the founder of ICQ.
Yossi Vardi and David Yang And Yossi Vardi then said that Cybiko is the biggest invention of mankind after MP3. It was very nice to hear on the forum in Arizona.
These were very interesting years, when I slept for two hours a month and I had dreams in reality. For the first time in my life I experienced this phenomenon when I walked around the airport in Zurich and saw a dream, while walking down the corridor. It was a very tense time. This is when, after just entering the US market, the NASDAQ collapsed, there was a crisis in America, half a million people lost their jobs. Realizing that this is a protracted history in America, just having got out, we entered the European market with Cybiko, and at that moment there was the September 11 terrorist attack, and that’s all. The recession rolled into the European market and we had to restructure the company.
These are the things that come to mind.
I remember the beginning of FAQCafe, also a great time - 2004. A little inappropriate direction to me, more like a hobby. But in terms of finance, FAQCafe is a very successful project.
Now the market has divorced many miniature programs that perform unpretentious tasks. Advise Russian software product developers in which direction they should go? Should they develop such programs or focus on serious software products?
Both are necessary. Sometimes having developed a small program, people recognize you and it becomes springboards to big business. So you can say about Lingvo and ABBYY. Still, Lingvo should be attributed to small programs. It was such at the beginning, along with 10 different dictionaries that existed at that time in Russia.
What not to do is not to dwell on it. Having developed a small niche program and reaching a certain popularity, you need to capitalize it.
What is capitalize in this case? This is to create a team, because one in the field is not a warrior. It’s impossible all the time to hope that my friend Petya and I will be doing small programs all my life. What's next?Be sure to happen a breakdown. Either Peter leaves or Microsoft comes out with a similar program and this business closes as a class.
If you were lucky, you managed to make a small niche program that shot and became popular - you need to immediately move on. We need to recruit people, we need to look for investors, we need to popularize the brand and release some more programs under this brand. If the founder soberly feels that he lacks some entrepreneurial qualities or professional qualities, then you need to hire a manager, you immediately need to move, seize the moment.
As for large programs. It does not work out right away to develop a large program. Even if you develop it, you still need to know how to sell it. A large program - it also costs a lot. And if there is no name, if there is no background, if there is no track records - who will buy it?
Or in this case it is necessary to immediately enlist the support of a large customer, a large customer. There are relationships that have developed on a different basis. There was a big company that sold computers, serviced 1C, large points of Gazprom and developed professional and trusting relationships. And this company said: Yes, solve just such a management task, we will buy it from you for 100 thousand. dollars.
Then, you can try to take a chance, type a team, start developing. Maybe something will work out. But not always succeeds, even if there is such a customer who is willing to pay.
The risks will be that it will not be possible to recruit professional people, it will be possible to recruit middle-quality people who will put the wrong decisions into the architecture. It will take six months, the prototype will appear. And it will become clear that he is slowing down (in the sense that the program is slowly running), that he does not satisfy the customer’s needs for scalability.
We will have to start everything all over again, and time is lost, and the customer in 6-8 months starts to get nervous: Well, where, where? You said that everything will be.
You admit that two months ago it was decided to throw everything out and start all over again. It turns out that two or three years have been lost, the customer is dissatisfied, the relationship is spoiled, the team has not been created, there are no new customers.
And naturally there are investors who, the customer is not stupid, to pay all this money in advance. He will pay 10-20 percent and will wait.
And to make the program need more money. And under this money is being dragged by friends and acquaintances, such angel investors who say: Look, you see an order of 100 thousand dollars, give me 20 thousand dollars, I will hire a couple of programmers.
As a result, these investors are completely upset by the situation, what is called disappointed, their money was gone.
In general, trying to start right away with large programs is a very big risk, even if there is a customer. If there is no customer, then the risks are even greater, because, apart from all the indicated risks, the risk is added that the task has not been precisely set.
This is not an idle question, I know such situations, they are very often. Nevertheless, the company, believing that it knows how to solve this problem, begins to solve it on its own, but it does not have enough analytics, not enough substantive knowledge to do what the market really needs. It gives some kind of solution that is trying to sell. The first customers peck at it, try to use it and here they discover that it does not solve this, this, this, and this is generally not convenient, and this is generally wrong. Some things can be corrected, and some things concern the architecture, the very foundation, and this cannot be changed in principle, it needs to be rewritten again. And then what to do?
Therefore, here, as in any innovative business, the holy word is the team. In Jim Collins’s book Good to Great (in the Russian translation “From Good to Great”), it is written very clearly, “first - who, then - what”. First, decide who your team is, who you go to battle with, who you will work with, and then decide what you will do. This is a perfect truth that every young entrepreneur needs to understand.
You have repeatedly said that a successful business is the right team. Give some tips on how to choose the right team to develop a business?
I would very much like to see simple recommendations, simple tips that could, like a litmus test, identify the right person or the wrong one. Of course, the task is more multidimensional and recommendations that are suitable in one situation are not suitable in another.
I recently read a book by Danny Meyer called Danny Meyer's High Cuisine, which is translated into Russian. This is one of the most successful American restaurateurs. He talks about how they created their first restaurant and how they made the rest of the restaurants. Restaurants that very quickly ranked among the top 20 US restaurants.
This is a man of legend, very successful financially, very successful in terms of business, quality of cuisine, etc.
He tells how he selected a team for his business in the hospitality market. He says that at some point he realized that there are things that cannot be taught to a person. Either they are from birth or not given. There is no need to waste time on such people, you need to tell them - thank you and continue with those who have it. He calls this principle 49 to 51. He came to the conclusion that if a man existed 100% fit to work in the hospitality business, then he should have had 51% innate hospitality and hospitality and 49% of technical professionalism. It is in this ratio, hospitality and hospitality a little more professional part.
He used to think that a professional is a professional, a 100% professional should work. No, that's right - 51% congenital cordiality and 49% professionalism.
And then he chose so. He said: “You never teach him the 51st percent of cordiality. If you take a candidate and see that he has 51% cordiality, but not 49% of professionalism, then take him and teach. And sooner or later he will become a good employee. If the opposite is true, then you never teach him kindness, just don’t waste time on it. ”
The funny thing is that this logic applies to business in general, only you have to be replaced by the desire to make the best company, the best product. If he has a desire to make the best company, the best service, the best product, but there is no 49% professionalism, then take it and teach.
But if he does not have the desire to make the best company, the best product, then he should not be taken, certainly not at first.
This is extremely important for a startup, for a young company. To the first core consisted of people obsessed with the idea of ​​doing a better job, contrary to their own interests. To the interests of the case stood above personal interests.
It may be lofty words and they may seem meaningless to someone, but in fact they are very practical.
Morale and personal qualities of a person in the early stages of the project are absolutely crucial moment. Professional skills are also extremely important, but with skills you can teach them over time.
Having created such a team of people who are inspired to do something great, even if it will locally contradict their personal interests, who are willing to compromise, sacrifice personal ambitions, but the main thing is to do it.
With such people you can go into battle and build a business. Then, gradually it is necessary to pick up a team of high professionals and the ratio of 51 to 49 should somehow be maintained.
We are trying to ask questions and understand from the interviews what is the main goal of life for people, do they see this goal? How do they see the goal for the next year, for the next five years, for the next 30 years. We ask these questions, we listen to their answers and try to understand whether they will work in harness, whether they will be team players or whether they are lone wolves. We try not to take lone wolves. You can work with them piece by piece, remotely, they are very effective in the short term. If you need to do something quickly, such lone wolves, working remotely, give a very fast result. But if they are taken to the office, they spoil the team, they destroy the team with their individualism, their assessments of people and the demonstration of superiority in their field.
If we take on managers, we look to see if people were engaged in social work at school or an institute. A person does not change in any way since the time of school and even kindergarten. A person with an active lifestyle, as a rule, in school and university time is in sight, literally - the head of the group.
We look at the ability and desire of a person to improve, to learn, to self-discipline.
School grades show not so much about knowledge, but about a person’s internal discipline. If a person was a troechnik this is a signal, this is a property of his character. This does not mean that we will not take it, we will look very closely at his personal capacity for self-organization and self-discipline.
There are such guys, a head on a place, very clear, fast, impudent mind, but at the same time in bad grades to school: two, three. The person says: “Yes, I understood everything, but I didn’t have a relationship with teachers, I didn’t like to learn.”
This does not mean that we definitely will not take it, this means that we will be looking very closely at it.
Sometimes such a person is a good seller, but it’s unlikely that such a person is ready for a long hike, for a heavy strap for several years, to work on the same project, not to get off anywhere, to live in such a family. So many parameters from his past life very clearly symbolize what will happen in the future.
You once said: "I do not think we have succeeded." What is success for you?
Honestly, I do not really remember what it was said for. I think this was taken out of context by a journalist for a catchy headline. What is success? I don’t know ... If you asked me what happiness is, I would tell you that happiness is the right way to go. Happiness is not a state, it is a process. You can not achieve happiness, you can go to it ..
The process of achieving this is real happiness, and the fact of achievement is temporary satisfaction.
As for success, this is all relative. Of course, our employees are pleased to realize that there are 30 million FineReader users in the world, 5 million Lingvo users. It pleases, this is what makes many work more intensively and with greater dedication. Because successful business can take place only when the company is engaged in a business that is useful for people. The main goal of any company should be customer satisfaction, this is the primary goal.
And all financial indicators and financial goals are a consequence, a secondary goal.
I am categorically against the wording, when financial goals in some business are put on the first position.
This is a short-term business shabashka. Let's go - earned - fled.
And if we want to create a company for many years, epochs, “for eternity”, then we should set the most important goal - to make people happier, improve the lives of people around. If we set this goal and achieved it, we will be able to find a way to get money from it.
Here is an example Wikipedia should be indicative or an example of Skype, which we currently use.
Initially, Wikipedia existed as an absolutely non-commercial phenomenon. The Wikimedia Foundation are people who were inspired by the idea of ​​giving everyone the opportunity to access information and knowledge. And now there are many options for how to get money on this. They went the most direct way to Donations and people who are willing simply give money.
The same, a well-known recent example of the English group, which posted its new album for free on the Internet, with an appeal to fans who liked the album to pay for downloading any amount they deem necessary. As a result, they earned several million dollars in 2-3 days.
I think this applies to everything that happens, not only business, not only their business activity, but people in general.
Some develop projects in order to earn a lot of money, others, such as Sergey Brin, want to be known and remembered as the leaders of big changes. What is the purpose of your business activity?
ABBYY's mission is to improve people's lives. By creating artificial intelligence technologies and programs for entering data into a computer and translating from one language to another, we turn information into useful knowledge.
Paraphrasing this wording in other words, we help people better understand each other. Indeed, we are inspired by this, believe it or not.
We want people to understand each other better, on which continents they would not be, what languages ​​he would not speak. So that they better understand not only contemporaries, but also their predecessors.
With the help of our technologies, millions of books are introduced into information systems, published both today and hundreds of years ago, and books are becoming available.
First, the data is on the dusty shelves of the library, then the data are transformed into information, and the information into knowledge. One of the definitions of information states that information is usable data. And knowledge is information suitable for decision-making. Here it is the genesis. All our technologies are designed to make this happen.
This chain can be formulated as follows: person - knowledge - information - data - information - knowledge - person. From person to person, in whatever epoch he is, in whatever language he speaks, wherever he is geographically located, he passes this knowledge to another person through this chain.
We are encouraged to create a set of technologies that allows it to create faster, better, expand boundaries and lower barriers in this process. How to make money on this? We'll find.
We don’t need money for the money itself. The vast majority of all that we earn, we invest in further development.
All that is done now, it is done on our own reinvestment. Compared with our turnover, we received scant investments.
Of the $ 100 we once invested with Sasha Moskalev, we now have: 650 people in the world, 7 offices in 7 countries, millions of users.
We did all this with our own money, which we invested in the process.
Blood is necessary for the existence of an organism, a biological being. Money is blood for a creature by name - a business, it is by no means an end in itself, for us at least.
I think that this view is shared by a large number of employees. In the company itself, we talk a lot about this topic and we built it from the very beginning. Most people who are now in the management of the company - from the very first days in the company, since 1991, since 1992.
Starting from CEO of Chief Executive Officer - General Director Sergey Andreev, continuing as Financial Director Vadim Tereshchenko, Director for Research and Development - Konstantin Anisimovich, Aram Pakhchanyan - Vice President for Corporate Projects, Vladimir Seleghey - Director for Linguistic Technologies, Kostya Zuyev, Kostya Zuyev, .d I can list people for a long time. These are all the guys who have worked in the company almost from the very beginning, they have been working in the company for more than 15 years.
What is the reason for the backlog of our country from the west? For example, why your former project Cybiko did not see Russia?
The fact that Cybiko did not see Russia is not directly related to the situation in Russia. It was a purely technical moment, it was a matter of time. As for the backlog of Russia. Of course, the reason for the backlog is the Soviet era. It is not only the socialist economy itself. There are consequences of this era, which complicate the rapid development of the economy today, when the socialist system is no longer there. It seems to me that today it is a problem of the lack of people who can commercialize technology, innovation.
By the number of brilliant people, Russia has always been ahead. There has never been a shortage of geniuses, talented people, in particular, talented engineers. But we also need people who can build a business on these ideas. I think that gradually the situation is normalizing.
Do you plan to launch anything innovative like Cybiko?
Two and a half years ago, I and my partner founded a small software company and this company should create a new software management system.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/17695/
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