Interview with the founder of the company with an estimate of 2'000'000'000 $. Stepan Pachikov about his unsuccessful experience in the high-tech business: “Do not put money on your own business”

AmBAR and SiliconNews.ru interviewed the founder of Evernote (also the legendary ParaGraph and Parascript), whose valuation has already exceeded $ 2 billion. Very interesting person with an interesting story who has something to learn. An exclusive interview where, among other things, Stepan Pachikov for the first time shares his business failures.

Stepan Pachikov : Russian innovator, co-founder of ParaGraph Intl., Parascript, Evernote, who contributed greatly to the development of handwriting recognition and VRML technology (virtual reality modeling language, standardized file format for the demonstration of three-dimensional interactive vector graphics, most often used in WWW) . The first businessman of the USSR, whose firm [ParaGraph] received a contract with Apple.

Ivan Tsybaev: Let's talk first about Silicon Valley. You have a wonderful inspirational article "Silicon Fever" from the 95th year in " Spark ". How was it written? What impression? Was there a special stage in getting to know the Valley?

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Stepan Pachikov: I know the valley since June 90, when I first arrived there. Then, in 1991, we began to work with Apple, opened the ParaGraph office in Cupertino, next to them (this was one of the conditions of the contract) - and a dozen key handwriting recognition developers moved to Valley. They [Apple] were very worried about the project. We tried to be aware of all the details, but did not tell us why they needed a handwriting recognizer. And it was one of Apple’s fundamental mistakes - we worked blindly, only by specifications, this is wrong - when you do artificial intelligence, there are a lot of nuances that are of great importance, and knowing that recognition will be done with a handheld device, modifies the way the algorithm is developed and affects development.


I began to spend more time in the Valley, so in the 92nd I brought my wife and children there. Sasha was 12, Ksyusha - 8. In Moscow, of course, I spent a lot of time, but about the same in the Valley and the same on the road.
At that time, I started a weekly column “Looking from California” in Computer Press magazine, an article for “Spark” —that was my understanding of what the Valley is at that time. This article came to my mind again when they began to organize Skolkovo, and when they tried to announce Skolkovo as Silicon Valley, Medvedev continues to call her Silicon.

IC: How did the attitude towards the Valley change over time?

SP: You know, the Valley has always been my favorite place, and I especially loved the 280th road, always told about it and drove guests to the airport along it. Attitude to the Valley, as to another motherland. Some truth and claims have arisen against the Valley at the end of the last century. It seemed to me that with so much money and capital, and with so many interesting, intelligent and educated people, educational institutions, the cultural life in the Valley could be more intense: theaters, conservatories and other museums. And it seemed to me unfair that there was such a concentration of smart, educated and rich people, and such a low intensity of cultural life. But now the situation is changing, I hear from my friends and acquaintances that, in general, everything is changing for the better, but, again, everything revolves around San Francisco. I don't consider San Francisco part of Silicon Valley. San Francisco is a separate big phenomenon. Although, probably, now the Federation Council can be included in the Valley. My relationship with the Valley is mostly good, but the desire to move to the Valley from New York is not.

IC: So, you have cultural claims, I myself lived in New York, and I understand that cultural life in New York is richer. Tell us more about why you moved to New York from the Valley. What influenced the move?

SP: There are 2 reasons. The first one is pretty funny. In 1997, Silicon Graphics bought my first company, ParaGraph, and it so happened that I earned a certain amount of money - more than I was used to spending. In an effort to learn how to spend money on toys, I became interested in Hi-End equipment (tube amplifiers, electrostatic speakers, etc.) - this is all very expensive, tens of thousands of dollars. It so happened that until that time I was not a fan of operatic art, but since we had very good equipment and very good, wonderful transport for laser discs, my wife began to buy operas on laser discs, and so we began to listen to operas and other things. classics, pretty quickly fell in love with opera art and began to look around. We started going to the opera houses, to San Francisco, to Seattle, we really liked New York and his opera, and I told my wife half in jest that in 2000, instead of constantly flying to New York, let's move there. And, pretty quickly, we did it. We bought an apartment 15 minutes walk from the Metropolitan Opera, in the western part of Manhattan. In general, we just fell in love with the city when we began to constantly fly to opera performances. So, the reason for our move to New York was the turntable for laser video discs.


The second reason I do not like to tell. It so happened that I organized a new, quite successful Pen and Internet division at Silicon Graphics, it quickly began to develop, but by this time Silicon Graphics began to experience financial difficulties, problems with management, they began to get rid of non-core businesses, and I headed, along with the team, continued to develop handwriting recognition technology. SGI decided to sell our branch to Vadem. I worked at Vadem for almost a year, But one fine day, CEO of the company John Jao called me and said that "now you will work for Microsoft, we will transfer your branch to Microsoft with all your patents, all technology , team, with all. ” It was a big shock for me, not because I had a bad attitude towards Microsoft, I had great respect for Bill Gates and his company, but the fact that it was done in a slightly dishonest way, behind my back, was put before the fact. Therefore, I refused to participate in the transaction, slammed the door, left the company and was depressed for a year and a half.

Moving to New York was partly a way out of this state. Microsoft bought Paragraph's patents and for many years I entertained the public by saying that when I was shown handwriting recognition on Microsoft phones, I asked: “Here, write“ Pachikov ”with any degree of recognition as you like, arbitrarily quickly and so Further". It always recognized, because my last name was in the dictionary, and the technology was sharpened to recognize my last name, because during the demonstration I often wrote my last name - it was like an Easter egg, which our programmers made. In general, the recognition technology passed to Microsoft, and I moved to New York.

IC: It is clear, that is, New York has become a kind of outlet for you after some not very pleasant events. And how often do you go to the Valley now and for what purpose?

SP: I am a board member of Evernote, which I started in 2002 - it was a New York company, but the main team (these were people from my Paragraph team), everyone lived in California, and I started flying to New York on weekends. And then, when Phil [Libin] took over the company in 2007, I stopped flying to California and flew only to Board meetings.

IC: When you lived in the Valley, what were the Russian-speaking communities then, and how did they communicate then?

Joint venture: from 92 until the end of the century, the main Russian-speaking company that was available to me was the former employees of ParaGraph, of whom there were a lot, we transported more than 25 families to Silicon Valley, therefore most of the Russian-speaking people, friends and acquaintances were associated with ParaGraph. Of course, other Russian-speaking communities appeared, but I was not strongly involved in them. It is clear that at that time there was nothing like AmBAR (“American Business Association of Russian- speaking Professionals”, headquartered in Palo Alto - ed.).

IC: You re-registered your company in California and at the same time participated in the Silicon Valley Open Doors ( SVOD) conference - how did you get there? You were invited by Alexey Fedoseyev , who previously presented his startup there , which he later sold to Motorola?

SP: Alexey Andreev invited me and met people around this conference, and I met Fedoseyev much later. It so happened that I invested money in 4HomeMedia and even earned it when they sold out to Motorola.

IC: How did you personally start to develop after the registration of Evernote?

JV: After we released the beta for Evernote under Windows in 2004, the business needed to be developed, it was necessary to meet with partners, with the press, investors. I was the CEO of the company and 24 hours a day I was engaged in the company's business. And, naturally, I was spinning more or less in all areas, I met with investors, gave interviews, met with the press, newspapers, magazines, radio. I did the usual work of ceo. In no special way, the Russian “get-together” did not occupy a special place in my life then, but most of the Evernote team was Russian-speaking. This has its pros and cons. The downside is that, by will not, it was necessary to communicate in Russian - in the company of a brainstorm it is much more convenient in the native language. And it left a certain imprint, it seemed that this was a Russian company. But this is not the case, Evernote was originally an American company, although a large number of Russian speakers gave it a certain aura. Now there is no such thing. Now everyone understands that this is a 100% American company. But the CEO ( Phil Libin ) speaks Russian well.

IC: I know that Round A has attracted Evernote investments, including from Troika Dialog, from Russian investors.

JV: It was already at Fillet. Troika offered the most advantageous money terms at that time.

IC: You started to raise such a company, and it is now one of the leading companies. And why in one of the previous interviews you rated yourself as a medium-sized entrepreneur?

JV: Natural modesty :-) You see, when there is so much time in business, when you meet with a large number of entrepreneurs of the highest level, you quickly realize that your place is not in the first thousand. For example, Phil, a brilliant entrepreneur, a businessman, and, I think, if I were lucky to meet such a person earlier in my life's journey, I would have learned a lot. Phil is not just a brilliant entrepreneur, but also a brilliant teacher. It’s just clear how his employees learn a lot, he makes them first-class specialists. Generally, he is a born teacher. He is a really talented teacher. And, I think that over the years we have learned a lot from him.

IC: Tell us what you did before Evernote - what were the important stages in your story as an entrepreneur?

SP: The first stage happened in the year 67-68. As a student of 1-2 courses at the University of Novosibirsk, I organized the first Black Lines rock band in Siberia. Until now, I consider one of the most successful events that I was able to knock out 5,000 rubles from rector Spartak Timofeevich Belyaev on a drum set (Trollo), and I managed to buy it by bank transfer, although it was sold only for cash. The first month I “banged” on drums, then I found a more talented guy, and then I became just the manager of this group. We gave concerts, performed at weddings, at dances, in a dormitory. I still remember all this with pleasure and I think that this is my first entrepreneurial success.

The next milestone in my organizational activity was a home science seminar, which was organized in my apartment and where a wide range of issues were discussed. First, Kolya Yatsenko (Kolyaba) for several months told a non-trivial concept of the history of the Civil War, about how the graduates of the General Staff of the Tsarist Academy helped the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War. Then for several months we were engaged in the analysis of the theory of Fomenko about violations in the dating of history. Zhenya Paletsky quite neatly and critically analyzed the approaches of Anatoly Fomenko. It so happened that at the seminar, it took place on Sundays, about 25-30 people gathered. It was a purely male company, even the wife left. There were various rumors that men were going, but they did not drink vodka. There were many interesting topics: Sasha Semenov talked about music and what logic is at the heart of musical perception. And for the first time at the seminar I felt like a leader and manager.

The next stage is the computer club for children. In 84, I became very interested in personal computers. I managed to get and read various foreign computer magazines. I quickly became a specialist in personal computers, and I was invited to the group "Temporary team of the school under the President of the USSR Academy of Sciences." Velikhov led it, but the team leader was Lyosha Semenov. I pretty much learned there.


In the 86th year, we organized the Moscow Children's Computer Club. And then Garry Kasparov helped greatly in this matter, since he handed over a batch of Atari computers to the club - about 50 pieces. It was the largest concentration of personal computers in the entire USSR. Harry signed a contract with Atari but instead of money he took “greyhounds puppies” with them - computers. Harry co-founded the club. And the club was a bright page in the life of Moscow in the 80s. We taught children programming - for free. Become a member of the club could only those who conducted classes with children.

A noticeable community of enthusiasts in the USSR was created around the club. Quite a lot of bright people were there. And we began to think how to organize our own company. This is how ParaGraph appeared - a joint venture, then registered in the USA as ParaGraph International with an office in Moscow. It so happened that from all sorts of projects that we wanted to do, we decided to do text recognition. And there were several reasons for this, one of them was the minimum necessary equipment: a computer and a scanner. We were lucky, and the team of guys I drew made a very good version very quickly, which showed that we could read handwriting without learning. Of course, we could only read legible texts. With this, we went to COMDEX (then it was the largest IT conference) in May-June of the 1990s. The airline lost our luggage, and we didn’t have any computers on the stand or scanners, but the people helped and collected “with the world a little bit.” Gave computers, scanners, printers, we hung the flag of the USSR. To us lined up. Then CNN made a report from our booth and our demo. This coincided with the arrival of Gorbachev, the interest was huge.

By the fall, we were already the most famous Soviet company. They showed not only scanning, but also demonstrated technology using a tablet with digital pens. And one of the people, then known - the founder of "Lotus", after seeing our demo, called GO (the company Jerry Kaplan, who invented the idea of ​​"pen oriented OS", he actually invented tablet computers) and told them: "It really works!" . In the fall of the 90th, we again came to California, met with Apple, began to show them our technology, they began to write words, but nothing worked. We explained that we simply did not have a digital English dictionary, and that we made the dictionary ourselves, using the diskette with the lyrics of the Beatles songs that a friend from England gave me as a basis. Then people with Apple began to write different words from the Beatles songs, and it all worked. The condition for the contract was the relocation of key engineers to the Valley. Apple paid us 6 million. The essence of the contract was in the development of handwriting technology, as it later became clear for Apple Newton ( tablet computer of the early 90s, the “great-grandfather” of the modern iPad - ed. ). And I still have a nostalgic love for Apple Newton, although this product has failed in the market. This is because Apple’s notorious marketing made several mistakes that can be cited in the marketing tutorial. One of them was that they too much lifted the bar waiting from the device. People really believed that the machine would recognize the language better than they themselves do.

I remember how we were at one conference, and someone in the hall loudly cursed our recognition. I told him that “if you don’t like it, unplug it, don’t use it”. But he said that he could not make out his own text and therefore bought Newton. He really believed that the computer should do it better than him. And that was one of the big punctures of Apple. And the second mistake is that Newton is very much ahead of its time. The processor power of the desktop is really not enough. The iPhone came to the market on time when needed, and all other premature devices paved the way. Apple Newton - a very significant stage.

IC: So you were at the right time in the right place with this conference?

SP: In business, luck is very important. Many people find themselves in the right place and time, but they do not notice it. Therefore, luck is important, but it is equally important not to miss this chance.

IC: After 92 years, when you moved, were there any important points?

SP: The most important moment happened on January 15, 1993, when I suddenly realized that the WWW was carrying him when he was still in the bud. , , , . : “ , , ” — , , , , , . « » — [ParaGraph]. , « » — «stone soup». , . « » — , , - , . , , .

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