How and why I decided to start my own business

Salute, Habr!
Recently, I quit my rather enviable position (chief architect) in a fairly good company (Acronis) and with an unshakable decision in the brain no longer work for hire, moved from Moscow back to Yerevan, from where I went to Zlatoglavo-Nerezinovaya seven years ago. Considering the unusual nature of what happened and the frequently asked question “but why ?!”, I decided to sort out my own thoughts and voice them out loud for myself and those who can learn something useful for themselves in my thoughts. In short, this is a story about why I left high-paying prospective work in an international company for the dubious prospect of starting my own business, and how I intend to live further.

Reasons for leaving

After analyzing a set of factors that influenced my decision to leave the friendly team, I highlighted the following main aspects:

1. Passing love for work
2. Bazaar of ideas
3. Financial independence
4. The stagnation and the fight against windmills
5. An experiment on yourself and the modern world

1. Passing love for work

Let's start with the most insignificant, which, however, was the last straw.

I have always believed and believe that you can work only on your favorite work. If you do not like your job, think about the fact that, even if you work from call to call without processing, the 40-hour work week takes at least half of your active life. Accordingly, without getting pleasure from work, you get only half the pleasure from life, i.e. emotionally shorten your life by half.

Because of my nature from the first days of work, I devoted myself to work with my whole soul. With the advent of the new bosses, my understanding of what it means to work with the soul began to move away from the party line. As it turned out that I incorrectly love work, I went to look for another job for myself that I would love correctly.



Because you have to love your job. Axiom.

2. Bazaar of ideas

At some point, the phrase “sell an idea” came into vogue in our organization. Especially actively, I began to stumble upon these tenders with ideas going up the career ladder, and having frequent meetings with those with whom we were not tied by a relationship of subordination. The phrase “sell the idea” is based on the marketing term “sell idea”, only understanding it in the projection on the organizational structure was distorted. If in the original sense, the selling idea benefits from those who bought the idea (investors or customers), then in the organizational structure, by selling the idea, you could get the consent of the buyer who did not interfere with your realization. And since even the poor can afford to buy an idea at such a favorable rate, in the end it was possible to spend a lot of time “selling the idea” to those who happened to be at the meeting. Suffering at such auctions, I often wondered "why all these people?". So I got the feeling that you can do this work alone many times faster than the market at the fair of ideas.



But the truth is, if you can do everything yourself, why convince someone that this should be done?

3. Financial independence

At some point, I discovered that my savings allow me to live, not working, for 20 years. Then, somehow, I accidentally discovered that deposit interest rates in Armenia are not as dismal as in Moscow, but reach as much as 14.5% (and not in some dubious banks, but, for example, in the VTB branch ). Such rates provide me with a percentage of my savings in the amount of my Armenian salary before leaving for Moscow, i.e. three times more than necessary for life in Armenia. In fact, the phenomenon is quite phenomenal and unexpected. If I had allowed this amount to settle in Moscow with the purchase of an apartment, car, high utility bills and prices, I would have to work for a few years for money that would have gone into the unknown pockets of unknown uncles who set prices on everything that could be done. . In the meantime, you can just take this money and live on it.



Why work for money if money can work for you?

4. Stagnation and the fight against windmills

By nature I have always loved and was able to solve problems. It’s not easy to decide how Mr. Wulf is from Pulp Fiction, but to see where the legs of the problem grow from and solve it so that she does not come back again. This, in essence, is the architect’s task - to solve not a problem, but a class of problems that this architectural solution introduces. Moreover, they should be solved in such a way that new problems are not introduced, and if they are implemented, then those that do not manifest themselves in the use case for which the system is designed.

As part of analyzing problems arising in a large organization, I noticed that on average, a developer spends only 2-10% of his time on solving a user problem, while he spends the rest of the time on solving problems that he or other developers have implemented that cannot be explained to the user. . For example, without understanding the interface of the inherited code (because someone designed it with curves, solving its local problem, not thinking about future customers), the developer writes a wrapper that makes the system behavior even more incomprehensible, slows down the assembly, increases the code base for future readers . Then, struggling with a slow build, instead of puffing and throwing out extra code, asking the question “where the fuck is that much code?”, A quick build system is written that tracks the modified files and provides mapping for those modules that need to be rebuilt. In this organizational swamp, the developers go into a certain state of things in themselves, solving the problems of not business, not technology, but difficulties specific to the organization itself — that is, a kind of experience that is not useful anywhere except in this organization.

Meanwhile, the world is moving forward, new technologies, challenges and opportunities are emerging. Working in a large organization, it is very difficult to keep up with the world, because large organizations like to distance themselves from third-party dependencies, because the vendor lock-in is an anti-pattern, and lawyers are not asleep. As a result, working in a large organization, you solve problems introduced by a group of 20-30 people for themselves instead of solving problems that millions can use.



I suddenly found myself behind the world. What I can't write for iOS and Android, but I know in which of the 20 Wrappers I have to cache the backup progress. It should not be.

5. Experiment on oneself and the modern world.

After reading the Hackers & Painters book of Paul Graham , a startup guru in which he points out the advantages of a web application over desktop software, all my subconscious sensations seemed to come together. If you get away from that

1. Clients suffered from installing software on a stable of Windows and Linux versions, and instead gave their data for processing to a web server, which is deployed in your own one hundred times tested environment
2. You had to raise your own data center with your server infrastructure, and instead you rented the infrastructure you need in the cloud
3. You had to look for clients, persuading them to buy your service, and instead they found you and advertised your useful website and service.
4. You had to produce tons of goods, transport and store them, and instead you received money for calculations

What prevents you from creating a successful company alone? Why do you need a bunch of people to persuade, who need to explain and follow that they understood you correctly? One competently tuned brain can spend a couple of seconds brainstorming, on which two brains, exchanging words - means deliberately serialized and slow, lose a couple of days. Why do you need a lot of programmers, when so much has already been written around the world? The more people you type, the more bicycles they write to you. By limiting yourself to the number of hands, you understand the true charm of reuse. Reuse, not as an act of courtesy to a colleague, but as a means of business survival.

Building a company live

I got the feeling that the modern world has matured so that with the ability to communicate with people and computers (gadgets), you can organize a successful company alone. As a success, I determined for myself the criterion: so that it could be sold for $ 5M. Being free from financial slavery to “work to eat” and possessing knowledge of IT and a bit of business, being sociable, organized and persistent, what am I not an ideal candidate to test myself and the modern world? After all, it may happen that the modern world has long been ripe for programmers who overwhelm large organizations to be released and begin to work for themselves - solving the problems of users, and not their colleagues and managers.


In the book Black Swan of Nassim Taleb there is an interesting remark that all of us are fed only success stories, while a much larger number of absolutely similar enterprises fail miserably, remaining unknown. It is rarely possible to read the article “The History of an Epic Loser” or “Why I Damn It Did Not Happen.” But these failures are much more rewarding than the fact that someone was hellishly lucky and everything turned out well for him. So I decided to describe on Habré the process of building my own company not after the fact, but along the way - as interesting findings and facts are discovered. Showing his mistakes, bumps and failures in the clear. So that others would not follow the rake, on which, due to certain circumstances, I can walk quite painlessly. And even if I fail, then at least I will be the first to publish the “epic loser story.”