Interview with the creator of habrahabr - Denis Kryuchkov

We could not talk with Denis for about two months, each week arranging a meeting several times. There were no circumstances: one or the other could not drive up. As a result, we still met in the Boozz bar, which is located near the offices of Themed Media and Futurico.

Danya: What are the karmic reasons that prevented us from meeting for about two months, perhaps?
Denis: I think employment.

Danya: Did you have sex with children and build your casino with blackjack and whores?
Denis: No, it was before, now I am tied up with it.
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Danya: Tied up?
Denis: Yeah-hh! [Denis actively nods his head and smiles, as if he remembered something very good] Well, you know, employment. Our office, well, you saw our office. But you used to come to the room where Jovan and I were sitting together, and now the designers and designers are sitting there. And I sit in the center of the room, I have no office. And any person in the company at any moment in time can approach me and take something in, distract me with something. And so it could be hard to dock. Have you seen the movie “Science of sleep”? Probably everyone had such a moment as you walk down the street with a dude, he takes a step to the right and you take a step to the right, you go to the left - and he goes to the left, and so on. And we also had just the opposite.

Danya: Out of sync?
Denis: Yes, yes. And when such a moment happened, it is called parallel synchronization, then finally we were able to meet.

Danya: Look, now you are talking about the office, on the phone before that I heard about some important meeting. Judging by your projects, you should remember everything in the scene from the Simpsons, when Barth comes to the editorial office of MAD magazine and comes to a complete delight of how clowns make it. And when you talk to me about some important meetings, tranches, go-ahead ...
Denis: Well, this is all the background, the main movement occurs in the office. But in order for this movement to be ensured, it is necessary to have some kind of margin in the form of a cache. And since we are not yet a self-sustaining company ... But we are close to break-even point. What we are doing now, nobody has done it before.

Danya: What are you doing?
Denis: We come up with thematic communities for people who want to spend a lot of time in these communities. We have to be pioneers, that is, to pave the way, which then all will go.

Danya: Why nobody did it? Someone created communities in LJ.
Denis: Well, communities in LiveJournal are communities within one big service. And we create completely autonomous projects in which people self-organize, express themselves.

Danya: You are all just cynical businessmen who want to make money on poor circles of friends, as Jovan said, to harness them all in one team.
Denis: No, no. It just seems that no one had ever thought to do what we do. That is, to find some interesting sphere, study it, study people who hang out in this area, study their needs, behavioral features. And then, based on this, to build a service in which they will be comfortable. Habrahabr became the prototype of this whole story. Tell the story of his creation?

Danya: Have you told her often?
Denis: Lately, yes.

Danya: Then don't.
Denis: The main thing is that Habrahabr has led us to the idea that if you approach each project as we approached the Habr, that is, do it with heart and soul, you can succeed in other niches. We launched the AutoCadabra, but so far the puzzle of this site cannot be fully folded. It is very difficult to read. That is, an ordinary ordinary person, registering on the auto-cadget, does not know where he is. Well, imagine that you are now abruptly find yourself on the street of some Tokyo with hieroglyphs and a crowd of freaks, and you do not know what to do. This is the same with autocadab, and now we are trying to simplify this site. Now mostly geek-car enthusiasts hang out there. And there are not so many of them. And in order to make a project successful, we need to make sure that its simple audience also perceives well.

Danya: And look, your audience is very much intersected: on the habre, on lepra.ru, on dirty.ru, on the auto-dash ...
Denis: Well, yes. Yes. I would not say that it strongly intersects, but quite strongly. Are you an active user of all our projects? I think you're sitting in a leprosy.

Danya: No, I like Habr. I go to leprosy every other day. Just look, Yegor Lavrov compared himself, Rykov, and people like you to dudes who put up adhesive tapes for flies on the Internet. And flies all stick and stick ... I understand that people came with dirty and leprosy.
Denis: Well, yes, it is. But Habr was an independent project, it was my attempt to assert myself after I was fired from Webplanet.

Danya: Oh, let's talk about that. Lech Andreev, the best journalist and wonderful science fiction, what happened to you with him for srach happened?
Denis: I think that Lech at some point flew off the coils, lost reality, and now it is in the wrong direction. I think Lech is a talented person, but he is a rather rude guy. Lech can easily the audience for which he actually works and creative, send a fuck if the audience says that Lech is somehow wrong. About Lech once Nosik said very correctly: that Lech is a poet, and any poet is a ham.

Danya: So what was the conflict?
Denis: Lech came to the project, which I did for five years, and I changed everything very much, redid it and the audience took it into hostility. Lech hung up some kind of shitty design from some StroySnabTorg-2, changed the concept, invited other authors, and the audience didn’t appreciate the value of all this and started to push it hard. I told Leh that the design was shit, but he replied that he was the chief editor and leave me alone.

Danya: Who owns the Webplanet?
Denis: Alexander Burmistrov. This is a person who owns the Agency Mass Communication. Which is engaged in public relations in structures like Gazprom. Here it is. And then Habr appeared and it seems to me that Lehi had a banal jealousy. Because Habr began to attract attention, there appeared its own audience, good content. And Lech began to write outright garbage about Habr and about me personally.

Danya: Before that, did you work for dni.ru?
Denis: Yes, I worked as a creative director of dni.ru. It was a long time ago, then dni.ru was a normal project, not a tabloid. Boris was the chief editor there ... he forgot his last name, but he was a very good journalist. The Days had the concept of a social and political project, and not like now.

Danya: Well then tell everything from the very beginning.
Denis: I started with an ordinary person who painted banners. In any media there is a person who does it. Because every day events change and new banners need to be shoved to users. In Days then we drew normal banners, and not like now: “Why did Bodrov disappear” or “What's wrong with Yarmolnik's stomach”.

Dania: How did you get into dni.ru?
Denis: I came to the Days at the invitation of Kostya Rykov, who is now a State Duma deputy. I met him on the Internet, I then lived in Penza, I was engaged in garbage there - I sat all day on the web and studied what was happening in this big-big world. Kostya saw in me a person who could be useful in some projects. And once, when we once again chatted on the phone, he said: “Listen, let's come to live in Moscow and we will communicate normally.” I thought one day, and the next bought a ticket.

Danya: Actually it scares. Well, the fact that everything is connected with the name Kostya Rykov, even Denis Kryuchkov.
Denis: Just Kostya is a man with great energy and ideas are constantly gushing from him. And apparently they gush so strongly that now he is a member of the State Duma. And maybe after some time he will be some kind of minister. The Minister of Press ... or the Minister of the Internet ... In general, when I realized that I was tired of drawing banners and being responsible for creative Days, I quit and started thinking about how to make my media project. I came up with the name of Vebplanet, made a design for it, took the old days engine from Kostya, and so I began to learn journalism. Before that, I didn’t come across it at all; moreover, I had a troika on Russian language and literature in school. During these five years, I have been very cool in pumping myself, I think that recognition was the fact that students of the Moscow State University Journalism Department began to ask me to practice. But like any normal person, I think that for such a long period as five years, you need to change the area of ​​activity in order not to boil in the same pot. I tried to suggest that Webplanet’s shareholders make a new project out of it, but did not find understanding. I argued, I argued, and in the end I was fired. I actually wanted to quit myself, but they did it for me, and quite toughly - they left it without any bonus, vacation pay. My plan is to go to Europe for three months and break off there, I got angry and made a habrahabr.

Danya: Such a thing as a habr didn’t exist at all or is it partly tracings with something?
Denis: Well, the news rating mechanism is tracing with digg.com. But on digge users rate not news, but links to news. This is a fundamental difference. Plus on Habré we made various additional services: companies, work ...

Danya: And people continue to sit down on it on an industrial scale, as Jovan said before, or has everything calmed down? Are people tired of habr or not?
Denis: Yes, you are tired. There are several periods in the relationship of a person to any community: at first he is very interested in him, then he is very strongly involved, then the person is addicted to the community, and then the period of cooling begins. All these phases take about a year. After a year, users consider themselves all-knowing and say that “habr is no longer the same”. And then there are new people who go the same way that dude went a year ago. This is a normal process for the circulation of users in communities.

Danya: Who is the main investor of Thematic Media?
Denis: Well, this is classified information. Let's just say that this is a venture fund that invests only in web projects and nothing else.

Danya: Did they find you?
Denis: Yes. A familiar girl called me and said that a very famous person wanted to meet me. I gave the phone and in the end I received a call from another person whom I did not know, but about whom I had heard that he was investing in various Internet companies. He called, offered to come to visit the office. We talked, they offered to invest, I refused. Then they called almost every day, every other day and were very persistent.

Danya: They sent the girls first, then the riot police?
Denis: Not even the whores did not send. Everything was normal, civilized. At the same time and besides them there were people who wanted to invest in the company. It all started six months after the opening of the Habr. The attitude of these people set us up and we agreed to sell the blocking stake.

Danya: What is your job title officially called? And how free are you in your actions?
Denis: Officially, I am a creative director. My responsibilities include organizing the workflow of the entire company. If we are talking about launching a new project, then everything is discussed with me. If we want to hire someone, I will interview this person. That is dofiga everything, except for issues related to financial statements. I do not understand this, therefore other people are engaged in it.

Danya: Well, look, if tomorrow it occurs to you to turn all the texts on your projects upside down, paint everything red, etc. Will you be allowed to do this?
Denis: First, I will not ask anyone. We will simply discuss everything with the staff and if we agree, we will do so. But at the same time, sometimes I play dictator and make decisions myself, because it’s just that you need to and three-week discussions will not lead to anything good. Sometimes you just need to take and make tough decisions. Say: there will be so and everything, nibet ...