A chance to learn from Yandex what he knows best

We opened the set to the new Tolstoy Startup Camp . This is a Yandex workshop where we help launch a startup. She will be the fourth in a row. The previous three gave a lot not only to its participants, but also to us - we understood how and what can be changed in the camp. In the first three sets, we were ready to work with a variety of IT projects, provided that we liked the idea, we believed in the team or saw the potential for business development.

Now we have decided that we will invite into TSC only those people who have already created projects, designs or programs - those who can do something with their hands. The experience of past camps has shown us that the main thing that Yandex can teach is to make technological and technology-related products for a mass audience. This is where we have greater expertise and skills. As soon as we take on something else, the usefulness and effectiveness decreases not only for us, but also for startups.


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Features of Yandex are shown in everything: in development, in design - anywhere. So that everyone can understand what our experience is valuable for and whether it will be useful for you, we asked two people from very different parts of Yandex to tell what, in their opinion, is unique in Yandex skills and what we can do best. They both worked with the guys and lectured in previous camps.

One of them is Anatoly anatolix Orlov, who has worked at Yandex for almost 10 years. The first two years at Yandex he wrote the Market, and then spent a long time engaged in search performance. The second is Kostya Gorsky, art director of Yandex Browser. He is in Yandex just over four years. Recently, his team introduced a new browser concept.
Read under the cut not only their different opinions, but also details about the camp.

Anatoly Orlov - one of the leaders of Yandex search.

I recently thought here that Yandex looks like a large city clinical hospital. In Moscow, a lot of glamorous paid clinics, where in beautiful interiors provide paid services such as removal of tartar or discharge of cold pills. But if you have had any serious trouble, then most often the doctor who can help you will work (at least half the time) in a completely Soviet-type burly state clinic with shabby walls and boorish nurses. Shabby walls and nurses for this, in fact, are not needed, so we have not implemented this. But in such hospitals there is a huge flow of complicated cases, and there are doctors there who have already seen literally everything. You could even say that their competence is paid for with lives.

We have a very cool technological competence. If you are doing something really technologically complex, then in Yandex there are a lot of people who will help you. In this case, it will be like in the joke: “Experts do not think - they know.” There are many smart people who can come up with a cool solution, but the advantage of our smart people is that we just know a lot of things that you are just going to think about.

We are faced with a huge amount of technological situations every day; small companies often need years to do this. Build a business on technology X, and at the stage of exponential growth realized that technology X no longer works on your data? To be bent, when the startup already shot, absolutely unpleasantly. And a couple of years ago, on Wednesday afternoon, we tried to fill in 10% of our data in X, and even then we realized that it was not working, and apparently it would never be. So you could ask us too. We have already stepped on all the technological rakes that can kill your business. You'd be surprised what percentage of "conventional industry technologies" is bent on at least some significant amount. 80 percent probably do not work. Of the new trendy and glamorous ones that young developers love so much for their beauty, probably all 99%.

We also have a very good culture of “demonstrable improvements”. Yandex has metrics for everything. If you make a change, then the “belief” that it improves something is very often broken about reality. It is better not to believe, but just stupidly measure the effect. You say not everything can be measured? No, you can measure everything. Not for everything you can come up with an exact metric, but for everything you can come up with something useful.

And we have a huge amount of unique data and resources. If your product needs to know the attendance of most pages in runet, or it requires 10,000 machine-hours of calculations per day, then we have it all.

If you need something from the above, come to us - we will help. If you make a standard commercial product that does not contain anything more complicated than nginx + php + mysql, and all you need is just money and help in checking the business model, then, most likely, you better not go to us. Of course, we all can do this, but we are no better at this than the funds that are in the market. Plus, some of the projects for people who make Yandex may simply not be interesting. This does not mean that they are bad - we are just not about them, and they are not about us. At least, I can hardly imagine how such wonderful projects, such as LinguaLeo, could be born in Yandex.

Kostya Gorsky, art director of Yandex Browser.

The first few months after I came to Yandex, there was a feeling that I sat down on a rocket that was taking off, and I need at least to hold onto it. There were so many cool people around who were not indifferent to what they were doing, so much new knowledge. It struck me greatly. At the same time, in Yandex, they did not solve anything and do not decide authorities. You cannot say: “Do this because I am the boss.” You should always be able to answer questions about why you propose to do this or that. When we came up with a new concept of the browser, we made dozens of presentations for different people in different parts of the company, just to tell what it is and why.

A large number of questions is what distinguishes experienced people. If the designer, for example, at the interview, says that everything is fine and he would not have altered anything, it is strange. If he says that in the existing decision everything is terrible and that is why he would have redid everything, this is also alarming. People who have already created not concepts, but working products, understand that those who work on a product understand more than others why everything is so arranged, that there were many options, that for some reason this decision was made. At the moment when the designer came up with something, the design does not end, but only begins, by and large.

In one of the interviews Ilya Segalovich said: “It doesn’t matter what you are capable of. It is important that you did. ” I really liked these words. This is the “religion” that Illya asked in the company, and she is still alive. I see it in communicating with people all the time, and it's scary cool. There are always more ideas than those who can implement them. I think those who come to the camp realize this important thought through communication with our people.

To summarize who Yandex expertise will be useful for and who we are waiting for in the fourth camp, it will be:

• massive scalable services, which in the future will be able to use millions of people;
• automated B2C services that solve a specific user problem;
• projects based on a unique technological solution.

But this is not done so that now we will only take ready-made projects with the team to the camp. We are still looking for people with their own ideas and thoughts, ready to create a team around them. Or without ideas, but on condition that they are ready to join some foreign project.

This Tolstoy Startup Camp will open on February 16 of next year and will last until April 17. The program, as before, will consist of three stages: the formulation of the idea, the testing of hypotheses and the creation of a prototype.

We still have no requirements for education, experience, country or place of residence. Prerequisites: age over 18 years old, knowledge of Russian, having own laptop or other device for work. Knowledge of English is also desirable, because we invite foreign experts to the workshop. Anyone who comes to us not from Moscow, we will provide accommodation.

To participate in the workshop you must fill out a questionnaire and solve the test task . If your application is selected, you will receive an invitation to be interviewed via Skype. Call for applications will last until 23:59 on January 18th.