Spout: Russian startups are control freaks

One of the leading top managers of the Russian Internet business, Anton Nosik, wrote about the global crisis in the domestic industry. These are conceptual theses that reflect the specific culture of the Russian way of doing business. According to Nosik, “devastation as a way of corporate existence for [Russian] Internet companies is inherent in nature,” that is, it is the foundation on which Internet business originated in Russia. Anton Nosik knows this more than anyone else, because he stood at the origins of the first Internet startups in Runet and watched this process from the very beginning.

There is no order in project management. Everyone does something differently: “the portfolio investor determines the development strategy for services, the executive director deals with the editorial policy, the financial department staffing table is determined by the finance department, designers are programmed, programmers make their adjustments to the design in retaliation,” etc. The roots of such a mess, suggests Nosik, are rooted in the mid-90s, "when teams of one or two or three enthusiasts stood at the origins of the current Internet projects." Each of them was forced to solve a lot of questions, and this chaos continues to this day.

The situation only worsened when investors of the first wave (speculators) came to the market. They also tried to steer everything, scouring the pioneers. They hardly agreed to delegate their powers to specialized specialists. Bardak reigns in the online business so far. Russian startups, even successful startups, are simply incorrigible: “A manager, sensing success, is simply unable to delegate authority. From this he loses weight, appetite, and sleeps worse. As a result, it happens to see a situation of devastation reproduced in the most unexpected conditions. However, they say that such a “growing pains” among companies led by control freaks is not only peculiar to Internet startups. ”