The main theses of Oleg Tinkov in an interview with "The Secret of the Company"

An updated edition of The Secret of the Firm last week published an interview with the most controversial entrepreneur in Russia - Oleg Tinkoff.

The conversation turned out to be emotional and interesting, capturing the timeline from the beginning of the nineties to the current moment.

"Megamind" leads the most interesting quotes from the interview.

About motivation and crisis

And we, businessmen, have survived a bit, we can count them on the fingers of our hands. I mean real businessmen, not oligarchs, who muddle something with the state. If to compare with the 1990s, now there is no entrepreneurship in the country at all. But this is a normal situation. We were hungry and poor, we had to do something, and now everyone is well off. I speak 3-4 times a year in front of the students - MSU, Ph.D. and others. I have rational goals - to recruit the best people. And I see that the students are very well dressed, the girls are beautiful. But they have no motive. Like my children, there will never be a motive to work just like me. My son is friends with the son of Misha Friedman. They even have some kind of joint business on the Internet, but this is all ridiculous and naive. This is a kindergarten. Because you need a powerful motive.

But so far there is no particular crisis. Everything worsened only in comparison with fat years. I do not see much suffering. Just think, the ruble fell twice - in Ukraine, the currency fell four times! Maybe, by the way, there will be a business boom in the coming years. And we will buy less boots. Not five pairs will be a student, but two. Nothing tragic happens. We have over 5 million customers. Everyone pays, there is money.

About banking and business management

Any business is cyclical. And especially banking retail business is cyclical. We are at the very beginning of a bad cycle. The next two years will be bad. Then the system will be cleared, people will deal with debts, and a new growth will begin. Yes, now we do not give out 100–150 thousand cards per month, as before, we give out only 40–50 thousand. Risks began to grow two years ago, and jumped strongly a year ago. We are one of the few who were ready for this. In the retail business, only three commercial banks are now earning - Alfa-Bank, Sovcombank and us. All that matters is whether you make money or lose it. All the rest is details. In 2013, we earned $ 180 million in net profit, in 2014 - $ 90 million, and in 2015 we will be profitable. And something tells me that this year we will be the only non-state profitable retail bank in Russia. I wonder when a business earns and pays dividends. I personally received $ 30 million last year. I understand this, business.

I am not ready to invest in anything at all, I have never done it and I do not intend to. I do not know how to be a partner. I can only buy 100% of the company and offer the founders a job. Sometimes it is useful to work as an entrepreneur to become a good manager. Recently, for example, was going to buy Ubank and "traffic police fines." But they wanted too much money. In vain. Now the market is bad, many are pouring. Maybe in the near future someone and buy or pick up.
An important point - I do not want to disperse. Because the focus is very important. Write big so that everyone understands. Here is an example of Nogotkov. There are many reasons for his collapse, but the main one is that he did not focus on one business. He had too many hobbies, and all this was pitiablely over. There are many such examples.

About principles and vision

The main principle - the customer is always right. I always dance from the stove, from the client. I am trying to find new unmet needs and satisfy them. If this is electronics, then the “Birch” assortment could be bought not for dollars, but for rubles. If these are dumplings, then they could be taken home on the subway, and they did not stick together, like the Soviet ones. If the beer is then unfiltered and with a screw cap, it is not necessary to open the teeth. If banking, then online, without offices and queues. We find a niche and begin to develop it.

I looked at niches and opportunities. A good entrepreneur sees what others do not notice. For example, now I see that there is no strong Internet player in insurance. Therefore, I am engaged in Tinkoff Insurance. I do not know why others do not go there. Are they blind, deaf or what?

(Note. Ed .: "Intouch goes to insurance") Well coming. But we will quickly deal with them. There is also “Renaissance”, but what kind of company is it? 10 years losing money. What is this business? Ridiculous. I can't call them businessmen. Of course, not to look at competitors at all - this is hats. When I went to the dumplings, there was a huge company “Talosto” on the market, a real monster. They produced a thousand tons of dumplings a day, and we bought a machine for 200 kg. But after three years we produced 3,000 tons, and they stopped at a thousand. Head-on can not, of course, compete. You can’t head to Sberbank, to Baltika, to Tinkoff. We need to look for workarounds.

I choose for a very long time, according to the principle “measure it once, cut it once”. Sometimes I am mistaken. For example, in a situation with Tinkoff Digital. This project can not be called unsuccessful, because I have not lost money. But success, too, probably should not be called. I thought RTB platform (Real Time Bidding - online auction of advertisements - “The Secret”), based on Big Data and the most modern technologies, will grow. I thought that all media advertising on the network would go there, but this did not happen. No explosive growth. The market itself was too small. So you need to look at the market size, choosing a niche.
The problem is that in Russia the display advertising market is muddy and immature. This is a “gray” zone, largely built on kickbacks, relations between people, these Vasya, Vasya. It is difficult at the technological level to deal with dullness. We were lucky - we were able to integrate this technology into the bank. If you visit our site a couple of times, you will see our ads everywhere.

About quotes and loss of money

And who has not fallen capitalization? Sberbank, Yandex, Mail.Ru lost all 70–80%. Only the hero of our time, Sergei Galitsky with his "Magnet" does not fall so much. This country has fallen. What questions to us?
Overcoming thorns and stars, we settled in the last quarter of 2013. And then the lending crisis began. People grab loans and began to return them more slowly. Plus, a foolish amendment appeared in the State Duma, which the press replicated (in November 2013, a bill appeared in the State Duma, which could be interpreted as a ban on issuing loans remotely, but it soon turned out that the deputies missed the union “or” by mistake, - “Secret”) .
Western investors seem to want to invest in Russian business, but if something goes wrong, they immediately sell shares. The situation is clear and understandable. I told them in my eyes: you bought shares at $ 17, a month later you were selling for $ 6. What are you doing? Well, these are the rules of the fund, the managers answered me: if the stock falls by more than 20% per day, it must be reset, otherwise the fund manager will lose the job. That began the collapse. And then came Ukraine, geopolitics, and we fell along with everyone.

I lost a billion dollars. I came here to the office, I looked - all the employees at Bloomberg are sitting, they count the money. Guys, I say, remember this day, you see a man who lost a billion dollars in 20 minutes. And smile. There was a lot of savagery in this smile. I'm a man, not a turtle. Of course, there were no suicidal thoughts, but it was unpleasant. And the question is not only a billion, it’s still virtual, but stupid. I put one comma there, another wrote it wrong in the newspaper, and the third started selling the shares. This is absurd.

This is Russia's problem - everyone needs everything tomorrow. To earn my billion, I have been in business for 25 years. And we just hatch people from Skolkovo, they already want an apartment in Moscow City and Tesla. Give them a social lift. Go to the stairwell and walk up. It is necessary to work, and not to look for an elevator. What is the problem of Sergei Polonsky and many others? They quickly grew and quickly lost everything. Many of the fast money go crazy. I earned slowly and calmly. Tinkoff Bank President Oliver Hughes is an Englishman. He says, guys, calm, everything is fine, in 5 years the shares will return to the IPO level. This is Anglo-Saxon thinking. And we need everything in a year, maximum - in three.

On the conflict with the "Rockett"

I love startups. I am an apologist for entrepreneurship. I help young guys, heroes sing glory. I usually do this when I have nothing to do. And I have a lot of free time. Twitter is fun. I sit, nothing to do, let's potrollya. Maybe the clients of “Roketbank” will increase, prolonging the agony for a month. Although, of course, they will not survive. God forbid someone will buy. For me, they are like small children, I help them.

They have a very expensive customer service, they do not have the right products and income. There is an Interkommerts bank, there are customers — and the Rocketbank application is somewhere in the middle. They live on a commission of 2% of Mastercard, but the bank takes something else. What they earn, I do not understand. This model is doomed. They have 6,000 customers in two years, and we have days when we release 3,000 cards a day. You understand the scale. The only option is that some bank decides to create a product for hipsters and buys them. But they have already burned so much money that it makes no sense to buy. Sorry for them. For me, “Rockettbank” is not a specific startup, but a generalized image, an example of how a business cannot be done. Such projects live from round to round. They routed investors, loot pisses, raised a new round, and so on to infinity. And now you can't live like this. Or you need to do a startup with your own money, or in a super niche where you can immediately earn a net profit. For the most part, startups attract investments, rent a new office, drink smoothies in co-working, poke their own tablets. Nobody thinks about profit and economic feasibility. Why do we need to earn money, we are building a company. This is not entrepreneurship, but some shit. Investment money corrupts. When we were young, we had no business angels, funds, rounds. But we did not complain.

About ecosystems

In the US, the model is different. There is a stock market. And in Russia it is not. The largest source of capital in the world is the stock market. Not investment funds, and not bonds. Therefore, Twitter can afford not to earn a penny and have a billion-dollar capitalization. Therefore, the business models of Apple, Tesla, Microsoft do not work for us. If you want to create Apple, get on a plane and fly to the USA. There is an ecosystem, but we do not have it. There are several funds, but these people are crazy. We have the right to life model of making money, but not the growth of capitalization.

The question is in the whole industry of this. Young people sit in social networks, rub around my accounts. And the more they sit, the less they do. I can afford to spend time on the social network, I am the owner of the bank, but they are not. Their startups do not satisfy consumers, do not build new things, but master money and live from investor to investor.
Call it aggressive positivism. I really want to help - the guys behind the form lost content. Everything looks beautiful, cool, but if you ask, and for whom are you doing this? What for? They will think. All Western funds "closed" Russia. Russian - all distributed their money. I don’t believe in state investments either. Everything, the only chance to survive is to start earning money.

Kaspersky 20 years in this thread. I have no time left for international projects. Let the kids do it. I'm old, I'm not ready. These are very difficult markets. Kaspersky - an exception confirming the rule. It makes me laugh when people fly to California to open an office, having neither a product nor sales in Russia. They do not understand that the level of competition is much higher there. I lived in the USA for six years, sold beer, lost money. Our startups as astronauts, absolutely no brakes.

About future

Maybe tomorrow your Mamut will decide not only to make the best media about the business, but also to build the best online bank. And come to me. Because nowhere else to go. If I offer $ 2 billion, I probably agree. So, not forever. And then into space, after Polonsky.