Company A to Z: Mail.ru Group

We present to your attention a new permanent section on the "Megamind": "Company from A to Z" .

Each publication will be a set of facts from the history of a Russian IT company. We begin, of course, with the largest and oldest organizations, overgrown with a significant number of intrigues, stories and dates / numbers.
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The first in the list is Mail.ru Group, for multiple reasons: here is the company's value for the entire Runet, and not the whitest and purest reputation, a large number of little-known details, as well as the most vivid personalities of the Russian, including oligarchic, business.

A - Asechka (ICQ)

Legendary free instant messenger created by Israeli friends Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Safi Wigiser and Amnon Amir on November 15, 1996. The avalanche conquered the world and just as quickly died, being bought first in 1998 (then) by the unconditional giant AOL for $ 407 million and again in 2010 DST, owned by Alisher Usmanov, for $ 187 million. Having joined the Mail.ru Group after the reorganization, it continues its protracted existence in the form of the Mail.ru Agent, although it is developing and undergoing many changes, no longer causing, by the way, users of past feelings. More recently, the company began to make active attempts to resuscitate ICQ, attracted to its advertising stars of Russian TV, such as Pavel Volya.

B - Blogs@Mail.Ru

The project, by the time it was closed, occupied the 3rd place in popularity among blogging platforms in RuNet and the 2nd among microblogs (after Twitter).

On a par with LiveJournal, it is this service that told Russians about what a “blog” is and who such “bloggers” are, not hesitating to use the so-called. "Star blogs", which were cultural, business and political figures.

B - Vkontakte

The creation of Pavel Durov, the refuge of all adolescents - Vkontakte, initially positioned itself as a social network of students and university graduates and quickly turned into a multi-billion dollar business that played a cruel joke with its creator, who was forced to migrate from Russia, according to his statements, because of fears own life. As a result of multiple acquisitions, Mail.ru Group is currently fully owned and, since 2014, has been managed by Boris Dobrodeyev (the son of the head of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company). The whole history of this social network is accompanied by formal and informal scandals and dramas of different levels, involving people right up to Alisher Usmanov.

G - Geymdev

Games are a separate article of interest and income of today's Mail.ru. It all started with the acquisition of the company IT Territory by Igor Matsanyuk, which released the browser-based Territory, to the present moment is a whole portal and platform for publishing and promoting games of all genres, from online to standalone.

D - Dmitry Grishin

Dmitry Grishin, who was born on October 15, 1978 near the Kapustin Yar military test site, which explains his interest in robotics, began his programmer career at the age of 20 (1998). The rapid career development began with the leadership of the development of the Internet auction Molotok.ru in NetBridge Services. After the merger of Yuri Milner’s assets with “Port.ru” in 2001, Grishin became the head of the service center of the merged company, and at the end of the year - the technical director of the company. In 2003, Grishin became the CEO of Mail.Ru. During his campaign, the company began not only to actively grow, but also to spoil its reputation, getting into various kinds of stories, like forcedly changing the start page in the user's browser to mail.ru, etc. In Wikipedia, Grishin is credited with the role of the company's visionary, who determined the most promising Mail development directions. ru Group - communication services and online games, but many in the market are confident that he was a performer - he sighted and straightened his patron and teacher Yuri Milner in the right channels. In 2010, Grishin headed Mail.ru Group after the separation of Russian and foreign assets; in 2012, he replaced Yuri Milner as head of the board of directors.

E - E-Commerce

The goods.ru working on the aggregator model is not the only e-commerce service of the company. In addition, the company has services Travel, Work and Real Estate.

G - Greed

With this word, Internet users quite often characterize the company's activities in a negative way, emphasizing the company's seemingly obvious motto: “to earn literally everything that moves.” On Habré alone, you can find dozens of cases of negative user stories.

W - Dating

The company owns 30% of Mamba and its own service Dating.ru, MoiMir also belongs to Mail.ru - according to company data, this social network exceeds the male audience.

And - Games

The game section dedicated to computer games appeared on Mail.Ru on May 23, 2006. It published information about the game world: news, reviews, screenshots of new games, video reviews. The portal was implemented jointly with the IT Territory company (see Igor Matsanyuk) and gamedev.

K - Alexey Krivenkov

Alexey Krivenkov is perhaps one of the least known people who had a hand in creating DataArt, and Port.ru, and, first of all, Mail.ru mail service. On Geektimes there is an interview with him , where, in a short form, Alexey describes all the main stages of the formation of companies and his own way in each of them. I bought the Mail.ru domain from my friends for $ 500, and as a result, moving away from the management of the company, I sold the stake to Yuri Milner, who began to consolidate assets with a stake in Krivenkov.

... at some point we decided that having a great engine, we can create a service in Russia that represents free mail to everyone. In addition, the mail.ru domain belonged to our good friends. For us, then it was no business - just a cool thing.

L - Levity

Roughly speaking, for 15 years of Mail.ru existence, it’s more than once, and most likely it’s not even 10 times, to put it mildly, to perform obviously ill-considered actions, which, however, did not prevent it from absorbing almost all the major players of the Russian Internet of the beginning zero.

M - Mail.ru

The construction and integration of the company, subsequently - the rebranding and transformation from DST / Port.ru / NetBridge.ru will occur around this particular name, planned from the very beginning of this process, which began in 2001. There may be several reasons, but perhaps the most realistic - This is the highest attendance and recognition.

N - Netbridge.ru

Stage on the road to modern Mail.ru, NetBridge.ru was founded in 1999 by Yuri Milner, who read about the states and prospects of the technology market as a company in Morgan Stanley, designed to replicate successful business models of Western services. First investors: Grigory Finger, Yuri Milner and the New Century Holdings Foundation, the company began to quickly create projects and at first Yury Milner even suggested that CompTek CEO Arkady Volozhu be engaged in business jointly, but in 2000 faced problems with the dot-com crisis and distrust of technology projects. on the Internet and was forced to cut staff. In 2001, a merger agreement was adopted between Port.ru and Netbridge.ru, Milner, Goland and Sergey Shestakov made plans, the company actively reduced its employees and killed unprofitable projects, reorganized and paid off, and also began to provide services with the names “ Service@Mail.ru.

O - Classmates

Another legendary project in which all parents are registered, the seventh most visited site in the Russian Federation, the 67th in the world, was created, according to one version, in the summer of 2005, according to another - on March 4, 2006. The creator is Albert Popkov, now living in London, started it as a hobby, but managed to see a prospect - in 2008 he, the main shareholders and partners, sold a controlling stake in the company to the DST fund, later transformed into Mail.ru Group, without disclosing the amount of the transaction.

P - Port.ru

Allocated in 1998 from DataArt, founded by Eugene Goland, Dmitry Krivenkov and Dmitry Andrianov, whose main asset was the mail service Mail.ru, which in 2000 set an unthinkable record for those times - 1 million registered users, “Port.ru” represents a milestone on the way to modern Mail.ru.
One of the main goals of Port.ru was the implementation of the matrix-based Internet portal model based on numerous services - in fact, the today's main page of all the company's services, the final control over which DST was obtained in the middle of zero. And in 2000, amid the crisis of the dot-com, because of which investors turned away from the company, and the co-founders began to leave, NetBridge became the main partner Port.ru

R - Reputation

Let's say that if it were not for the all-seeing Alisher Usmanov and the cunning but perspicacious Yuri Milner, the Mail.ru Group would not have taken place in principle.
This is a corporation that has separate and interesting projects, the degree of "brightness" of which is inversely proportional to the degree of integration in the parent company, in general - everything is like that of all giants.

C - Mergers and Acquisitions

That is how the company came to the current moment - for a long time and methodically buying everything on the market that is more or less of interest.

T - Ivan Tavrin

The 38-year-old domestic media manager, who managed to create and work in a variety of Russian media companies, in 2009, together with Alisher Usmanov, consolidated total assets in UTV-Holding, in 2012, he became the general director of Megafon. In 2014, he bought out Pavel Durov’s share in Vkontakte during a joint-stock conflict, and later Mail.ru Group bought the stake.

U - Alisher Usmanov

The main owner of Metalloinvest, who made his fortune in metallurgy, tested investments on the Internet in zero, starting with an electronic metal exchange and continuing with purchases of Kommersant and Secret Firmy publishing houses, together with Gazeta.ru. In 2008, at the peak of the mortgage crisis and the problems of technology companies, began active acquisitions in the Russian market, becoming a co-owner of SUP and the DST fund. In 2009, he financed DST with the purchase of Facebook, Zynga and Groupon shares. After the reorganization of DST and Mail.ru Group owns almost half of the fund and the controlling stake of the company combining Russian Internet assets. In mid-October 2015, he made another high-profile investment - together with UTV Holding (see Ivan Tavrin), he invested $ 100 million in the e-sports organization Virtus.pro, representing gaming teams in many “disciplines”.

F - Futubra

Service microblogging a la Twitter, who was born and died within one year - 2012.

X - Hosting

According to the vice-president and technical director of Mail.Ru Vladimir Gabrielyan, the portal has eight data processing centers, the number of servers is 9000 units. The technical department of Mail.Ru employs over seven hundred specialists.

According to the information posted on the company's blog, as of December 2013, 2.5 thousand servers were used to operate the mail service with a total memory capacity of 12.5 PB. Over 15 years of operation, 400 million email addresses have been registered.

W - Too much

Mail.ru is also able to overdo it, as any company with money, great holidays and souvenir products (for every taste) are especially good, as an example we can only give the construction of a new company office in which both a skating rink and an industrial climber climbing along the wall on grand opening.

Y - Ilya Scherbovich

A 40-year-old investment manager from Vladimir, who had worked in Sberbank and Deutsche Bank, bought out the shares of Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev in Vkontakte (48% of the company) in 2013, began an active fight with Pavel Durov, as a result of which the latter was forced to sell a stake in the company and leave it. A year later, the package was bought by Mail.ru Group for $ 1.47 billion.

W - Ilya Shirokov

The creator of My Circle, bought by Yandex in 2007, Ilya worked in the company for six months and went to Stanford, where he met Yuri Milner. In 2010, he headed "Classmates", from whose management Popkov retired, in 2014 he left the company.

E - Email

Mail.ru was originally a simple service of registering your own postal domains and accessing them via POP3. It became the “core” around which Eugene Goland, together with Yuri Milner, built the company, absorbing from the beginning of the zero years many different services, from online stores to social and thematic / informational projects. Krivenkov, Andrianov and Shutov had a hand in its creation. Included in the Russian Guinness Book of Records as the first site with a million registered users in RuNet.

U - Yuri Milner

Almost a legendary personality, an investor and a venture capitalist, the “proxy” of the owner of Metalloinvest and the main shareholder of Mail.ru, Alisher Usmanov, is actually responsible for the current state of the company, starting to build it back in 1998. Having merged with Port.ru in 2001, the combined company began its existence, which continues to this day. Yuri Milner is a physicist by education, but he started doing business and investing after he entered the Wharton School of Business, according to him, because of his “disappointment in himself as in physics”. In 2009, in conjunction with Alisher Usmanov, he organized DST, which was the first Russian fund to invest in projects that, after the 2008 mortgage crisis, attracted funds: domestic Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte, Mamba and gaming companies, and a little later - Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. Paired with Ron Conway, he invested in graduates of the Y Combinator incubator (39 projects for $ 150,000 each), which earned him an international reputation. The last loud step - the search for extraterrestrial civilizations in conjunction with Stephen Hawking.

I am Yandex

Attempts to buy a stake in Yandex or to become partners of the company were made more than once - in 2001 Milner offered Volozh either a merger or a partnership, and a little later there was an attempt to buy 10% of the company through Alisher Usmanov. Neither failed, and now we have two independent and large companies - one is more beautiful than the other.