20 years to Yandex. Lecture by Ilya Segalovich - the person who invented this word
Exactly 20 years ago, on September 23, 1997, Yandex appeared on the Internet. Arkady Volozh, Ilya Segalovich, Elena Kolmanovskaya presented the search engine Yandex.ru at the Softool exhibition. They opened it by cutting the ribbon in front of the computer - because they did not understand how to open websites on the Internet.
Then it consisted of 5 thousand sites on which about 4 gigabytes of text was posted. People approached the demo computer, tried to ask requests and received answers. At that time, Yandex took into account the morphology of the Russian language, the distance between words and was able to rank the documents.
This is one of the last lectures that iseg , co-founder and first technical director of Yandex, Ilya Segalovich, read. It is dedicated to the history of Yandex from the moment that Ilya and Arkady Volozh sat at school at the same desk. The quality of the lecture notes is not as good as we would like, but the content is priceless.
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- My name is Ilya Segalovich, Yandex company. I studied at school with my friend Arkasha. We were not spilling water, sat for four years at the same desk, received gold medals and we went to do. Neither he nor I did where we wanted, but we lived side by side, met and played badminton. We had such a hobby. I brought a net to my yard all the time. I had a book with funny pictures. We ourselves have learned and taught twenty people around us. We regularly organized powerful badminton battles, so this badminton line continued in our institute.
It was a reason for us to meet, because our hostels were near: he had on Volgin, and I had on Miklouho-Maclay. This is the south-west of Moscow. In general, not far, and there little forest. There was a big badminton zone. Now I do not know, everything is already built up there. We played and continued to be friends, although we already studied in different institutions. Then the revolutionary period began, the cooperative movement, and he tells me at some point - we played badminton, and he says: "Listen, I leave my institute and go into business”. I say: "Are you out of your mind?" Where? Here the whole story is clear: it’s necessary to work, to do what the boss ordered, and you are somewhere in your business. ”
It was perceived simply by absolute insanity. On the other hand, the age of such - in general, there is nothing to lose. Not that I took it all tragically, but after a year I myself came to him and said: “Listen, you won’t find a job for me to program something?” He says: “Come on, come on.” I connected, and the work to which I came for the sake of extra earnings - it turned out to be quite interesting, and then so interesting that it captured my whole life. The work was related to the manufacture of search engines for computers IBM PC.
Then we had the first product. It was called the "International Classification of Inventions for Patentologists." There were seven thick books that no normal person could read or even browse or memorize were completely unable to, and it was necessary to quickly navigate, to find the necessary headings. We did all this, in my opinion, on ten diskettes, and this was the beginning of my working biography in this company: I was engaged in formatting floppy disks. This is not the most intellectual activity. Why I did not program? There was a funny story. I come to him and say: "Come on."
It was still a period when I was not looking for a job, I had the money under contracts. We really did something useful in our old work, and there was some money. Literally in one evening, I programmed literally everything he wanted, but he somehow forgot about me, found some other guys, and after nine months we again meet with him. I say: “What are you not calling? Where is your job? ”He says:“ Sorry, we have already programmed everything, but come, you will be programming floppies ”. That's about how I got to program floppy disks. Then I realized that formatting floppy disks is very difficult, and most importantly, there are many of them. We had to somehow reduce their number. Then I looked at what they write down there. I realized that this is impossible, it is necessary to compactly compress the data.
In general, well done guys, they all wrote, but before the correct algorithms there was still far away. I cheerfully rushed to this business and reduced the amount of work I had to do, that is, instead of writing one program on ten floppy disks, I managed to reduce everything to three or four. It released a tremendous amount of time, and one could do something more rewarding. I imagine how happy I was then. Now it's hard to remember, but, in general, it was nice. At the same time, the program has become less occupied, and in general the requirements for it have decreased, but this is purely engineering pleasure.
It is also due to the fact that I tried to self-educate. Here I came across, for example, some English magazine, I was chattering it from cover to cover. There was such a magazine, and there just came across an article about data compression. I took this article. There was no program there, everything was told there in words, but I directly implemented everything, as it was written there, and it worked.
Then everything went further, and then we had a period of crisis related to the fact that the Soviet organizations, which were the main buyers of our system - they collapsed all together in 1992, 1993, 1994. It became so bad that they stopped buying. In general, they ceased to be engaged in production, and from there they ceased to buy what is needed for production. They began to rent premises, they began to engage in barter and so on. A very difficult economic time has come throughout the country, which I am not inclined to denigrate once. In general, I think it is stupid, from my point of view, the nineties. But I remember that there was a lot of confusion, but somehow it quickly returned to normal, and people began to perceive themselves normally.
I wanted to say that there was a very difficult period, and our project collapsed along with the economics of patenting. The Soviet Union ceased to patent, and this is a critical moment. We continued to sell this program, but out of five or six people who were involved in the project, only two or three remained. Arkady, seeing that everything was bad, rushed to work on computers, "iron", and he called me, and he called the other guys. But nevertheless, a small department, left over from a half-ransacked company of the late eighties - early nineties, still existed by the mid nineties. We began to think what to do in order to, perhaps, not earn money, but somehow sound.
The first thing that occurred to me then, I say: "Let's do something eternal." It is clear that we were able to search and well searched from the point of view of understanding the language. And it was necessary to take some Russian text that was exactly eternal, that is, one that people will always use and always use. The first thing that comes to mind is War and Peace. But what to look for in it? This is not an information guide.
Do not forget that in the early nineties, the feeling and perception of religion and the whole religious was completely different from what it is now. Now it is very ambivalent. There are people who are very much for, and there are people who are very much against. Then, after many years of persecution, religion was perceived as a hurt, unhappy branch of culture, and all people who considered themselves cultural were, in a sense, obliged to help.
You can always find the offended and somehow try to help them internally. Now, too, there are segments of the population that can somehow be inwardly sympathetic. Then the believers were such people who had to sympathize. Plus, there were people who were believers, and somehow it all came together, and we did such a thing called the Bible Computer Handbook. We took the Bible, digitized it, invested a lot of work. I met with the Russian biblical society. I met people who made the Brussels edition. I know the history of the publication of the Bible. I know who translated what chapter.
Very interesting, in general, I can read a whole lecture, but the essence is that it was for me an immersion in the subject, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it was necessary to make a good product that would be secular, neutral, universal, and this would be perceived by religious people only as positive and godly. We managed to do such a thing in 1994, and in 1995 we started selling it very inexpensively, although at that time, maybe it was expensive - $ 40, I think, if I'm not mistaken. This is quite a lot in those times, but after this patent history was over, for us it was the only source of income.
We made a very beautiful cover. We had a lot of volunteers who helped in this project. There was a wonderful man who was doing a symphony at that time. It was such a synodal edition, when for each word an index is made where this word occurs in the text of the Bible. Helped the people who did the symphony. They read, corrected, that is, everything is cool there. We also tried to make the search work well, so that everything was instantly instant. The machines were old - AT and XT computers.
We had such a test. He was called "cat test." I did this: I just took and threw a book on the keyboard. It was necessary to ensure that the program was all adequate, did not fall, so that it was possible to put pressure on the down arrow and that some endless lists were scrolled at such a speed that a person would not feel any delays. Search was supposed to be in a second. All this had to be done somehow in order to enjoy it.
The result was quite pleasant. We sold a thousand copies. This is an insane amount - 40,000 dollars. For a very long time, she probably came to us for two or three years, but as a result, our group from CompTek, from this company, which was engaged in hardware, was not expelled, although there were all the prerequisites for this, because the accountant always paid a salary, she looked at us and thought: “What are these idlers doing here?” The company earns, it sells hardware, and these strange programmers are sitting here, they are programming and selling some kind of money.
Nevertheless, we paid for ourselves and got the nerve to take another order, because the product was so nice that the Institute of World Literature and the Informregister came to us - such was the organization that the state commissioned to record all Russian classics on CD-Roma. And here we are with our rather high-quality product. Naturally, they came to us, and we received this order. There were more competitors, there was a tender. We were the best, and as a result of this order we doubled or tripled the team. This gave us the opportunity, firstly, to breathe somehow, and secondly, CompTek moved to the place where there was a permanent Internet connection. It was August 1995, but it is important that the Internet was permanent and fast.
- My name is Lisa. I'm from Krasnoyarsk. I have two questions. You can not immediately respond to them, but according to the logic of your story, because they are not related to the story. The first question: what are the problems now at the present stage of development of search engines do you have? The second question: please tell me later about the Yandex’s managerial school.
- Good. I think that there may be someone who will make it more professional than me, because I gave a lecture twice in this school, I will now read it for the third time, but did not prepare it. I approximately know how many people study there, but I don’t know all the specifics and details.
We have six out of three programmers. It was a blast, fantastic, in fact, and we were given the Internet. Not dial-up - do you know dial-up? (Depicts the sound of the connection - ed.) Does anyone still remember that, right? Not dial-up, but just a normal cable, Ethernet. True, Ethernet was still a coax then, but they already switched to Ethernet, so the period was a transition one. Well, Ethernet was coaxial, and now Ethernet is RJ45. In general, a twisted pair is called. Generally speaking, I want to note the following - that we should not be perceived as people who are quite “teapots”, doing something on their knees. We were inspired all the time by very ambitious plans and tasks.
First of all, we all saw what was around. I had a complete set of similar western local search engine tools for a computer. I had a biblical western product. Even three, in my opinion, I looked at when I did. We felt at the forefront. Everything we did, we always did not on the Hamburg account, as they say, that is, we did not give ourselves any discounts. We had favorite western foods and there were unloved western foods.
We tried to do it right, that is, we wanted to make it perfect from the point of view of user experience, from the point of view of quality, pleasure from owning the product, and so on. Even when we were not engaged in the Internet, and engaged in local products, we still set the maximum demands for ourselves. When we connected to the Internet, I remember, somewhere around then I discovered such a system - AltaVista. They closed three days ago. In general, probably, no one paid attention to this news, but people who have been on the Internet for a long time, - at this moment a little tears have fallen from them.
Viewer:
- Artem, Tyumen city. Tell me, after the closure of this project on the Bible, then you had some kind of motivation? You wanted to earn money, become famous, become the gods of the Internet, or become famous only in Moscow?
Ilya:
- First, it was very ashamed to throw what we started, that is, I wanted to make a good local search engine, and it was somehow very ashamed to take it in the middle. Therefore, exactly dokruchili to make it good. Secondly, when we went online and I looked at AltaVista, and there were some other systems there, we realized that, in fact, we can do the same and even better. The feeling that we can do better, the feeling that this is bad, and we know how, and we can do better - that was very spiritual.
There was a keen desire. Then, to be honest, we didn’t understand at all what kind of business it would be, in general, where it all goes, how people will earn money on the Internet. It was absolutely shrouded in total darkness, but there was a feeling that we could do it, and it would be better than what it is now, and it will be used. At least, we ourselves will start using, because we have always eaten our dog food, that is, we have always used the product itself.
We have never made custom products. All the products we did, we did for ourselves. We did them all the time and we used them ourselves. I probably used this Bible the most. I quoted so much and so on, that is, I remember it very well. There was the same feeling with the Internet, and the Internet was then small, and it seemed that there was Internet, you think, so to speak, uploaded it to your hard drive. So it was.
Viewer:
- Were there moments when you thought that nothing was working out, and in principle what you are doing now, it will not bring fruits as a result, and you will be left with nothing? Second moment. Did you or the members of your team have a transition moment when they offered you to go to another company, did they pay a salary there more than you earned? Was there such a moment - just leave and receive money there?
Ilya:
- I would note two such moments in the nineties. First, around 1993–1994, when we hadn’t connected to the Internet yet, we didn’t have a Bible yet, and our old products were already burned out, and we had to somehow survive. We literally got hooked by making this bible. This saved us a year or two.
The second point is about 1996, when the business really went uphill before the crisis, and our parent company earned very well, and we, against their background, despite the fact that we paid for ourselves and received these orders, were still perceived by such stepchildren very understandable and not very necessary. There was a rather acute such moment, rather, it was already more psychological: is it necessary to do this at all? And will it bring the necessary income? Can we somehow pay for ourselves in such a way as to expand?
Do not just pay off the five or six people who sit. All the same, they are sitting in the parent company, the parent company provides some kind of infrastructure. There are so many aspects that say "free bread". There were also some pretty sharp moments. I would single out about two thousand years when we received investments. How to do it? It was a very sharp moment.
We could be sold completely, as “Aport” or “Rambler” did, and with them, in general, a tragic story happened in many respects in the sense that, having changed the team, the owners could not give birth to a sense of belonging. We took the only right decision: we sold a third, and sold to such investors who seemed to us the most sane, that is, they clearly did not want to break us. They did not want total control. They gave us money and entrusted it to us, that is, they entrusted us with the future of our company. This, oddly enough, is a rather rare quality among investors.
Usually, if investors give money, especially in Russia, they say: now we will command and say what to do and what not to do. It was a very delicate moment.
Another was a moment - approximately in the region of 2002–2003, when we emerged from this minus, when we burned investor money. The Internet still earned very little, but we learned to live on self-sufficiency. It was a pretty poignant moment. We have not grown at all for about three years or have hardly grown at all. When we received money, investments, we scored about a hundred people per year, and we were at this level for about two or three years, at least until 2004.
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Then it consisted of 5 thousand sites on which about 4 gigabytes of text was posted. People approached the demo computer, tried to ask requests and received answers. At that time, Yandex took into account the morphology of the Russian language, the distance between words and was able to rank the documents.
This is one of the last lectures that iseg , co-founder and first technical director of Yandex, Ilya Segalovich, read. It is dedicated to the history of Yandex from the moment that Ilya and Arkady Volozh sat at school at the same desk. The quality of the lecture notes is not as good as we would like, but the content is priceless.
')
- My name is Ilya Segalovich, Yandex company. I studied at school with my friend Arkasha. We were not spilling water, sat for four years at the same desk, received gold medals and we went to do. Neither he nor I did where we wanted, but we lived side by side, met and played badminton. We had such a hobby. I brought a net to my yard all the time. I had a book with funny pictures. We ourselves have learned and taught twenty people around us. We regularly organized powerful badminton battles, so this badminton line continued in our institute.
It was a reason for us to meet, because our hostels were near: he had on Volgin, and I had on Miklouho-Maclay. This is the south-west of Moscow. In general, not far, and there little forest. There was a big badminton zone. Now I do not know, everything is already built up there. We played and continued to be friends, although we already studied in different institutions. Then the revolutionary period began, the cooperative movement, and he tells me at some point - we played badminton, and he says: "Listen, I leave my institute and go into business”. I say: "Are you out of your mind?" Where? Here the whole story is clear: it’s necessary to work, to do what the boss ordered, and you are somewhere in your business. ”
It was perceived simply by absolute insanity. On the other hand, the age of such - in general, there is nothing to lose. Not that I took it all tragically, but after a year I myself came to him and said: “Listen, you won’t find a job for me to program something?” He says: “Come on, come on.” I connected, and the work to which I came for the sake of extra earnings - it turned out to be quite interesting, and then so interesting that it captured my whole life. The work was related to the manufacture of search engines for computers IBM PC.
Then we had the first product. It was called the "International Classification of Inventions for Patentologists." There were seven thick books that no normal person could read or even browse or memorize were completely unable to, and it was necessary to quickly navigate, to find the necessary headings. We did all this, in my opinion, on ten diskettes, and this was the beginning of my working biography in this company: I was engaged in formatting floppy disks. This is not the most intellectual activity. Why I did not program? There was a funny story. I come to him and say: "Come on."
It was still a period when I was not looking for a job, I had the money under contracts. We really did something useful in our old work, and there was some money. Literally in one evening, I programmed literally everything he wanted, but he somehow forgot about me, found some other guys, and after nine months we again meet with him. I say: “What are you not calling? Where is your job? ”He says:“ Sorry, we have already programmed everything, but come, you will be programming floppies ”. That's about how I got to program floppy disks. Then I realized that formatting floppy disks is very difficult, and most importantly, there are many of them. We had to somehow reduce their number. Then I looked at what they write down there. I realized that this is impossible, it is necessary to compactly compress the data.
In general, well done guys, they all wrote, but before the correct algorithms there was still far away. I cheerfully rushed to this business and reduced the amount of work I had to do, that is, instead of writing one program on ten floppy disks, I managed to reduce everything to three or four. It released a tremendous amount of time, and one could do something more rewarding. I imagine how happy I was then. Now it's hard to remember, but, in general, it was nice. At the same time, the program has become less occupied, and in general the requirements for it have decreased, but this is purely engineering pleasure.
It is also due to the fact that I tried to self-educate. Here I came across, for example, some English magazine, I was chattering it from cover to cover. There was such a magazine, and there just came across an article about data compression. I took this article. There was no program there, everything was told there in words, but I directly implemented everything, as it was written there, and it worked.
Then everything went further, and then we had a period of crisis related to the fact that the Soviet organizations, which were the main buyers of our system - they collapsed all together in 1992, 1993, 1994. It became so bad that they stopped buying. In general, they ceased to be engaged in production, and from there they ceased to buy what is needed for production. They began to rent premises, they began to engage in barter and so on. A very difficult economic time has come throughout the country, which I am not inclined to denigrate once. In general, I think it is stupid, from my point of view, the nineties. But I remember that there was a lot of confusion, but somehow it quickly returned to normal, and people began to perceive themselves normally.
I wanted to say that there was a very difficult period, and our project collapsed along with the economics of patenting. The Soviet Union ceased to patent, and this is a critical moment. We continued to sell this program, but out of five or six people who were involved in the project, only two or three remained. Arkady, seeing that everything was bad, rushed to work on computers, "iron", and he called me, and he called the other guys. But nevertheless, a small department, left over from a half-ransacked company of the late eighties - early nineties, still existed by the mid nineties. We began to think what to do in order to, perhaps, not earn money, but somehow sound.
The first thing that occurred to me then, I say: "Let's do something eternal." It is clear that we were able to search and well searched from the point of view of understanding the language. And it was necessary to take some Russian text that was exactly eternal, that is, one that people will always use and always use. The first thing that comes to mind is War and Peace. But what to look for in it? This is not an information guide.
Do not forget that in the early nineties, the feeling and perception of religion and the whole religious was completely different from what it is now. Now it is very ambivalent. There are people who are very much for, and there are people who are very much against. Then, after many years of persecution, religion was perceived as a hurt, unhappy branch of culture, and all people who considered themselves cultural were, in a sense, obliged to help.
You can always find the offended and somehow try to help them internally. Now, too, there are segments of the population that can somehow be inwardly sympathetic. Then the believers were such people who had to sympathize. Plus, there were people who were believers, and somehow it all came together, and we did such a thing called the Bible Computer Handbook. We took the Bible, digitized it, invested a lot of work. I met with the Russian biblical society. I met people who made the Brussels edition. I know the history of the publication of the Bible. I know who translated what chapter.
Very interesting, in general, I can read a whole lecture, but the essence is that it was for me an immersion in the subject, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it was necessary to make a good product that would be secular, neutral, universal, and this would be perceived by religious people only as positive and godly. We managed to do such a thing in 1994, and in 1995 we started selling it very inexpensively, although at that time, maybe it was expensive - $ 40, I think, if I'm not mistaken. This is quite a lot in those times, but after this patent history was over, for us it was the only source of income.
We made a very beautiful cover. We had a lot of volunteers who helped in this project. There was a wonderful man who was doing a symphony at that time. It was such a synodal edition, when for each word an index is made where this word occurs in the text of the Bible. Helped the people who did the symphony. They read, corrected, that is, everything is cool there. We also tried to make the search work well, so that everything was instantly instant. The machines were old - AT and XT computers.
We had such a test. He was called "cat test." I did this: I just took and threw a book on the keyboard. It was necessary to ensure that the program was all adequate, did not fall, so that it was possible to put pressure on the down arrow and that some endless lists were scrolled at such a speed that a person would not feel any delays. Search was supposed to be in a second. All this had to be done somehow in order to enjoy it.
The result was quite pleasant. We sold a thousand copies. This is an insane amount - 40,000 dollars. For a very long time, she probably came to us for two or three years, but as a result, our group from CompTek, from this company, which was engaged in hardware, was not expelled, although there were all the prerequisites for this, because the accountant always paid a salary, she looked at us and thought: “What are these idlers doing here?” The company earns, it sells hardware, and these strange programmers are sitting here, they are programming and selling some kind of money.
Nevertheless, we paid for ourselves and got the nerve to take another order, because the product was so nice that the Institute of World Literature and the Informregister came to us - such was the organization that the state commissioned to record all Russian classics on CD-Roma. And here we are with our rather high-quality product. Naturally, they came to us, and we received this order. There were more competitors, there was a tender. We were the best, and as a result of this order we doubled or tripled the team. This gave us the opportunity, firstly, to breathe somehow, and secondly, CompTek moved to the place where there was a permanent Internet connection. It was August 1995, but it is important that the Internet was permanent and fast.
- My name is Lisa. I'm from Krasnoyarsk. I have two questions. You can not immediately respond to them, but according to the logic of your story, because they are not related to the story. The first question: what are the problems now at the present stage of development of search engines do you have? The second question: please tell me later about the Yandex’s managerial school.
- Good. I think that there may be someone who will make it more professional than me, because I gave a lecture twice in this school, I will now read it for the third time, but did not prepare it. I approximately know how many people study there, but I don’t know all the specifics and details.
We have six out of three programmers. It was a blast, fantastic, in fact, and we were given the Internet. Not dial-up - do you know dial-up? (Depicts the sound of the connection - ed.) Does anyone still remember that, right? Not dial-up, but just a normal cable, Ethernet. True, Ethernet was still a coax then, but they already switched to Ethernet, so the period was a transition one. Well, Ethernet was coaxial, and now Ethernet is RJ45. In general, a twisted pair is called. Generally speaking, I want to note the following - that we should not be perceived as people who are quite “teapots”, doing something on their knees. We were inspired all the time by very ambitious plans and tasks.
First of all, we all saw what was around. I had a complete set of similar western local search engine tools for a computer. I had a biblical western product. Even three, in my opinion, I looked at when I did. We felt at the forefront. Everything we did, we always did not on the Hamburg account, as they say, that is, we did not give ourselves any discounts. We had favorite western foods and there were unloved western foods.
We tried to do it right, that is, we wanted to make it perfect from the point of view of user experience, from the point of view of quality, pleasure from owning the product, and so on. Even when we were not engaged in the Internet, and engaged in local products, we still set the maximum demands for ourselves. When we connected to the Internet, I remember, somewhere around then I discovered such a system - AltaVista. They closed three days ago. In general, probably, no one paid attention to this news, but people who have been on the Internet for a long time, - at this moment a little tears have fallen from them.
Viewer:
- Artem, Tyumen city. Tell me, after the closure of this project on the Bible, then you had some kind of motivation? You wanted to earn money, become famous, become the gods of the Internet, or become famous only in Moscow?
Ilya:
- First, it was very ashamed to throw what we started, that is, I wanted to make a good local search engine, and it was somehow very ashamed to take it in the middle. Therefore, exactly dokruchili to make it good. Secondly, when we went online and I looked at AltaVista, and there were some other systems there, we realized that, in fact, we can do the same and even better. The feeling that we can do better, the feeling that this is bad, and we know how, and we can do better - that was very spiritual.
There was a keen desire. Then, to be honest, we didn’t understand at all what kind of business it would be, in general, where it all goes, how people will earn money on the Internet. It was absolutely shrouded in total darkness, but there was a feeling that we could do it, and it would be better than what it is now, and it will be used. At least, we ourselves will start using, because we have always eaten our dog food, that is, we have always used the product itself.
We have never made custom products. All the products we did, we did for ourselves. We did them all the time and we used them ourselves. I probably used this Bible the most. I quoted so much and so on, that is, I remember it very well. There was the same feeling with the Internet, and the Internet was then small, and it seemed that there was Internet, you think, so to speak, uploaded it to your hard drive. So it was.
Viewer:
- Were there moments when you thought that nothing was working out, and in principle what you are doing now, it will not bring fruits as a result, and you will be left with nothing? Second moment. Did you or the members of your team have a transition moment when they offered you to go to another company, did they pay a salary there more than you earned? Was there such a moment - just leave and receive money there?
Ilya:
- I would note two such moments in the nineties. First, around 1993–1994, when we hadn’t connected to the Internet yet, we didn’t have a Bible yet, and our old products were already burned out, and we had to somehow survive. We literally got hooked by making this bible. This saved us a year or two.
The second point is about 1996, when the business really went uphill before the crisis, and our parent company earned very well, and we, against their background, despite the fact that we paid for ourselves and received these orders, were still perceived by such stepchildren very understandable and not very necessary. There was a rather acute such moment, rather, it was already more psychological: is it necessary to do this at all? And will it bring the necessary income? Can we somehow pay for ourselves in such a way as to expand?
Do not just pay off the five or six people who sit. All the same, they are sitting in the parent company, the parent company provides some kind of infrastructure. There are so many aspects that say "free bread". There were also some pretty sharp moments. I would single out about two thousand years when we received investments. How to do it? It was a very sharp moment.
We could be sold completely, as “Aport” or “Rambler” did, and with them, in general, a tragic story happened in many respects in the sense that, having changed the team, the owners could not give birth to a sense of belonging. We took the only right decision: we sold a third, and sold to such investors who seemed to us the most sane, that is, they clearly did not want to break us. They did not want total control. They gave us money and entrusted it to us, that is, they entrusted us with the future of our company. This, oddly enough, is a rather rare quality among investors.
Usually, if investors give money, especially in Russia, they say: now we will command and say what to do and what not to do. It was a very delicate moment.
Another was a moment - approximately in the region of 2002–2003, when we emerged from this minus, when we burned investor money. The Internet still earned very little, but we learned to live on self-sufficiency. It was a pretty poignant moment. We have not grown at all for about three years or have hardly grown at all. When we received money, investments, we scored about a hundred people per year, and we were at this level for about two or three years, at least until 2004.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338562/
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