Where large companies are looking for innovation. Interview with Dmitry Izmestyev about the development of startups
All the big IT companies were once startups. The most successful are now themselves a forge of new businesses. What innovative projects are the most promising, with what mistakes young startups have to deal with investors - we talked about this with the vice-president of LANIT for innovations Dmitry Izmestiev.
“Meetings with startups sometimes remind me of a trip to the island of Papua: in the collision of different civilizations, you always have to find a common language. The main thing - not to eat.
- Dmitry, you participate in the selection and maintenance of innovative ideas until a team with a good idea turns into a company with a good profit. How to find this good idea, how to be inspired and what external experience to navigate?
The easiest "recipe" to find something creative is to look at the intersection of industries. If you apply an idea from one industry to another, in most cases something interesting will turn out.
And it’s safer to concentrate on evolutionary ideas. In contrast to the revolutionary, with no prehistory, evolutionary trends improve the already existing development. Operating systems existed before Microsoft, search engines existed before Google, social networks existed before Facebook. However, these companies were able to see the market and refine the product so that it turned out to be really cool, massive, bright. You need to engage in evolutionary innovation, simply because it’s a better route if you really want to make money, and not just crave fame.
')
Source of inspiration
For an IT solution to be good, it must solve your problem. Let us recall the example of Uber creator Travis Kalanik, who could not catch a taxi in Paris and thought about the convenience of the “magic” call button on the phone.
Do for yourself, but do not neglect other people's opinions: do not be afraid to tell your idea and receive feedback, including negative. In the startup world there are a lot of people who are focused only on themselves and are not ready to listen to customers. Their startups are doomed to failure.
- How does the selection of startups occur in your company?
Our group of companies practices two approaches to innovation. The classic approach to innovation involves investing in promising start-ups. So do all the world IT leaders, such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft. We also understand that the company needs to develop in those areas in which it is still weakly represented, and the easiest way is to buy an external team and help in its development, not only financial, but also expert. Therefore, we are building a startup with proper navigation in business, as well as helping customers and vendor support.
The second, less classical and more complex way of innovation is the cultivation of ideas within the company. LANIT makes a huge number of large projects. Technical and product solutions that appear in the process are often no worse than the ideas of any innovative team that drinks cocktails in coworking. Only members of our project teams may not even realize that they are creating some kind of innovation, they just go to work and solve a specific task. This is another of my functions - to seek innovation in their own projects and products of the group of companies.
- How do such IT solutions fall into your hands? Catch them in internal meetings?
Usually they come to me with some problem. At some point, the working team realizes that, roughly speaking, stalled. And the project is on, and you need to create a solution that has never happened before. Yes, it is developed in the interests of a single customer, but it should turn out no worse than external projects in the HYIP areas. And here I see processes that are very similar to innovative ones - we need to invent some approach, explain to his team, put this team around a new idea, we need to infect everyone with this idea, so that they present the idea and implement it.
To work with promising innovative ideas LANIT formed a venture fund Lanit Ventures. So I'm not the only one working in this direction.
- What company is currently focused on the development of innovations?
We are developing the following areas: big data, virtual reality, modern educational technologies and electronic publishing technologies, retail solutions.
By the way, there are several solutions for retail in our portfolio. And this has its own logic. I'm talking about ZOZO - ABC Solutions' WFM system - and LANIT Omni's Right Way CRM system. The fact is that the LANIT group has the Inventive Retail Group - a successful retail chain of branded stores. It includes world famous brands: re: Store, Samsung, Sony Center, Nike, ROOKIE, LEGO, kid rocks and others. Management Inventive Retail Group is open to experimentation and is ready to introduce innovations immediately. Thus, we can work out a solution within the company and only then bring it to the market.
It makes sense for you to come to LANIT with your own innovative idea, if its alliance with the products and technologies of our group of companies causes a synergy effect. It is always interesting to find this synergy - when a startup plus something in LANIT suddenly becomes not 1 + 1, but 1 + 10.
- Are there any parameters that a startup must meet in order to reach a payback period and generate profit in the planned period?
It is strictly necessary to have a leader — the founder, the co-founder, that is, the person who “burns” with the idea and is ready to make the project a matter of his life. It is even better when more than one person promotes the technological idea. In a start-up world, those projects whose development several leaders are engaged in are more sustainable.
Secondly, it is important to be able to focus on your idea and stick to this direction. I meet a lot of creative people who gush ideas one over the other better and cannot concentrate on working out one. Work with such project leaders is absolutely unpromising. The only acceptable option is if such a founder finds in his team people who will refine his ideas. That is, the team as a whole should be able to focus on one, the main direction.
Source of inspiration
Thirdly, the startup should be open to changes in response to external feedback. The inability to hear clients and experts, the unwillingness to make changes to the project is as harmful as the constant change of the motion vector. People who have to punch their walls with their foreheads to tell the world about their idea often become “stony” and generally stop accepting any criticism. This strategy will only work if the startup initially develops in the right direction. But such successful stories - one in a million. You may not have a visionary mindset, but then you need to be able to listen.
Source of inspiration
Fourth, do not delay sales. It is important that the team is ready to start quickly in the market. Perhaps you need another three years to finalize your product. But after three years, your ideal solution will probably be irrelevant. Remember the stories of great scientific discoveries. Usually, several scholars went to the same discovery in parallel in different parts of the world, not knowing about each other. So in the world of startups all the same. Do not have time, someone else has time. Fortunately, now there are flexible development methodologies that allow launching a regular update package to the user quickly and literally every week.
- Father instructed the future entrepreneur Chichikov with the words “you take care of and a penny most of all; this thing is safer. " How important is frugality for beginning IT businessmen?
I'm worried about the stories when startups for the development of the product immediately ask millions. Big investments at an early stage usually end badly for an immature project. It is much better when a team counts every penny, a very proper economy is born from this, with a good investment history - with this you can easily get a plus and build momentum. Having a good economy from the start is very important. And for this you need to be as economical as possible and use each resource to the maximum. Alas, not everyone is ready for this. And if not, maybe you should not engage in a startup?
Well-developed companies in which the founder combines two competencies - understands both IT and business. More often, you have to deal with developers who have an interesting idea and do not have any ideas about business.
Source of inspiration
Sometimes, the project can be pulled out with the help of a competent, professional team. Remember the story of Google: the two star founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page confidently developed the young company, while the Sequoia Capital Foundation actually did not impose on them the well-known successful businessman Eric Schmidt. In a couple of years, Google from a company that has attracted several million investments has become a multi-billion dollar corporation.
- How can a startup build a business model?
How to make money, you need to think first and foremost, and then - about everything else. Nobody asks you to invent a business model, you can always borrow it. And if your idea is unique, be inspired by business solutions from other industries. You can get a proven business model even from the fashion industry. For example, let's take the Zara brand, which has become successful with sales of replicas of haute couture models that have just shown expensive fashion houses. It looks like the Chinese market is arranged - it can very quickly and cheaply replicate other people's successful solutions. Instead of a long production immediately to the market. Why not use this model in IT? This is just like what happened in the open source segment: the open-source non-commercial project PostgreSQL has become a serious competitor to Oracle and IBM DBMS.
- If the product is initially born on a highly competitive field, what should I look for?
Young startups come to us and bring their idea. Great, I say, only such a cool idea is still there among these guys on the market and those. Then they promise to make the product a little better than the competition. Just how much better? If the difference is small, the stellar history just will not work. You need to have the best product, like Google, whose idea of ​​cross-references has changed the entire history of search engines. It is also important how much you are in love with the product and how you can fall in love with others. The more people you have managed to infect with your idea, the more willing you are to invest. I am, of course, inspired by new ideas. Only they all require verification. You cannot build a business on one charisma of the founder.
- How much time do you spend thinking about the future? Is it possible to immediately understand that a new idea can change it?
At home in my mind is the book "The Foreseeable Future." This is the popular work of the English physicist, Nobel Prize winner George Thomson. It was released in 1958 and describes just our time. And what do you think? Even a prominent futurologist Thomson did not manage to make a truthful prediction. This book is interesting only as an entertaining reading, it is terribly funny. There is very little in common with our reality.
Even cellular communication failed to predict to any science fiction writer. Descriptions of some universal means of communication are in every second book - talking about projects like Iridium satellite communications, accessible from anywhere in the world. And the fact that all over the planet will have a long and methodical arrangement of towers with transceivers for cellular coverage - such a thing could not come to anyone. Therefore, my personal approach is to work, not read fiction. Rather than trying to develop the ability to foresee, it is better to concentrate on creating this future yourself. You may make a mistake several times and only do something good for the tenth time that “shoots”. But you can’t guess the bullseye to target.
- And in what direction to work? What do you find interesting?
I am inspired by startups related to automatic design, the use of artificial intelligence in design. They are interesting because it is an attempt to answer the question of what is creative thinking. This area seemed inaccessible for the conquest of technology. The fact that a computer can think logically, recognize images, has been known to all for a long time. And every year he makes it all better. And the fact that the computer will be able to think creatively has not been seriously discussed before.
There is a strong feeling that there will be a breakthrough in this area. The first decisions appear in the design of websites and marketing products. There are already examples of projects where design is shaped through machine learning. This is not at all the same as a set of templates.
Soon we will learn about solutions that, due to the development of interfaces, new technologies, the interaction of artists, photobanks and other players in this market, will create a truly original, concise, user-friendly design. At least I believe it.
Your business ladder can be any. The main thing that it was interesting to climb (From a trip to Chile)
- From what sphere did you come to “innovations”?
I worked in IT education for more than 20 years, and before that I managed to work as a programmer at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Once, while still a second year student at the Moscow State University, I got to a seminar at the history department - it was organized by a team of specialists from the German Göttingen, who was engaged in digitizing complex historical documents. They developed a system that allowed documents such as European medieval books with complex gothic fonts and illustrations to be machine-readable.
I decided to show the Germans the results of my work - in the early 90s, when there were still only early and very poor versions of Windows, I wrote my operating system with a youthful enthusiasm with a good graphical interface. The Germans asked me exactly one question: “How much code is there in assembly language?” After my answer, without any additional questions, I was immediately hired. I joined the team and wrote one of the first systems for marking documents - the very same medieval books. Tagging in the text is now engaged in every second, and then nothing like it was in principle.
- Then you significantly deepened your work with content, and the book remained in your profession for a long time ...
Yes, in 1995 I came to the Network Academy and worked here until 2013, first as a teacher and then as a technical director. It must be said that these years were not monotonous, because all the time we were inventing something, changing it.
I learned a big lesson in 1999, when I felt that I had reached the absolute maximum in the teaching profession. When my colleagues returned from abroad with the course on teaching technologies at IBM and brought a bunch of ideas that I have never used, then I realized how wrong. The sense of peak in the profession is usually deceptive, opportunities for development and growth, as a rule, always exist.
So, in the "Network Academy" we first engaged in individual IT training. Then, when it became clear that the state occupies an ever-growing place in the economy, we substantially shifted to large educational and consulting projects. When national research universities were created, our training center acted as an expert - we did a lot of research on how to create the most successful university. The uniqueness of this project is that IT education has essentially prompted the best practices throughout the educational field.
- What achievements do you consider to be real milestones in the development of the Network Academy in your career?
In 2010, Networking Academy LANIT won the World Contest for Partner Projects Microsoft. In fact, this meant that one of the coolest vendors at the time recognized us as the world's best training center. So Microsoft appreciated the project for training IT employees of the Federal Treasury, which we implemented in a consortium with the Microinform training center. The Treasury planned to introduce a new information system in its branches throughout the country. And we internally trained (attention to numbers!) 10 thousand confident users of the system in 87 cities. We also taught more people, but this was no longer a full-fledged full-time format. But it is he who is the most efficient and labor-intensive.
In such an atmosphere, my colleague and I, from the hands of Microsoft top managers, received a statuette for the first place in the category Learning Solutions, Impact Partner of the Year (“The Most Influential Partner of the Year in Educational Projects”)
This is an incredible feeling when you realize that the world community, thanks to your project, saw Russia - that we are in “IT” education.
And the next milestone is the emergence of the format “Personal Education” in the group (we already wrote about this on Habré). I am proud that I managed to implement it, because this is a real innovation - due to the use of information technology, people began to pass exams better. Compared with very high-quality full-time training, the effectiveness of the new format is 30% higher. And compared with distance learning, success is probably much greater.
- What is your strength in IT? The main advantage?
I just recently thought about this issue. I am often asked to join a complex project and help solve the problems that have accumulated in it.The question is, how can a person from the side come and help when there is an established team that has devoted a lot of time and energy to this? Most people in this situation will say - this is not my area. And it is interesting and not scary for me to understand something new for myself. This just led me to the sphere of innovation, and it is this quality, by the way, that unites many of Habr's readers.
“Meetings with startups sometimes remind me of a trip to the island of Papua: in the collision of different civilizations, you always have to find a common language. The main thing - not to eat.
- Dmitry, you participate in the selection and maintenance of innovative ideas until a team with a good idea turns into a company with a good profit. How to find this good idea, how to be inspired and what external experience to navigate?
The easiest "recipe" to find something creative is to look at the intersection of industries. If you apply an idea from one industry to another, in most cases something interesting will turn out.
And it’s safer to concentrate on evolutionary ideas. In contrast to the revolutionary, with no prehistory, evolutionary trends improve the already existing development. Operating systems existed before Microsoft, search engines existed before Google, social networks existed before Facebook. However, these companies were able to see the market and refine the product so that it turned out to be really cool, massive, bright. You need to engage in evolutionary innovation, simply because it’s a better route if you really want to make money, and not just crave fame.
')
Source of inspiration
For an IT solution to be good, it must solve your problem. Let us recall the example of Uber creator Travis Kalanik, who could not catch a taxi in Paris and thought about the convenience of the “magic” call button on the phone.
Do for yourself, but do not neglect other people's opinions: do not be afraid to tell your idea and receive feedback, including negative. In the startup world there are a lot of people who are focused only on themselves and are not ready to listen to customers. Their startups are doomed to failure.
- How does the selection of startups occur in your company?
Our group of companies practices two approaches to innovation. The classic approach to innovation involves investing in promising start-ups. So do all the world IT leaders, such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft. We also understand that the company needs to develop in those areas in which it is still weakly represented, and the easiest way is to buy an external team and help in its development, not only financial, but also expert. Therefore, we are building a startup with proper navigation in business, as well as helping customers and vendor support.
The second, less classical and more complex way of innovation is the cultivation of ideas within the company. LANIT makes a huge number of large projects. Technical and product solutions that appear in the process are often no worse than the ideas of any innovative team that drinks cocktails in coworking. Only members of our project teams may not even realize that they are creating some kind of innovation, they just go to work and solve a specific task. This is another of my functions - to seek innovation in their own projects and products of the group of companies.
- How do such IT solutions fall into your hands? Catch them in internal meetings?
Usually they come to me with some problem. At some point, the working team realizes that, roughly speaking, stalled. And the project is on, and you need to create a solution that has never happened before. Yes, it is developed in the interests of a single customer, but it should turn out no worse than external projects in the HYIP areas. And here I see processes that are very similar to innovative ones - we need to invent some approach, explain to his team, put this team around a new idea, we need to infect everyone with this idea, so that they present the idea and implement it.
To work with promising innovative ideas LANIT formed a venture fund Lanit Ventures. So I'm not the only one working in this direction.
- What company is currently focused on the development of innovations?
We are developing the following areas: big data, virtual reality, modern educational technologies and electronic publishing technologies, retail solutions.
By the way, there are several solutions for retail in our portfolio. And this has its own logic. I'm talking about ZOZO - ABC Solutions' WFM system - and LANIT Omni's Right Way CRM system. The fact is that the LANIT group has the Inventive Retail Group - a successful retail chain of branded stores. It includes world famous brands: re: Store, Samsung, Sony Center, Nike, ROOKIE, LEGO, kid rocks and others. Management Inventive Retail Group is open to experimentation and is ready to introduce innovations immediately. Thus, we can work out a solution within the company and only then bring it to the market.
It makes sense for you to come to LANIT with your own innovative idea, if its alliance with the products and technologies of our group of companies causes a synergy effect. It is always interesting to find this synergy - when a startup plus something in LANIT suddenly becomes not 1 + 1, but 1 + 10.
- Are there any parameters that a startup must meet in order to reach a payback period and generate profit in the planned period?
It is strictly necessary to have a leader — the founder, the co-founder, that is, the person who “burns” with the idea and is ready to make the project a matter of his life. It is even better when more than one person promotes the technological idea. In a start-up world, those projects whose development several leaders are engaged in are more sustainable.
Secondly, it is important to be able to focus on your idea and stick to this direction. I meet a lot of creative people who gush ideas one over the other better and cannot concentrate on working out one. Work with such project leaders is absolutely unpromising. The only acceptable option is if such a founder finds in his team people who will refine his ideas. That is, the team as a whole should be able to focus on one, the main direction.
Source of inspiration
Thirdly, the startup should be open to changes in response to external feedback. The inability to hear clients and experts, the unwillingness to make changes to the project is as harmful as the constant change of the motion vector. People who have to punch their walls with their foreheads to tell the world about their idea often become “stony” and generally stop accepting any criticism. This strategy will only work if the startup initially develops in the right direction. But such successful stories - one in a million. You may not have a visionary mindset, but then you need to be able to listen.
Source of inspiration
Fourth, do not delay sales. It is important that the team is ready to start quickly in the market. Perhaps you need another three years to finalize your product. But after three years, your ideal solution will probably be irrelevant. Remember the stories of great scientific discoveries. Usually, several scholars went to the same discovery in parallel in different parts of the world, not knowing about each other. So in the world of startups all the same. Do not have time, someone else has time. Fortunately, now there are flexible development methodologies that allow launching a regular update package to the user quickly and literally every week.
- Father instructed the future entrepreneur Chichikov with the words “you take care of and a penny most of all; this thing is safer. " How important is frugality for beginning IT businessmen?
I'm worried about the stories when startups for the development of the product immediately ask millions. Big investments at an early stage usually end badly for an immature project. It is much better when a team counts every penny, a very proper economy is born from this, with a good investment history - with this you can easily get a plus and build momentum. Having a good economy from the start is very important. And for this you need to be as economical as possible and use each resource to the maximum. Alas, not everyone is ready for this. And if not, maybe you should not engage in a startup?
Well-developed companies in which the founder combines two competencies - understands both IT and business. More often, you have to deal with developers who have an interesting idea and do not have any ideas about business.
Source of inspiration
Sometimes, the project can be pulled out with the help of a competent, professional team. Remember the story of Google: the two star founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page confidently developed the young company, while the Sequoia Capital Foundation actually did not impose on them the well-known successful businessman Eric Schmidt. In a couple of years, Google from a company that has attracted several million investments has become a multi-billion dollar corporation.
- How can a startup build a business model?
How to make money, you need to think first and foremost, and then - about everything else. Nobody asks you to invent a business model, you can always borrow it. And if your idea is unique, be inspired by business solutions from other industries. You can get a proven business model even from the fashion industry. For example, let's take the Zara brand, which has become successful with sales of replicas of haute couture models that have just shown expensive fashion houses. It looks like the Chinese market is arranged - it can very quickly and cheaply replicate other people's successful solutions. Instead of a long production immediately to the market. Why not use this model in IT? This is just like what happened in the open source segment: the open-source non-commercial project PostgreSQL has become a serious competitor to Oracle and IBM DBMS.
- If the product is initially born on a highly competitive field, what should I look for?
Young startups come to us and bring their idea. Great, I say, only such a cool idea is still there among these guys on the market and those. Then they promise to make the product a little better than the competition. Just how much better? If the difference is small, the stellar history just will not work. You need to have the best product, like Google, whose idea of ​​cross-references has changed the entire history of search engines. It is also important how much you are in love with the product and how you can fall in love with others. The more people you have managed to infect with your idea, the more willing you are to invest. I am, of course, inspired by new ideas. Only they all require verification. You cannot build a business on one charisma of the founder.
- How much time do you spend thinking about the future? Is it possible to immediately understand that a new idea can change it?
At home in my mind is the book "The Foreseeable Future." This is the popular work of the English physicist, Nobel Prize winner George Thomson. It was released in 1958 and describes just our time. And what do you think? Even a prominent futurologist Thomson did not manage to make a truthful prediction. This book is interesting only as an entertaining reading, it is terribly funny. There is very little in common with our reality.
Even cellular communication failed to predict to any science fiction writer. Descriptions of some universal means of communication are in every second book - talking about projects like Iridium satellite communications, accessible from anywhere in the world. And the fact that all over the planet will have a long and methodical arrangement of towers with transceivers for cellular coverage - such a thing could not come to anyone. Therefore, my personal approach is to work, not read fiction. Rather than trying to develop the ability to foresee, it is better to concentrate on creating this future yourself. You may make a mistake several times and only do something good for the tenth time that “shoots”. But you can’t guess the bullseye to target.
- And in what direction to work? What do you find interesting?
I am inspired by startups related to automatic design, the use of artificial intelligence in design. They are interesting because it is an attempt to answer the question of what is creative thinking. This area seemed inaccessible for the conquest of technology. The fact that a computer can think logically, recognize images, has been known to all for a long time. And every year he makes it all better. And the fact that the computer will be able to think creatively has not been seriously discussed before.
There is a strong feeling that there will be a breakthrough in this area. The first decisions appear in the design of websites and marketing products. There are already examples of projects where design is shaped through machine learning. This is not at all the same as a set of templates.
Soon we will learn about solutions that, due to the development of interfaces, new technologies, the interaction of artists, photobanks and other players in this market, will create a truly original, concise, user-friendly design. At least I believe it.
Your business ladder can be any. The main thing that it was interesting to climb (From a trip to Chile)
- From what sphere did you come to “innovations”?
I worked in IT education for more than 20 years, and before that I managed to work as a programmer at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Once, while still a second year student at the Moscow State University, I got to a seminar at the history department - it was organized by a team of specialists from the German Göttingen, who was engaged in digitizing complex historical documents. They developed a system that allowed documents such as European medieval books with complex gothic fonts and illustrations to be machine-readable.
I decided to show the Germans the results of my work - in the early 90s, when there were still only early and very poor versions of Windows, I wrote my operating system with a youthful enthusiasm with a good graphical interface. The Germans asked me exactly one question: “How much code is there in assembly language?” After my answer, without any additional questions, I was immediately hired. I joined the team and wrote one of the first systems for marking documents - the very same medieval books. Tagging in the text is now engaged in every second, and then nothing like it was in principle.
- Then you significantly deepened your work with content, and the book remained in your profession for a long time ...
Yes, in 1995 I came to the Network Academy and worked here until 2013, first as a teacher and then as a technical director. It must be said that these years were not monotonous, because all the time we were inventing something, changing it.
I learned a big lesson in 1999, when I felt that I had reached the absolute maximum in the teaching profession. When my colleagues returned from abroad with the course on teaching technologies at IBM and brought a bunch of ideas that I have never used, then I realized how wrong. The sense of peak in the profession is usually deceptive, opportunities for development and growth, as a rule, always exist.
So, in the "Network Academy" we first engaged in individual IT training. Then, when it became clear that the state occupies an ever-growing place in the economy, we substantially shifted to large educational and consulting projects. When national research universities were created, our training center acted as an expert - we did a lot of research on how to create the most successful university. The uniqueness of this project is that IT education has essentially prompted the best practices throughout the educational field.
- What achievements do you consider to be real milestones in the development of the Network Academy in your career?
In 2010, Networking Academy LANIT won the World Contest for Partner Projects Microsoft. In fact, this meant that one of the coolest vendors at the time recognized us as the world's best training center. So Microsoft appreciated the project for training IT employees of the Federal Treasury, which we implemented in a consortium with the Microinform training center. The Treasury planned to introduce a new information system in its branches throughout the country. And we internally trained (attention to numbers!) 10 thousand confident users of the system in 87 cities. We also taught more people, but this was no longer a full-fledged full-time format. But it is he who is the most efficient and labor-intensive.
And the next milestone is the emergence of the format “Personal Education” in the group (we already wrote about this on Habré). I am proud that I managed to implement it, because this is a real innovation - due to the use of information technology, people began to pass exams better. Compared with very high-quality full-time training, the effectiveness of the new format is 30% higher. And compared with distance learning, success is probably much greater.
- What is your strength in IT? The main advantage?
I just recently thought about this issue. I am often asked to join a complex project and help solve the problems that have accumulated in it.The question is, how can a person from the side come and help when there is an established team that has devoted a lot of time and energy to this? Most people in this situation will say - this is not my area. And it is interesting and not scary for me to understand something new for myself. This just led me to the sphere of innovation, and it is this quality, by the way, that unites many of Habr's readers.
Yes, our startups really need good specialists:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342338/
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