Innovations in Russian
I am a professional participant in the innovation industry. Together with our colleagues for the last 10 years, we have been participating in the creation of new technologies.
And I have to say about the reason why you should not engage in innovation in Russia. Here you can speculate about the poor investment climate, the ineffectiveness of government programs, the size of the domestic market, the displaced motivations of participants. But besides that, there is a poorly controlled risk, which is the possibility of being behind bars. And this is not to speak out loud, but necessary. Under the cut of the top 5 innovative companies according to the investigative committee, known to me, and their misadventures were not previously mentioned in Habré.
Warning: For me, this is a personal story. My friend, who participated in the creation of a truly competitive innovative company as a technical director and co-founder, is now in jail. But despite this, I will try to describe and recall as unemotionally as possible several stories that happened to the founders of innovative companies in Russia, in the industry in which we operate.
I do not think that you can come up with some rules of hygiene in order not to get into similar situations, but still it is very useful to keep in your head the whole range of risks. Therefore, if you are already in this industry or are thinking of going to innovators, I recommend reading those examples from our reality that were not mentioned on Habré.
')
I want to immediately formulate several statements that I sometimes have to hear from my colleagues, and later on with examples to show that all of them are wrong in our reality:
Approximately such strategies guide those whom I asked about the risk of not being accused of a criminal offense by doing innovative business in Russia.
I selected examples so that in each of them was a real innovative component.
Vsevolod Opanasenko, CEO and founder of the T-Platform company, was sent to the detention center on March 26, 2019.
T-platforms is a company established in 2004 and specializing in special computing platforms. There are two unconditional achievements: the export of supercomputers to Germany, the creation of a Baikal processor and computers based on it (a subsidiary) .
Image from Zeptobars blog
According to the publication in Vedomosti , his arrest is connected with the non-fulfillment of obligations under the contract for the supply of computers to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which could have been caused by an untimely advance payment. The dispute in the arbitration court moved to the criminal plane.
The founder remained the majority owner of the company (which is quite unusual for companies of this magnitude), created a domestic processor today (although the “domesticity” share can be assessed differently, because production is not in Russia) and a competitive computer for office needs (as in performance, and at a price), and all this against the background of import substitution in software in the Russian Federation and not the best state of the microelectronics industry.
Almost certainly, the arrest of the main owner and CEO of the company will lead to a halt in the development of the T-platform, or maybe simply to the destruction of the company.
“Strategic industry” does not help.
EKAT - Skolkovo resident since 2014, the company's founder, Alexander Makarov. The latest news that I found about the state of the criminal case from 10.2018 .
The company is engaged in thermocatalytic gas cleaning systems, develop, produce and supply them to end users.
Slide open presentation from www.slideshare.net
As far as I understand from the description of their technology, the main innovation is the use of foams for the production of catalysts. The production technology of such catalysts (perhaps from a different composition for different catalytic reactions) can be truly unique and innovative.
At the beginning of the company's life, a rather paradoxical charge was brought against the owner. A few years after the round of investments from the state fund, the company's valuation fell and the fund offered to buy out 75% of the company's shares to the founder for 6 million rubles. The investigation considered all losses in the value of shares to be embezzlement of state funds, which would create an eerie precedent, provided that most startups simply fail. In other words, by agreeing to an investment from a state fund, investigators can be expected if one has allowed a lower valuation of the company.
As you see, the company was noticeably lower than any reasonable “radar”, i.e. it was a very small business.
“Below the radar” does not help.
It seems that all the “affairs of innovators” will unite the connection with state contracts. But it is not.
Investment funds are another “front” of the innovation industry, but they are inextricably linked with technological development and innovation.
The Baring Vostok Foundation worked with companies in Russia and the CIS.
The qualifications and efficiency of management characterize the list of companies in which they invested: Yandex (35.7% of shares in 2000, which allowed them to earn $ 4 billion), Ozon.ru, CTC Media, 1C, Avito.ru, Tinkoff.ru, Gett, Tasteville, 2GIS.
After the merger of the Vostochny banks (which was owned by Baring Vostok) and Uniastrum, the management of Baring Vostok appealed to the London Arbitration Court because of the withdrawal of assets from Uniastrum bank for 17.5 billion. before the merger of the new director of the united bank “Vostochny”. And he, in turn, appealed to the investigative committee.
Michael Calvey is under house arrest.
In detention center:
Vahan Abgaryan - partner of Baring Vostok
Philip Delpal - Partner of Baring Vostok
Ivan Zyuzin - Investment Director, Baring Vostok
Alexey Kordichev - Former Head of Vostochny Bank Alexey Kordichev
Maxim Vladimirov - CEO of the First Collection Bureau
The problem of interpretation in the framework of the criminal code is that the structure of a criminal group may include arbitrary people; it does not matter what formal position the employee had in the company, and whether he was an employee or shareholder at all.
I have no idea where now the new generation companies will be able to receive private investments of the second or third round for scaling and business development. After this high-profile case, one does not have to hope for the systematic work of a comparable private investment fund, which means that it will be necessary to attract more and more public funds (see the logic of the investigation in the case of EKAT).
“We do not deal with the state” - does not work.
I know personally the history of this company, from which WavIoT was subsequently separated. He is well acquainted with Evgeny Akhmadishin, who was the co-founder of the company and the technical director in the initial stage of development of “Stryzh”.
Sources of information about the company in Wikipedia .
Methods of receiving a signal in the radio have long been well studied, everything is done close to optimality. But at a certain point in time there were 3 factors that allowed to create something new in this industry:
In "Strizh" developed a technology for receiving and processing signals, in which 1 bit of information could be transmitted up to 100ms. The probability of receiving a bit of information is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio, in the numerator of which is the signal energy (or power per band, which is equivalent). By improving the quartz oscillators, it was possible to narrow the transmission band under the previous limitation on the signal power, extending the coherence duration of the radio signal.
In addition, the signal processing bandwidth due to the use of special calculators and the original processing method was about 1 MHz. One receiver made it possible to receive signals from thousands and tens of thousands of sensors (it depended on the transmission intensity, but here it was even better than in LoRa because of the separation in frequency). Low sensor consumption made it possible to create sufficiently compact devices that have been operating for years from autonomous power sources. The image is an example of a water sensor.
In general, this is a great example of an innovative company that could be created in Russia. Here it is possible to find qualifications in the field of radio and mathematics, and this qualification was absolutely necessary to create a competitive technology. Personally, I was also amazed that, in addition to creating the technology, they were able to make a grocery solution, which included everything from direct sales by the housing manager to the front-end client applications.
Then the company was divided into 3 businesses (Swift Telematics, WavIoT, NWave), I can not imagine how things are going for each of them, but as far as I heard, sales for all are growing and reaching billions in rubles in one of the companies . NWave does business successfully and attracts investments based in London.
In the meantime, the investigation opened a case because of parking sensors for Moscow parking lots, which were designed and manufactured in Strizhe. The company received a contract from FSUE FSO Sveko, which in turn participated in the state contract. The investigation formulated the criminal community, which included the technical director and co-founder of Strizh, Yevgeny Akhmadishin.
Today, Yevgeny Akhmadishin is in the SIZO for more than 1.5 years, losing everything he built.
“Being a technical director” and “not executing a state contract” does not help.
The image is taken from a great story about what the company does.
The company develops 3D models necessary for the repair of ships. This is a huge job, which includes many methods that allow you to restore the model from the design documentation and the actual measurements of the object. In addition, one of the company's products was a mobile repair support center with elements of virtual reality.
In general, 3D modeling, simulators for the preparation of repair crews, repair planning - this is all a modern approach to the effective maintenance of complex and large-scale technical systems like sea vessels and submarines.
Obviously, the company indirectly worked with government money.
As part of the case of embezzlement in the construction of the submarine "Varshavyanka", the director and owner of the company Valery Pshenichny was detained. After three weeks spent in the SIZO, the entrepreneur seems to have been tortured and killed. The official investigation asserts about suicide, the experts of the Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination (St. Petersburg State Budgetary Health Institution BSME) explicitly exclude this version .
“How you will repair your submarines” doesn’t work either.
It seems that innovation should increase the publicity of the company and in some sense guarantee protection against ill-founded criminal charges. But I have the impression that this works completely in the opposite direction - more publicity attracts more attention of investigators. In addition, perhaps, more noise around the criminal case somehow helps in promoting in the hierarchy of the department, “inflating” the matter is not money, so fame.
Dauria Aerospace - a private space company , the founder Mikhail Kokorich is not in the SIZO, the company actually ceased its activities. According to him, the creation of a company in Russia was his biggest mistake in life .
Dodo founder pizza was called in for questioning due to suspicion of drug trafficking. Exclusively commercial company. I want to think that someone just took the Breaking Bad TV show too seriously. But on that day, when I read this news, I seriously worried if we would lose their excellent pizzas.
If you start an innovative business in Russia or just take a significant part in it in any capacity, you risk being in prison even more than in the case of a business that does not have signs of innovativeness. The risks of product problems after release / sale are higher. The consequence will be easier to manipulate the concepts of the value of the company and its products, the amount of damage will always be “very large”. Those. You will have a unique offer on the market, but its price will be “clearly overpriced”.
And yet, in dealing with the state, do not even let the thought “it is necessary for them themselves”:
We often deal with companies creating biometric solutions. This industry in Russia is now just a driver for educating new applied specialists in computer vision and deep learning. But I am almost certain that all the equipment that can help catch criminals or better control the state border will not be properly maintained or will not be included in information systems. What will result in criminal cases.
I think you can dig up a lot of blatant examples when the creators of unique technologies or products were very mistaken about the fact that someone is actually planning to use all these innovations, to support solutions that work within the framework of state funding. But the real motive of the organizers turned out to be in the use of funds, and not in the creation of new working solutions.
It seems that I focus too much on state contracts. But, in fact, a huge amount of new technologies is locked in to state regulation and financing to some extent: smart city, biometrics, ecology, automatic car control, communications (telecom operators, the Internet), military technologies, any drones. And in our country, you will also come across companies owned by the state: industrial and agricultural companies, banks of a noticeable size.
So take care of yourself.
And I have to say about the reason why you should not engage in innovation in Russia. Here you can speculate about the poor investment climate, the ineffectiveness of government programs, the size of the domestic market, the displaced motivations of participants. But besides that, there is a poorly controlled risk, which is the possibility of being behind bars. And this is not to speak out loud, but necessary. Under the cut of the top 5 innovative companies according to the investigative committee, known to me, and their misadventures were not previously mentioned in Habré.
Motivation
Warning: For me, this is a personal story. My friend, who participated in the creation of a truly competitive innovative company as a technical director and co-founder, is now in jail. But despite this, I will try to describe and recall as unemotionally as possible several stories that happened to the founders of innovative companies in Russia, in the industry in which we operate.
I do not think that you can come up with some rules of hygiene in order not to get into similar situations, but still it is very useful to keep in your head the whole range of risks. Therefore, if you are already in this industry or are thinking of going to innovators, I recommend reading those examples from our reality that were not mentioned on Habré.
')
“I thought that”
I want to immediately formulate several statements that I sometimes have to hear from my colleagues, and later on with examples to show that all of them are wrong in our reality:
- innovations are not touched by the real ones - we are not fraudsters like everyone around;
- we will not be touched, because the state is interested in us - a strategic industry, maybe even connected with the military, and indeed everything is under control;
- while we are small and below the radar, everything will be fine; if we grow up, we will think.
- we will not conduct business directly with the state, only through a couple of intermediaries, nothing threatens us;
- we are a commercial company, do not touch the state, hipsters and smoothies, we work exceptionally clean, everything will be fine;
- I am not the CEO or chief accountant, I’m unlikely to be affected by any problems of a criminal nature;
Approximately such strategies guide those whom I asked about the risk of not being accused of a criminal offense by doing innovative business in Russia.
I selected examples so that in each of them was a real innovative component.
T-platform
Vsevolod Opanasenko, CEO and founder of the T-Platform company, was sent to the detention center on March 26, 2019.
T-platforms is a company established in 2004 and specializing in special computing platforms. There are two unconditional achievements: the export of supercomputers to Germany, the creation of a Baikal processor and computers based on it (a subsidiary) .
Image from Zeptobars blog
According to the publication in Vedomosti , his arrest is connected with the non-fulfillment of obligations under the contract for the supply of computers to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which could have been caused by an untimely advance payment. The dispute in the arbitration court moved to the criminal plane.
The founder remained the majority owner of the company (which is quite unusual for companies of this magnitude), created a domestic processor today (although the “domesticity” share can be assessed differently, because production is not in Russia) and a competitive computer for office needs (as in performance, and at a price), and all this against the background of import substitution in software in the Russian Federation and not the best state of the microelectronics industry.
Almost certainly, the arrest of the main owner and CEO of the company will lead to a halt in the development of the T-platform, or maybe simply to the destruction of the company.
“Strategic industry” does not help.
EKAT
EKAT - Skolkovo resident since 2014, the company's founder, Alexander Makarov. The latest news that I found about the state of the criminal case from 10.2018 .
The company is engaged in thermocatalytic gas cleaning systems, develop, produce and supply them to end users.
Slide open presentation from www.slideshare.net
As far as I understand from the description of their technology, the main innovation is the use of foams for the production of catalysts. The production technology of such catalysts (perhaps from a different composition for different catalytic reactions) can be truly unique and innovative.
At the beginning of the company's life, a rather paradoxical charge was brought against the owner. A few years after the round of investments from the state fund, the company's valuation fell and the fund offered to buy out 75% of the company's shares to the founder for 6 million rubles. The investigation considered all losses in the value of shares to be embezzlement of state funds, which would create an eerie precedent, provided that most startups simply fail. In other words, by agreeing to an investment from a state fund, investigators can be expected if one has allowed a lower valuation of the company.
As you see, the company was noticeably lower than any reasonable “radar”, i.e. it was a very small business.
“Below the radar” does not help.
Baring Vostok
It seems that all the “affairs of innovators” will unite the connection with state contracts. But it is not.
Investment funds are another “front” of the innovation industry, but they are inextricably linked with technological development and innovation.
The Baring Vostok Foundation worked with companies in Russia and the CIS.
The qualifications and efficiency of management characterize the list of companies in which they invested: Yandex (35.7% of shares in 2000, which allowed them to earn $ 4 billion), Ozon.ru, CTC Media, 1C, Avito.ru, Tinkoff.ru, Gett, Tasteville, 2GIS.
After the merger of the Vostochny banks (which was owned by Baring Vostok) and Uniastrum, the management of Baring Vostok appealed to the London Arbitration Court because of the withdrawal of assets from Uniastrum bank for 17.5 billion. before the merger of the new director of the united bank “Vostochny”. And he, in turn, appealed to the investigative committee.
Michael Calvey is under house arrest.
In detention center:
Vahan Abgaryan - partner of Baring Vostok
Philip Delpal - Partner of Baring Vostok
Ivan Zyuzin - Investment Director, Baring Vostok
Alexey Kordichev - Former Head of Vostochny Bank Alexey Kordichev
Maxim Vladimirov - CEO of the First Collection Bureau
The problem of interpretation in the framework of the criminal code is that the structure of a criminal group may include arbitrary people; it does not matter what formal position the employee had in the company, and whether he was an employee or shareholder at all.
I have no idea where now the new generation companies will be able to receive private investments of the second or third round for scaling and business development. After this high-profile case, one does not have to hope for the systematic work of a comparable private investment fund, which means that it will be necessary to attract more and more public funds (see the logic of the investigation in the case of EKAT).
“We do not deal with the state” - does not work.
Swift Telematics
I know personally the history of this company, from which WavIoT was subsequently separated. He is well acquainted with Evgeny Akhmadishin, who was the co-founder of the company and the technical director in the initial stage of development of “Stryzh”.
Sources of information about the company in Wikipedia .
Methods of receiving a signal in the radio have long been well studied, everything is done close to optimality. But at a certain point in time there were 3 factors that allowed to create something new in this industry:
- the accuracy of quartz oscillators gradually increased and increased, making it possible to increase the duration of signal coherence;
- the power of the emitters (namely, power, and not energy per bit of information) is so limited by state laws that there were problems with signal transmission over distances of more than 100 meters for existing radio protocols;
- there was a market for IoT devices.
In "Strizh" developed a technology for receiving and processing signals, in which 1 bit of information could be transmitted up to 100ms. The probability of receiving a bit of information is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio, in the numerator of which is the signal energy (or power per band, which is equivalent). By improving the quartz oscillators, it was possible to narrow the transmission band under the previous limitation on the signal power, extending the coherence duration of the radio signal.
In addition, the signal processing bandwidth due to the use of special calculators and the original processing method was about 1 MHz. One receiver made it possible to receive signals from thousands and tens of thousands of sensors (it depended on the transmission intensity, but here it was even better than in LoRa because of the separation in frequency). Low sensor consumption made it possible to create sufficiently compact devices that have been operating for years from autonomous power sources. The image is an example of a water sensor.
In general, this is a great example of an innovative company that could be created in Russia. Here it is possible to find qualifications in the field of radio and mathematics, and this qualification was absolutely necessary to create a competitive technology. Personally, I was also amazed that, in addition to creating the technology, they were able to make a grocery solution, which included everything from direct sales by the housing manager to the front-end client applications.
Then the company was divided into 3 businesses (Swift Telematics, WavIoT, NWave), I can not imagine how things are going for each of them, but as far as I heard, sales for all are growing and reaching billions in rubles in one of the companies . NWave does business successfully and attracts investments based in London.
In the meantime, the investigation opened a case because of parking sensors for Moscow parking lots, which were designed and manufactured in Strizhe. The company received a contract from FSUE FSO Sveko, which in turn participated in the state contract. The investigation formulated the criminal community, which included the technical director and co-founder of Strizh, Yevgeny Akhmadishin.
Today, Yevgeny Akhmadishin is in the SIZO for more than 1.5 years, losing everything he built.
“Being a technical director” and “not executing a state contract” does not help.
Novit PRO
The image is taken from a great story about what the company does.
The company develops 3D models necessary for the repair of ships. This is a huge job, which includes many methods that allow you to restore the model from the design documentation and the actual measurements of the object. In addition, one of the company's products was a mobile repair support center with elements of virtual reality.
In general, 3D modeling, simulators for the preparation of repair crews, repair planning - this is all a modern approach to the effective maintenance of complex and large-scale technical systems like sea vessels and submarines.
Obviously, the company indirectly worked with government money.
As part of the case of embezzlement in the construction of the submarine "Varshavyanka", the director and owner of the company Valery Pshenichny was detained. After three weeks spent in the SIZO, the entrepreneur seems to have been tortured and killed. The official investigation asserts about suicide, the experts of the Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination (St. Petersburg State Budgetary Health Institution BSME) explicitly exclude this version .
“How you will repair your submarines” doesn’t work either.
Risks higher
It seems that innovation should increase the publicity of the company and in some sense guarantee protection against ill-founded criminal charges. But I have the impression that this works completely in the opposite direction - more publicity attracts more attention of investigators. In addition, perhaps, more noise around the criminal case somehow helps in promoting in the hierarchy of the department, “inflating” the matter is not money, so fame.
Also mention
Dauria Aerospace - a private space company , the founder Mikhail Kokorich is not in the SIZO, the company actually ceased its activities. According to him, the creation of a company in Russia was his biggest mistake in life .
Dodo founder pizza was called in for questioning due to suspicion of drug trafficking. Exclusively commercial company. I want to think that someone just took the Breaking Bad TV show too seriously. But on that day, when I read this news, I seriously worried if we would lose their excellent pizzas.
Conclusion
If you start an innovative business in Russia or just take a significant part in it in any capacity, you risk being in prison even more than in the case of a business that does not have signs of innovativeness. The risks of product problems after release / sale are higher. The consequence will be easier to manipulate the concepts of the value of the company and its products, the amount of damage will always be “very large”. Those. You will have a unique offer on the market, but its price will be “clearly overpriced”.
And yet, in dealing with the state, do not even let the thought “it is necessary for them themselves”:
- The Swift Telematics sensors were cut off by road services when asphalt was repacked after a couple of years, almost all
- Interior Ministry refused to accept the delivery of computers in the case of "T-platform"
We often deal with companies creating biometric solutions. This industry in Russia is now just a driver for educating new applied specialists in computer vision and deep learning. But I am almost certain that all the equipment that can help catch criminals or better control the state border will not be properly maintained or will not be included in information systems. What will result in criminal cases.
I think you can dig up a lot of blatant examples when the creators of unique technologies or products were very mistaken about the fact that someone is actually planning to use all these innovations, to support solutions that work within the framework of state funding. But the real motive of the organizers turned out to be in the use of funds, and not in the creation of new working solutions.
It seems that I focus too much on state contracts. But, in fact, a huge amount of new technologies is locked in to state regulation and financing to some extent: smart city, biometrics, ecology, automatic car control, communications (telecom operators, the Internet), military technologies, any drones. And in our country, you will also come across companies owned by the state: industrial and agricultural companies, banks of a noticeable size.
So take care of yourself.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/451898/
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