Translated material
"Silicon Basement"
A report from the Moscow business incubator, where they are preparing the appearance of a superman
The Incube business incubator is 100 square meters on the ground floor of one of the educational buildings of the Academy of National Economy. Here, young scientists, together with crazy managers, grow their startups*. Such as "Incube", in the country ...
The Incube business incubator is 100 square meters on the ground floor of one of the educational buildings of the Academy of National Economy. Here, young scientists, together with crazy managers, grow their startups*. There are two more like Incube in the country: the Vyshka incubator and the St. Petersburg industrial park Ingria.
The largest business incubator in the world is California's Silicon Valley. We calculated: Incube is 150,000 times smaller than her. (It was explained to me that Incube could do more. But then there would simply be no one to fill it.) Such is the extent of our real backlog.
Aleksey Komissarov, an enthusiast, philanthropist and manufacturer of automotive paints in the Tver region, founded the incubator six months ago with personal money. Even the tables in the incubator are painted with auto paint.
There are a couple of dozen tables in the incubator, there are computers on them. There is a stool with a fax machine and a conference room with silicone ottomans. There is also a coffee machine and free advice from already successful entrepreneurs. They give master classes to residents almost every week. A couple of years ago, there were almost no places in the country where one could come with a project.
Techies could spend years looking for risky managers who are ready to take on the promotion of the idea. And risk managers (they are said to be even fewer than talented techies) were very far from the technological business. For example, as in the Arkhangelsk Artemov family, where brother Roman, 36, is a businessman-adventurer, and brother Artem, 29, is a development engineer. Today it is their company Si-A-Si (technology for broadcasting video in conditions of low traffic on the Internet) - one of the most successful residents of the incubator. And five years ago, while Artem Artemov was writing his program, Roman Artemov was selling timber. And "about any high-tech" did not want to hear.
Before the forest, the adventurer Artemov owned a construction company in Anapa. It was she who in 2004 built the first two mini-fountains at the resort (at the entrance to the village of Vityazevo). What provoked the fashion for these mini-fountains all over the Black Sea coast of Russia.
In 2006, Artemov was thrown into the woods. A competing company entered his plot with trees already cut down and corrected the marks on 4 thousand cubic meters. At the Department of Economic Crimes, they explained to Artemov: “If you want, we will return 500 cubic meters, the rest, I’m sorry ...” That is, they hinted at a rollback. In general, it was this event that prompted the adventurer Artemov to take a closer look at what his brother was doing. And go online. "There is no OBEP yet."
In the incubator, colleagues look at Roman Artemov as a resourceful simpleton. Dense, as one innovator told me, "in some aspects of society." So the conversation turned to United Russia.
- "United Russia" is the CPSU, a symbol of stagnation, a brake on modernization! Alexey Kostyrya, the developer of the intellectual social network ePythia, argued fervently.
“That’s not true,” Artemov Sr. disagreed. “Only by joining it, you can change something.
We also talked about the fight against corruption. We decided that the best example of this struggle is the reform of the Georgian police, when the entire personnel changed in one day.
“I don’t know,” Artyomov said. - There is another more effective way, and also Georgian. Shoot 50 traffic cops.
Nobody listens to the adventurer Artemov when he talks about political affairs. But Artemov is a brilliant manager… He recently opened an office in Malta. The brothers' technology is already being used by Kommersant, Rosbalt and Livejournal.com websites. Next year they plan to enter the European and US markets. One can only dream of such acceleration. But Artemov Sr. talks about all this for some reason without strong emotions. “But the fountains in Anapa,” he suddenly says, “it was a breakthrough!”
In general, almost all the managerial "halves" of the local startups until recently had experience only in the classic "low-tech" business. For example, twenty-five-year-old Andrei Kubonin and Ivan Protopopov left high positions in prestigious companies in order to raise the Fidesis company, professor of mechanics and mathematics at Moscow State University, Vladimir Levin. Kubonin left UniCredit, and Protopopov was cut part-time at Extra M. Some would call it "downshifting". But the talented Protopopov and Kubonin say they "didn't want to fall into corporate slavery."
They met Professor Levin through mutual friends. The scientist was looking for a partner for the commercial component of the project: they needed a business plan, a marketing strategy ... I found two at once. Now Protopopov and Kubonin explain the invention of Levin and a group of his co-authors in a language understandable to large and medium-sized businesses. Namely: a software package designed for strength analysis. With the detailed properties of a physical object, the program allows you to trace exactly how it will deform under high loads.
“This is a breakthrough* technology that will allow in many cases to solve problems that were previously only possible for a person,” explains Protopopov.
And then he tells how the Fidesis program can analyze the deformation inside the core of a nuclear reactor, the railway track at the time of the passage of the Sapsan ...
Protopopov and Kubonin are not at all like Russian managers. Because they left warm places and a career "in order to give more dedication." They stay up late with papers and don't linger on business lunches. They don't smoke at all and don't swear. For Russian offices, all this is not normal. Even outwardly, they look more like a classic “silicon” entrepreneur: a jacket, jeans, a three-day unshaven…
This summer, Mikhail Prokhorov became interested in Fidesis. To introduce the billionaire to the technology closer, the guys went to Seliger. Protopopov and Kubonin planned to "capture the breakthrough of domestic developments"...
Now Protopopov says: "In Russia, communicating with smart people is a privilege."
Fidesis and Si-A-Si of the Artemov brothers can already be called developing companies. For those who have not yet entered the market, the Greenfield Project helps in Incube. The firm was founded by three friends — IT engineer Mikhail Korneev, entrepreneur Renat Garipov and MBA Petr Tatishchev. The company has not yet made its founders rich (which is what every startup aims for) and is even barely going to zero. But she has already raised several startups. “We try to help, starting with the best colors for the company logo, ending with the search for investors,” Korneev tells me. - Of course, we are not monsters, and for us all this is also a new experience. Today we are pioneers and that is why we cheer for our protégés so passionately. We do a lot for free."
According to the idea of the founders of the Greenfield Project, an innovator can come to them only with an idea (worthy), and leave with a finished business project. Here is Alexei Kostyria. He came up with the idea in March 2010, and should “fly out” in April 2011. Although in his case, Cisco experts (co-founder of Skolkovo) often use the word “shoot”.
Kostyria is developing a geosocial network * of the future - ePythia - for owners of smartphones and tablets with built-in GPS receivers. Until April, only the beta version will be valid. But then, quite possibly, ePythia (or a similar program) will take the already classic web 2.0 to a new level.
The meaning of the service is to select the best solutions for a given task, depending on your location.
- The simplest example of using the service: you need, say, aspirin. You enter this as a task in the program, Kostyria tells me. “And it will pop up an aspirin reminder the moment you drive and walk past the pharmacy that has it. The program itself will contact the pharmacy database.
Ideally, Kostyrya sees his service in general as a platform for collective interaction. For example, user A wants coffee but cannot leave to buy it. Its task is solved by user B, moving past the coffee shop towards office A. The calculation within the service can be a cumulative rating system. For example, a person who buys coffee twice can count on a sandwich...
But a year and a half ago, Kostyria headed a construction company for the installation of ventilation and air conditioning. And that's how it all turned out.
I must say, Lesha Kostyria is an active supporter of the theory of "technological singularity". Its essence is that the constant acceleration of the technological development of civilization will lead in 2035-2040 to the emergence of a superman, a new species (for example, integrated with machines).
“Epithia is one of the small steps that brings us closer to the appearance of the neural interface,” says Lesha Kostyrya. “Today we take more and more information out of our memory and define it on external media. A smartphone is our external memory, but it needs to start “working” without the active participation of a person. We enter desires into the smartphone, and it, through millions of other devices, fulfills it. We can no longer enter parameters, but slander them. And very soon only a thought will be enough ...
Ordering coffee with the power of thought? I clarified.
- Yes, that is, no intermediaries and platforms will be needed, - explains Lesha. - Say, newspapers and websites will not be needed at all. To read your text, I will simply get into your mind with your permission and “read” your text about us directly from the original source. Your thoughts about us, feelings, suspicions...
…Thank God, until 2035 there is time to “mentally” prepare.
Glossary
A startup is a very young company that builds a business based on innovative technologies. If successful, the profit is tens and hundreds of times greater than the initial investment.
Breakthrough is a technological breakthrough.
A beta version is an online service that operates in test mode with a limited set of functions.
A geosocial network is a new type of social network that unites and coordinates the actions of users, taking into account their (changing) geographical location.