Translated material
How a native of Russia created an application for 600 million users, fighting for freedom on the Internet
The entire world press writes about David Gorodyansky. He is called one of the most promising CEOs in the world. Just think: the application he created is used by 600 million people worldwide, in more than 200 countries. In early September, Gorodyansky's company AnchorFree closed the largest deal in its history, raising $295 million in a new funding round. In total, it managed to raise $358 million from investors, which is more than any of its competitors. David fights for internet freedom and privacy. It provides access to blocked resources such as Telegram. And David was born, but in fact Dmitry, in Moscow, and only now he lives in Palo Alto. But in Russia almost nothing is said about him. But we will fix it. And we'll show you everything.
Reference. David Gorodyansky was born in Moscow. When David was nine years old, his parents emigrated to the United States, settling in Palo Alto, California. At the age of 20, he began to engage in entrepreneurship. In 2005, together with Evgeny Malobrodsky, he founded the AnchorFree company. AnchorFree has created a free Hotspot Shield program that provides secure data transmission , protected from eavesdropping. Hotspot Shield is now one of the 50 most popular apps on the App Store, with more than 600 million users worldwide.
"I don't want to waste my youth on nonsense"
- A 24-year-old guy is driving an old typewriter, in his hands is a check for $ 6 million, which he obtained to finance his company. Tell this story. How did you manage to raise [the company], what was it?
Actually, I was 23 years old. We started our AnchorFree company and the idea was that we wanted to create something that would impact a billion people. We didn't know how we were going to do it, we had no idea. We were students who constantly worked from different cafes, used Wi-Fi, understood that Wi-Fi was unprotected. We wanted to make Wi-Fi secure and free.
Now wifi is free everywhere. Then, in 2005-2006, Wi-Fi was paid almost everywhere. We had no money, we bought a bunch of Wi-Fi antennas with a credit card, agreed with a bunch of restaurants, various businesses in Palo Alto, San Francisco to put antennas on their roofs and make free Wi-Fi.
Then we realized that in order to develop [the business] further, we need funding. We developed the Hotspot Shield app and it has become quite popular. We thought that we didn’t really need to build these Wi-Fi networks, not very scalable, we just focused on the application and just went to communicate with different investors.
We were 23 years old, we had no idea what we were doing. The investors who believed in us at the beginning were Esther Dyson, who is on the board of directors of Yandex, and Bert Roberts, who is the former CEO of MCI, was on the board of directors of Telephonica and other companies.
You say "we". Who are we?
— Me and my co-founder Zhenya.
- Sorry, of course, but not every person comes up with the idea to make a billion people happy.
— I was born in Moscow, grew up in Moscow. We moved here to California when I was nine years old, but every year I returned to Moscow to my grandmother. My grandmother was principled and ideological. And when grandfather was alive (he is a war veteran), there was always a feeling that something important for the world should be done, that there was no need to waste time on nonsense. Then I met Muhammad Yunus at the institute, who received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for lifting 100 million people out of poverty.
And different people - my grandmother, grandfather, Muhammad Yunus - formed in me the idea that I want to spend my youth not on nonsense, but I want to do what is big, what is important. And to this day, when I meet young entrepreneurs, my first question when they talk about their business plan is: “Why are you doing this?”
And if the answer is: “[we do] what is really important for the world, what can solve the problem of billions of people,” then that’s cool. And maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but at least it's clear why. [And it happens that] you look and think: this person will spend 5-10 years of his life (rather, 10 or more) on something that is not important to anyone. And the chances of success are the same as if he did what is really important.
But let's fast-forward 15 years to the car you were in. That is, you started making towers for Wi-Fi with your own money.
— We first developed Hotspot Shield as an application to protect our Wi-Fi networks. We understood: why install Wi-Fi points ourselves, if we can protect Wi-Fi points? And it will be much larger and more useful. With this idea, we began to go to investors. We went to venture funds, they said: guys, you have nothing, just an idea. Esther Dyson and Burt Roberts agreed.
How did you meet Esther?
- Through Bert, and I also met him through acquaintances. He was, as it were, the first investor, he flew to us on his private jet. We then had an office, maybe you read, Forbes, it seems, wrote. We painted the walls ourselves...
- Yellow...
Yes, yellow. [We] had a wolf. There was one employee, he had a real wolf, not a dog. This is the size (shows). Grey.
Did he live at home?
- At home, but he came to us, ran around the office. He was quite scary, but actually kind... And then Bert arrives, his company has a capitalization of $25 billion, 80,000 employees. [Flies in] in his private jet, meets with us, in our barn that we've painted, with the wolf. I was nervous that he would get scared and not invest. But he liked us, he invested. Many years have passed, we are still close friends with him and Esther. We then received $6 million from them and from their acquaintances. I then had a very old car - a Pontiac (when it rained, my roof leaked). I was driving from the lawyers with a check for $6 million to Silicon Valley Bank to deposit this check. It was raining, it was dripping on me through the roof, and I was thinking how not to get those $6 million wet. That is, as if the check did not get wet. Such a cool story.
- In fact, a story that romanticizes Silicon Valley and everything related to entrepreneurship, because the thing turned out.
- Yes Yes. In fact, I think a lot of people romanticize entrepreneurship. People think: oh cool, dudes made YouTube, sold for a billion and a half in two years, great, I can too. They don't understand what it is. In fact, it is very difficult: out of nothing you have to make something. Someone is just lucky, but there are less than 1%. Most is a lot of hard work, and you have to believe so much that you have to put the rest of your life kind of in the background.
- What did you miss? You received $6 million and what did you start doing?
“We got $6 million, made an app, started hiring people, made a bunch of mistakes.
How to inadvertently help the "Arab Spring"
“Having received this $6 million and developing protection for Wi-Fi, we understood that this is not the idea that will solve the problem of a billion people.
- Why?
“Because our users were mostly students in California who wanted to protect their Wi-Fi at the institute.
Who did they want to protect from? Who needed them?
- Basically. Currently, 11 million Americans a year lose their personal data due to Wi-Fi hacking. How it works? You go to Starbucks or the airport, and there is some hacker on the network who pretends to be San Francisco aeroport Wi-Fi. Or there Starbucks [Wi-Fi]. You think you're connected to the Starbucks network or the airport, but in fact you're connected to his computer and he sees everything you do, your passwords. If you use Hotspot Shield, then, of course, it's all encrypted. And he doesn't see anything.
- How can I understand that I'm not connected to San Francisco Wi-Fi?
“You can't. If you use Hotspot Shield, it won't matter to you.
One evening we left the office for home. At that time, our users were mostly here in America. And in the morning they came and saw a million new users from Egypt on our servers. We didn't know where they came from or what they were. It turned out that Egypt blocked access to social networks, to Facebook and others. And the users in Egypt realized on their own, without us, that they can use our application to freely access Facebook, Twitter and so on.
We looked at it and thought, “Oh! This is very cool. We can give people not only secure access, but we can also give freedom of access.” We thought this was the billion-dollar idea we needed. And over the last, probably 10 years, in every event where information was blocked, or there were some security vulnerabilities, or events related to the anonymity, privacy of users (user data was collected by companies or someone else), we had a leap users. When there was a recent coup in Turkey, two million downloaded our app in the first two hours. Simply because Twitter and YouTube have been blocked.
How will they know about it?
- Somehow. We often find out about this when the news is not yet written. We suddenly see that in some country 100 thousand users have downloaded our application in an hour - something is happening. Or blocked, or something related to security and privacy. For example, in the United States in March 2017, the government said that all ISPs could collect and sell user data in the same way as Google and Facebook. Previously, they did not have the right to do so. That is, Google and Facebook collected data and sold it, and some Comcast, other Internet providers until 2017 did not have the right to do so. Since March 2017, they have been entitled to this, and when this happened, we had a huge surge of precisely users in the US who wanted to protect their data. There was a question not of access to information, but a question of secure access. When net neutrality got canceled here a couple of months ago...
- What it is?
— There was a law that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against different content. That is, let's say, some Internet provider cannot say: well, there is Netflix, it has a lot of videos, we will make it slower now if they don't pay us.
That is, the speed should still be the same.
- Identical. This law has now been repealed. In December 2017.
- For what purpose?
“They believe that the government should not regulate this. Let the market correct itself. And we thought: if the government cannot regulate this, then we can give people a solution in terms of technology, product, so that the Internet remains free and equal. People who use Hotspot Shield have the same access everywhere, because the ISP does not see where the person is going. Next, we developed our own VPN technology, which greatly increases the speed of a VPN, because usually VPNs slow down the speed.
600 million users worldwide
- Tell me, how many users do you have now?
We have been downloaded by 600 million people worldwide.
It's hard to imagine this figure. 600 million people. How much is this? Is this the size of Twitter?
- Don't know. How many people use Twitter? Probably something like this. If you look at the AppStore in the US, Facebook is in eighth place, SnapChat is in ninth place, we are somewhere among the 25 most popular applications. We are close to Twitter, sometimes they are in front of us, sometimes we are in front of them. But what's interesting is that if you look at this list in the App Store, we are the only application that protects user data. Of the first three companies to reach a billion users on the Internet, the first was Yahoo!, then Google, and then Facebook. And the business of all these three companies is the sale of our data. I think that the next company to reach a billion on the Internet will be a company that protects our data. And I hope that we will be such a company.
— Tell me, do these users pay you? What is your business model?
We have a freemium business model. We are downloaded by a million people, 3% of them pay us, and 97% use us for free. But this 3% covers all costs and gives us a profit. Our company is profitable.
- What are they paying for?
“They pay for various additional features, for faster speed, the ability to connect to different countries. If, for example, I want to listen to Russian rock on VKontakte, but it doesn’t work for me in the USA, then I connect to Russia and listen to it.
“He doesn’t just work. It does not work because it is considered pirated.
- I guess I do not know. But he was inaccessible, but became available. Or the Japanese watch sumo, the Indians watch cricket in India. Then we have blocks, we block phishing, that is, websites that want to steal your data. You receive an email from your bank, but in fact it is not your bank. This is a hacker who wants to get through to your data. We detect it and block it. It's also a paid thing.
We have two key business models, two key ways to make money. [First] are applications that are downloaded by 250,000 people a day. And the second is the SDK (software development kit), into which companies integrate their applications. That is, any application that wants to give access to secure Wi-Fi, protect users' privacy, give free access to their application, or defend net neutrality (say, Youtube, if they don't want to be slowed down), can embed us, and we drive their traffic through our servers and make it completely invisible to anyone who tries to either block it or slow it down. The first companies to integrate our technologies into their applications are mainly security companies. I would say 60% of the world's largest security companies have built our technology. We are built in by McAfee, Kaspersky, Telephonica is the same. Not to protect data, which they don't want, but to protect Wi-Fi.
- Between six million dollars and the next round of investments, one of the largest banks, Goldman Sachs, came to you. How did it happen?
“Before Goldman Sachs came to us, we were running out of our six million and needed another five million. It was 2008.
— Great time to look for money.
It was difficult to raise this money. But in the end, we got those five million from the same investors that gave us the previous six. It was insanely difficult. And we learned a lesson: it's not worth living on investors' money, but it's worth being profitable.
The first thing we did was fired all the people in sales (sales department. - The Bell). We had a bunch of sales people who didn't sell anything. We fired everyone, the whole department.
- Irregular move.
- Focused on engineers. And our engineers began to build a product that itself began to be sold to users, without any sellers. We cut our costs significantly by laying off all people in sales and leaving only engineers.
There were different consultants, people who wanted us to pay them for advice, a bunch of useless people, and I took them all out. I always say to entrepreneurs: if someone wants to give you advice, he should invest in your company.
It was difficult, but we made it through. We got five million, began to pay off, and when Goldman Sachs came to us in 2012, we were profitable and didn’t look for money much. We thought that if we have an IPO in the future, then they are a great partner for this. We took $52 million, and, accordingly, the company's total capitalization at that time was $63 million. We didn't spend much.
— How are you doing? Are you two founders? Or do you have employee options?
- We have every person, even the secretary, there are shares. From the very beginning, we wanted everyone to feel that this is their company. Not our company, but their company.
Is the company still private?
Yes, still private.
— And how can you estimate the value of such a company?
We don't want to disclose it yet. I think we will release this data at some point, both in terms of revenue and company valuation.
- With income, it’s clear: this is a mathematical amount. If you don't want to [disclose], I can perfectly understand. But is there any internal cost estimate? Billion? Five? One hundred?
We estimate somewhere between $300 million and $500 million.
“Not bad for the guys who started with the yellow room and the wolf.
“Blocking social networks is against the interests of Russia”
— You and I are both from a country (I'm more so than you, although you say you travel often) that has now turned heavily towards restricting the Internet. In Russia, at least two large networks are blocked with varying degrees of success - these are LinkedIn and Telegram. What do you think? Why is Russia doing this and how far-sighted is it?
— I think it is short-sighted. Very often, governments of different countries do incomprehensible things that are actually against their interests in the long run.
- How?
- Long-term blocking of LinkedIn and Telegram is not in the interests of Russia, but against the interests of Russia. In Russia, as it were, an educated European society, people want free access to information. The Internet in Russia has [always] been free, nothing particularly popular has been blocked.
During the blocking of Telegram, we first saw a surge in Russia. Thousands of people started downloading us to get access to Telegram. An interesting story about this. [When Telegram was blocked] I go into the office, go to the engineers, and ask: what are you doing? Yes, they say, we are trying to fight with Russia in order to unblock Telegram. “Guys,” I say, “you are not fighting Russia, you are fighting for Russia. When you unblock Telegram, you give Russians free access to Telegram.” For me, this is not political, it does not apply to politics. There are things that are just, and there are [things that] are unjust. For me, free access to information is a thing that is fair and right.
- I completely agree.
— We saw a similar thing in Ukraine. They blocked Yandex, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, we also saw a surge there.
Especially for those who use Yandex Maps. In my opinion, every taxi driver there now uses our application to get access to Yandex Maps. Short term, very obscure solution. For what?
- If you followed this story, then the [Russian] authorities did not succeed in blocking Telegram. Do you think it is possible in the long run that a private company beats the state system on a long trend?
- I think so, because technology is developing faster than any other systems. But I think that here it is possible to work on this task from several directions. One is technological. Another, probably, is a dialogue with the government. I think that there are enough people in the Russian government who will say that it is not in our interests, we will stop blocking. Whatsapp is blocked here in Brazil. For the same reason [as Telegram].
- Access keys?
- It is encrypted, there is no access. And here in the States there is a constant debate about data encryption. Can I allow different applications to encrypt data? In fact, this is a rather funny conversation, it is about nothing. If we do not encrypt the data, then your banking application or any Pay Pal will be unencrypted, which means that the money of all people will be stolen in two days.
So there is no real possibility that encryption of different financial applications will not be possible. All financial applications, all banks will always be encrypted. Or we say that we will not encrypt anything, and then the hackers will steal all the money of all the people and the banks will go bankrupt, and that's it.
- As far as I understand, the dispute is not about whether to encrypt or not to encrypt, but to hand over some encryption keys (there are many memes about these metal keys on a ring) to the government.
- This is impossible. If you encrypt correctly, you don't have those keys. And WhatsApp tried to explain this to Brazil, and it seems to me that Telegram tried to explain to Russia. In our case, we released a transparency report in December 2017, an official document where we published how many times we were asked by various governments to provide user data. About 180 times. And every time our answer was simple: guys, we want to help you, but we don't have this data. Due to the fact that they are not there, we have nothing to talk about, that's all. Google, unlike us, also receives constant requests from governments of different countries for user data, and Twitter, and Facebook, and that's it. Unlike us, they have this data.
Accordingly, they either hand them over, or do not want to hand them over and begin to sue. We believe that if we can't protect users from themselves, then we can't protect them from anyone. Therefore, the best way to protect user data on the Internet is simply not to collect it. If you don't have them, you can't give them to anyone.
Why are Google and Facebook dangerous?
- Where is the line (and is there one) when companies should share data with the government and when they should not?
“If Google has the data, then their people can decide what to share and what not to share. Another thing is what happens with WhatsApp, Telegram, with us - with people who simply do not have this data.
- Do I understand correctly that this is the position of the founders - not to collect this data?
— Absolutely.
Is this one of the points of contention between [Whatsapp co-founder] Jan Koum and [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg? Jan Koum, who left [from WhatsApp], and Zuckerberg, who believes that we need to collect and build the entire business model on this.
- Exactly. Exactly.
— Ideologically, what do you think, is it necessary to collect data or not?
- I don't think so. We surveyed our users and asked: how important is privacy on the Internet to you? Almost all users said that 70% of the time privacy is not important: we go to Facebook, share thoughts, photos. But somewhere 30% of the time it is very important and for almost everyone. That 30% is when we search the Internet for something related to our health (drugs, hospitals), or finances (banks, shopping), or our family.
- Relationship.
- Relationships, negotiations. These are the 30% that matter. So I really don't think that data should be collected or data should not be collected. I think we should give people this control over the data. It should not be with hackers, not with governments and not with corporations like Facebook, but with people. There should be some very simple tool so that a person can press a button and say: here I do not want my data to be collected.
There is now the largest online privacy-related legislation the world has ever seen. It was released by the European Union. There is no such law in the States yet, and nowhere else in the world yet, but Google, Facebook, all companies operating in Europe must follow it.
The law is quite simple. If you collect user data, you should tell them directly about it, and not hide it somewhere. The user either agrees or disagrees. If he did not agree, you must respect his decision. And if he agreed, you should give him a very easy way to change his mind. And if he changes his mind, you will have to erase all the collected data.
- America, oddly enough, is a country that often initiates regulation for others, but itself implements such things last. How do you think it works in America?
- There are many different interests in America, and they are lobbied in the government in different ways. Now Zuckerberg went to Washington ...
- I lobbied there.
“They bought everyone in town, I think. The questions they were asked... basically the whole press took it like this: Congress is people who don't understand how the internet works.
- Old farts!
- And there is a young one who explains to them how it works. I think it's a lobbied thing that the press reacted like that. In fact, the questions were (I watched this interview carefully) are quite good. Many things he clearly knew (for example, "Do you collect cookies on other sites?"), but he specifically said: "I don't know, my team will come back to you later."
I think it's good that there is interest in this topic. One thing that no one talks about to the press is that Facebook is not only selling our data, but also buying it. That's what's scary. You give some of your data to Facebook - good. But there are other things that you search on Google or do something that you never gave them. They buy them and combine them with your profile. And this buying of data is no less scary than selling data. They collect more and more information, even information that you never gave them.
What are they doing with our data?
- They process them in order to understand what kind of advertising to deliver to us. These things are unpleasant and dangerous.
When will people realize how important this is?
I think they already understand. What are the most popular apps in the App Store? These are mainly social networks and games. And among the social networks and games in the top 50, only our application protects users. This was not the case two years ago. Two years ago, 80% of our users were in other countries. Now 50% of our users are in the US. In fact, free access to information and data protection are not two different things, they are one thing.
“There are the most sincere people in the world ...”
- What do you think, this story is about data - it’s clear with advertising, it’s clear with health, it’s clear with leaks. What about politics? Can data really influence the mindset of people, change the outcome of their vote, and ultimately influence the formation of the political picture in the country?
– I really love Russian rock. I like the rock musician Bashlachev, he has this song: “Don’t build, you just build, if you don’t know how to build, sing. And so - if you don’t eat, then don’t spit. ”
When I hear about politics, I think: guys, just build, do something good. Create projects that help people. And they sit, chat, separate, share something and do nothing, but you can do a lot of things. As I said at the beginning, the entrepreneur does not represent the world as it is, but as it should be. I would like more people in Russia to think about how to build, and not how to breed demagogy.
– An interesting moment. I talked about you with my friends. They said, keep in mind, he is a fan of Putin. He is such a fan of Russia that… Are you really a fan of Putin?
– I don’t know Putin, I don’t have an opinion about Putin. For me, Russia is not the government, it's the people. I am a fan of people in Russia. It's easy to judge a country by their governments - here in the States, many people judge a country by its government and Russia by its government. I judge the country more by its people.
Russia has the most sincere people I know, and that's why I love Russia. I was born in Moscow, raised in California, I love America, I love California. For me, this is normal. It's not normal when people come from Russia and don't like their country, it's very strange. I have many friends from India. There is unrealistic corruption, there are unrealistic problems with clean drinking water and others that have not been in Russia for a hundred years. But I have never met Indians who hate their country, I have never met Frenchmen who hate France. I constantly meet Russians who don't like Russia and I don't get it. The point is not the government, the point is the country. There are a lot of problems in every country, including Russia.
- And in America.
- Yes. What is a country for you? For me, Russia is Moscow, where I was born, I have many friends and relatives in Russia. For me, Russia is the people, not the government.
- The feeling that Russia has become isolated from the whole world, do you fix it lately?
- Yes, it does, I guess. We don't have an office in Moscow, I don't feel it myself, but it certainly affects many people. I see that people have become more...
- Wary.
- Be wary of Russia. At the same time, I did not notice that they began to treat the Russians badly. Relationships are good on a human level.
“In the US, it’s harder for a president to plant a tree in his own country than it is to bomb another country”
– I get the impression that you are looking at what is happening in Russia through the eyes of a tourist.
- I see a lot of problems in Russia, as I see here too, I do not idealize. I was invited to the US Supreme Court in 2012, where I met and spent time with the judges, and they said something that I really believed. Why is America for all the conflicts and problems that have been in the country, from slavery to the civil rights movement and various wars in Iraq, Vietnam and so on, why has the country remained united, strong?
Their opinion was this. Even if people in the country lost faith in their government, they always believed in the judiciary, in an independent judiciary. There were a lot of moments when they hated the president, somebody else, but they always believed that there is an independent law, an independent judiciary. I really believed in it, it seems to me that it is so. I would like to see independent courts in Russia.
Now there was a good example of the independence of the American judiciary. Trump made a law that people from seven Muslim countries cannot enter the US, and some judge in a village in Hawaii took it and overturned it. Just canceled the law of the president. From some small town in Hawaii. And it's cool.
The problem in America is such - I will now turn to Russia - that the president, in order to do something inside the country, needs to reckon with the court and the congress. It's difficult. And in foreign policy, he does not need to reckon with anyone. I exaggerate, but it is more difficult for the US President to plant a tree in San Francisco - this will be canceled by the governor, the mayor, a bunch of committees of some kind ...
- Local government. Come and dig up this tree...
- Yes. It is harder to plant a tree in your own country than to bomb another country. It's unrealistic. And I wish the Supreme Court could control foreign policy just as it controls domestic policy. And there would be a balance.
And in terms of Russia. I would like people to trust the judicial system. Whatever government there is, so that there is a law so that it works both within the country and for foreign policy too. My friends in Russia, some support the current government, some do not, but no one believes in the law that the law will protect them. Even those who are very supportive of the government do not believe that the court will protect them.
- This, unfortunately, is so. It is all the more difficult to imagine that a small district court ... in Tver ...
- In Tver, yes.
- Or in the Krasnodar Territory he will make a decision that is not agreed with the top.
"Grown leather" and business in the Russian and Mexican outback
- Listen, let's talk about other projects that you invest in.
“I want to invest in things that have the potential to impact a billion people, to solve a real problem. I don't want to invest in an iPhone game or stuff that doesn't matter. My most popular example of a junk company is Zynga, which went public, was very successful, but then went downhill. She sold virtual farms - you could buy a virtual goat or cow. Profitable or unprofitable, they do such crap unimportant!
I invest in things if I think they have the potential to change the world. Maybe they will be successful. Maybe they won't succeed. But there is potential.
Modern Meadow is a company that realized that nature is heavily polluted by cows.
- It is a fact.
“And they decided to make artificial meat and artificial leather. They take the stepsels of the stem cells of the cow without killing it, just taking the cells. In their laboratory they grow skin or meat, like in a garden.
- Separately?
- Separately. They grow it, and then print it on a 3D printer and get meat or skin.
– Now there was a piece of science fiction we have on the air.
- Meat is a long-term thing, and the skin is their real business, which brings in money. They make artificial leather - that is, it is not artificial, but real, only grown.
This is real leather, not leatherette. Just don't kill cows, raise cows, pollute the environment.
Other companies I have invested in where I am more embedded are GlobeIn.
– GlobeIn.
“Their mission is to connect a billion people to the global economy.
- Like this?
– This is a marketplace on the Internet where people subscribe, the subscription costs $50 per month.
- A lot.
- A lot, but every month you get a box of things from developing countries - these things are unique, you can’t buy such things in a store. And people's stories. who do these things. People in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia produce these things and thanks to GlobeIn they have a steady income. It's not that you bought a scarf and that's it, it [income] is permanent, because it's a subscription. In Mexico, there really are cities where people used to trade in the markets or work somewhere, and now they earn 2-3 times more and sell on GlobeIn.
Can a person from any country join?
- From any country.
- This idea is like a soft redistribution of income from the super-rich, because $ 50 a month is decent. One way or another, $600 a year is redistributed to those for whom $600 is a lot. In Afghanistan, in a mountain village, this is very, very much.
- Certainly. We want to give billions of people access to the global economy to participate in it. Another company I have invested in is Pager. They are in New York. This is Uber for doctors.
- Interesting.
- In my opinion, there is such a thing in Moscow too. We in the US do not have the opportunity to call a doctor at home, simply not. Pager is an opportunity to call a doctor at home.
- This application - you pressed the button, and the doctor came to you in an hour. If there is insurance, then it's free, if not, then $ 100 per visit.
It's super cheap by local standards.
- I just thought that there are wrong things that in 10 years should disappear. If your child gets sick and you have to go to the clinic and sit there for 2 hours in line while they sneeze and cough on him, this should go away. The ability to call a doctor at home is a must.
“Probably the last thing I wanted to talk about. Since you like to look ahead, tell us how you see the future of the Internet.
“I see two big new trends. First, 5 billion new users will come online from Africa and Latin America. While they do not have access to the Internet, but it will appear. It may not be an expensive iPhone, but it will be a smartphone, there will be a cheap android phone, but it will be. Again in India. Those 5 billion will walk away from their old phones without internet. They will see the Internet for the first time in their lives, get into a social network, start reading news, watching information. It will be incredibly cool, it will completely change everything.
– Can it give the world a new social network, new products?
- I hope so. Initially, when the Internet started, there was an idea that there are a bunch of small companies and ordinary people who have a voice and can compete with the giants. And over the past 10 years, the giants - Amazon, Google - have taken control of the Internet and over people's data. And this is a control that is very difficult for users to get back.
And I hope that there will be new projects that will democratize the Internet, so that it is the way it is at its core, and not that five companies have become everything.
This is one thing. The other thing is devices connected to the Internet – from smart doors to smart windows, smart refrigerators.
- Toothbrush.
– 25 billion new devices will be connected to the Internet in the next few years. 25 billion. The mattress you sleep on can send signals to your doctor about how well you slept. The refrigerator can send a signal to the store that the milk is over.
– Is it possible to send a signal to the refrigerator that a lock needs to be hung on it?
- Can! ( Laughs ) It gives opportunities, there will be a lot of new innovations, a lot of new ideas. But again, this creates opportunities for hackers, for corporations. The data will be a thousand times larger. There is a crazy statistic that 90% of the data that has been collected about us on the Internet has been collected in the last 2-3 years. What will happen in the next 2-3 years, when there will be 25 billion new devices and 5 billion new users - this data will be many times more. And protecting this data is a very important task.
“My impression is that there are a few ideologically powerful people in this area who move things forward for altruistic reasons to a large extent. This is true?
- This is true. There are people who want first of all to change the world, to accept the world not as it is, but as you think it should be.
David, thank you for this inspiring conversation. It seems to me that you fully relate to these people.
- Thank you.
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