“Russian norms!” — the best of 2018

The New Year holidays are just beginning - it's time to see (or read) what you didn't manage to do last year. We have selected for you the best releases of the video project "Russian Norms!" in the past year - from aspiring restaurateur Evgeny Chichvarkin and the hope of world fintech Nikolai Storonsky to the founder of the Grabr service and a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list Daria Rebenok.

“Every three years, a half-life of a Russian occurs in a person”

Evgeny Chichvarkin in the spring of 2018 opened his first Hide restaurant in London , and already in October the restaurant received a Michelin star. Chichvarkin met with Elizaveta Osetinskaya before the opening of the restaurant and told her how the companies he created are changing the restaurant and wine business in central London, why he will never return to Russia and why he expects a sharp drop in Russian incomes in the next year and a half. They even argued about the latter, and time is running out - if by the end of 2019 the incomes of Russians do not fall by a quarter, Chichvarkin owes us dinner at his London restaurant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz9CJwL5C48&t=2121s

“It doesn't matter where I'm from. Even if it came from Mars

One of the main hopes of the global fintech, the Revolut payment service by Nikolai Storonsky and his partners, almost entered Russia this year - but at the last moment the launch was postponed . But even without this, Revolut is doing fine - in the spring the company closed a new investment round, having received $250 million and a $1.7 billion valuation, and Storonsky, with a fortune of $500 million, can now claim a place on the Russian Forbes list. In "Russian norms!" he told the story of the hottest Russian fintech startup in the first person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srX8NrtZg7k

“Blocking social networks is against the interests of Russia”

secure Wi-Fi service AnchorFree David Gorodyansky's is not as well-known as Revolut, but this year it attracted more investments - $ 295 million in the latest round. The application created by Gorodyansky is used by 600 million people in more than 200 countries, and its main task is to fight for freedom on the Internet and access to blocked resources, such as Telegram. And it all started with a small office in which a tame wolf lived, and the first check for $ 6 million, which Gorodyansky barely drove to the bank in an old car with a leaky roof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJnm9A6ICFw&t=2778s

“In another league, we are met by very big players”

QIWI co-founder Boris Kim ended up in finance by accident: a biochemist with his first education became a banker because he knew English, and his friends really needed money to develop their business. In 2013, QIWI held an IPO on NASDAQ, turning into a $3 billion business. But the happiness was short-lived: after the annexation of Crimea, the company's capitalization fell four times. What is QIWI going to do next? Kim is confident that the future belongs to neobanking and millennials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAPl6gKNbWk

“We dressed up in Super Mario costumes and so attracted attention”

At 28, Daria Rebenok has raised $14 million — about half a million dollars a year, counting from infancy. The Grabr project, which is being implemented by Daria and her husband Artem, has been invested by the best and most famous investors, such as the funds of top managers of Facebook, Uber, Yelp and Peter Thiel. In 2018, Daria managed to enter the Forbes list of entrepreneurs under 30 who are changing the world for the better. In "Russian norms!" The child told how to move to the USA, get the first $100 thousand for a startup and create a business worthy of the Forbes list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htv034_bleo

“Unscheduled meetings are the magic of Silicon Valley”

A native of Yerevan, the founder of ABBYY David Yan has long been one of the most successful Russian entrepreneurs in the West. Its electronic dictionaries have been used all over the world for decades, and ABBYY FineReader is installed on every second scanner. Now Yang is engaged in artificial intelligence, has already founded a dozen companies in this area - and one of them truly predicts the fate of people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxTKqpxpnjg