"We are called the killer Ethereum." As a programmer from Izhevsk built one of the world's main blockchain platforms

The blockchain platform of Alexander Skidanov Near Protocol was launched just a year ago, but already attracted $ 33.7 million from investors in the scale of Andreessen Horowitz and won the status of one of the dominant players in the market, “Ethereum killers”. However, the path of the Izhevsk programmer to recognize turned out to be thorny: throwing in search of a business idea, attempts to build a singularity, barbecue with investors, thousands of code pages and millions of investment spent-the history of Skidanov most resembles the HBO Silicon Valley series. In an interview with "Russian norms!" Alexander spoke about the amazing ups and downs of his career, explained what Internet 3.0 is, why you need a blockchain, how to get to Y Combinator with a dubious project and why it is more useful to remain friends with competitors. Below are the brightest quotes of our hero.

About blockchain, Internet 3.0 and Telegram

Blockchain today is a very large ecosystem. I will tell you on the example of Bitcoin. This was the first blockchain, and it is still the most expensive, the most basic, most used. We have a task: we want to transfer money between people, but do it electronically and on the planet’s scale. Imagine that we sat down and want to implement such a system. There are two fundamental things that need to be solved. The first is where information is stored, who has how much money. The second - in order for me to send the money, and no one else could send my money, there must be a system that authorizes me. But in the system, for example, a bank or a fintech service, there is one problem. It consists in the fact that there is some structure that I must trust. And this structure, firstly, itself can for some reason want me to harm me. Secondly, she can be in jurisdiction, in which she needs to sometimes cut off the opportunity to use it.

Accordingly, I want to say: let's write the system so that no one can control what is happening. This is very difficult to do. Because the database of transactions is located on some computer. Somewhere there is a hard drive on which the information is saved. And the person who put this hard drive, who is convinced that the computer is still working. That is, there will still be people who have access to data and can do something with them, conditionally, delete your account. The task of the blockchain is to solve this problem. Bitcoin says: you know, and we will make a fairly simple system in which there are thousands of computers around the world in all possible jurisdictions, and all these thousands of computers simultaneously perform the same calculations and come to the agreement that these are calculations. And the system works in such a way that no one specifically can unanimously solve whether something happened or something happened. Everything that happens can only occur in accordance with predetermined rules. And the rules say that a) the account, if there is, cannot be removed, except for its creator, b) no one can print bitcoin, except for those bitcoins that are printed on schedule, and there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in the world.

The most important thing, the main know-how that Bitcoin brought is a system itself in which there is no one server to which you can come in a mask and endure it. Instead, there are thousands of these servers around the world. And even if you control 51% of them, you cannot violate the rules. In the best case, you can rewrite history. But the story that you rewrite should still follow the rules. That is, you cannot steal money from a person.

I hired the majority of NEAR employees to the idea of ​​Internet 3.0. Although in general this term was invented by Polkadot. And the main structure that builds Polkadot, their fund is called Web3 Foundation. We call it open Internet. The idea boils down to the fact that so that all the data does not belong to one center, whether it is a bank, cloud service or something else. Today something can be done. There is Matrix. This is such a chat, called Federal, which is distributed to a large number of servers. He allows you to either trust anyone if you are technically enough, or trust someone you choose. Or so the mail works. I don't like Gmail, I can go to Protonmail. I can choose to whom to trust.

But some things can not be done today. And I want there to be an infrastructure where the developer wrote the code once, placed it, and it now exists in Meta Version. There is nowhere. There is no one server on which it is deployed. It is raised in a virtual system. And now all users can come and start using it. It is desirable that users can do this without any deep knowledge. I want such a system. Near is far from this. But this is exactly what does this fundamentally. You can deploy any code. People can use it. But Near is too expensive and too slow. Despite the fact that we are much cheaper and faster than broadcast, it is still incomparably expensive and slowly compared, for example, with how you use Facebook. But this is a step.

The regulators no longer had time to catch us. Today NEAR is fully decentralized. And the regulator will not come to us. They could catch the moment when we started. You can not immediately start a decentralized network. That is, it is possible, but dangerous. There was a process when we debugged some last pieces. It was possible to come at that moment, to catch us and destroy us - to say that we are releasing securities. And today we have no control over the Near. Even if they take all 150 people from Near Foundation and Near Inc. And they will put in the same room with all access keys, we cannot do anything. We do not control the protocol. The protocol went into free swimming. Just as today it is impossible to stop Ethereum, even if you catch Vitalik Butaterin. And how much you are not five with his key, Ethereum will no longer stop. Near is exactly the same situation.

In the case of the GRAM blockchain project, I think we know 10% of what happened. I think at the level at which Pavel Durov is spinning, their criteria appear by which decisions need to be made. I do not understand them. But if Telegram released, my life would be more difficult. There the code was written by a very strong team. There was Nikolai Durov. This is a person who won ICPC twice. They already have experience. And users. They could go, throw Grams on all Telegram users. And OP, 100 million users at once. This is more than in the whole crypt today. It would be another world. For the ecosystem, this would most likely be better. Perhaps Telegram would have broken the way to the user. And then users would have spread out in all, and we would all be in the plus. And perhaps Telegram would have come, won the entire market, and we would have remained out of work. Do not guess.

About the Olympiads, startup on the couch and Y Combinator

I was born in Izhevsk. Probably carried out programming, probably somewhere at 8 years old, my dad began to teach me. The school was ordinary, but the class - with a mathematical bias. My class teacher did not allow my innate talent to die and cultivated him. Then I went to IzhGTU. And there I met two guys. Their name was Ruslan Kovachev and Kolya Permikov. And they were engaged in olympiads. And so, literally when I was in the 1st year, Ruslan and Kolya left for Prague for the World Programming Championship and arrived back with a silver medal. And I began to spend all my time on preparation. And after a few years of exhausting training, along with two other guys, he won the third place on the ICPC.

After that, I wrote [the co-founder of Memsql, ex-manager Microsoft] Nikita Shamgunov : “Nikita, let's bring me to Microsoft.” I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted to the stars. He says: “This does not work, of course. You will need to go through an interview there. ” He sent my resume somewhere, I was appointed an interview. And I did not speak English from the word "in general." Three uncles called me. I did not understand anything what they wanted from me. And they did not understand anything that I told them. And I did not pass the interview. I wrote to Nikita, Nikita says to me: "Damn, Alex, I chewed you, I put you in your mouth, you had to swallow." I say: "It happened." But Nikita did not want talent to disappear. And Nikita went, made some additional efforts. I sent my resume to the Russian party, in Microsoft it is called "Homeland". And some other uncle looked at him and said: "He looks like a smart guy, come on." And he appointed me an interview with himself and with another Russian. And the third was in English. But I have two in Russian. The English somehow suffered. In general, with difficulty I got on an internship. From there, a career has already gone. On the first giant, by the standards of Izhevsk, I bought a large salary of $ 6 thousand to go to work.

I left Microsoft too because of Nikita. He then began his Memsql company. He needs to hire people. And he went to us all, he thought of everyone. We were young, ready to quit everything. And I said: "One life, why not." I remember there was a moment when Nikita and Eric were supposed to call me two founders to make an offer for money. And we sat with my wife and decided that if such numbers, then we agree, and if less, then we do not agree. And now Nikita calls and says a number 1.5 times less. And I look at my spouse and say: "What difference does it make." And we still went. Everything that got into the car was taken with them. Everything that did not fit, did not take. They just took it and went.

The idea was that at first we would live right in the office. It was such a three-room apartment in Menlo Park. And my wife and I occupied one bedroom, Ceo Eric and his wife - another, and Nikita slept on the couch. It was like the series "Silicon Valley". Very quickly they realized that it doesn't work like that. Because they need to hire new people. You cannot bring them to the place where you sleep. They moved to the office, and we had to look for an apartment. Then I found out the prices of real estate. And in the end we were able to find an apartment in size of 20 square meters. m, which cost $ 1600 per month. It was a fall into reality. And we lived in this bunker for 2 years.

In Memsql, I was 5.5 years old. In 2016, I suddenly realized that I wanted to try my own. By that time I got carried away with machine learning. And he left Memsql. I did not have a plan to do anything. The idea was to look for what was happening. And so I sat in the coffee shop. And this is Silicon Valley. Here every second person is either a programmer or a person who has a businessman. And the young man approached me, says: "Ha, you read the machine." Come on, he says, get to know each other. I say: "Come on, not?" And we met him, word for word, and decided to go, build a company. Just because we have fun. That is, then we did not even have an idea of ​​building. As a result, I don’t even really remember what we came up with. Some smart assistant, such as Siri, but on steroids. And we came to Y Combinator. And Y Combinator took us.

We made a bet on the interview. And the interview went very well. We have prepared answers. In 10 minutes they ask a certain number of questions. And these questions are more or less repeated. They are known in advance. There are services on the Internet where you can launch a timer for 10 minutes, and he will give you random questions. And you just read these answers aloud. And you are preparing with yourself. And so we arrived, all the questions were according to the training manual, we answered everything. Offended. Then we were returned to a second short interview, but, in general, we passed. True, Y Combinator in our case did not give anything. But in general, this is an incredibly useful tool if the company knows what he does. The problem is that we did not know.

About NEAR, singularity and barbecue with investors

While studying at Y Combinator, I met Ilya, with whom we will start Near. Ilya also wanted to start his company. He was going to leave Google. And I told him: “Listen, you want the company, we can start the company, and you can join us, we are already going through Y Combinator, most likely we will be able to successfully raise investments, you will miss these first steps, you don’t need to suffer with it, we will go again, we have no idea, but you don’t have an idea, nothing will change in this matter.”

It was already absolutely clear to the release of Y Combinator that what we do definitely did not make any sense. Ilya and I no longer believed that we would grow together. And we told the third partner that we were leaving. And the next day, they simply immediately reincorved in NEAR. And Ilya and I decided that if we both have a dream to build a singularity, we will do something in this direction. Singolarity is such a concept that says: “Imagine that machine learning has made a sufficient amount of jerks that you can write a program that exceeds a person in everything.” Any task that I can do, she can do better. If we assume that this is possible, then an interesting thing happens. If I was able to create it, it is reasonable that she can create herself too. But since she is better than me, she can create herself better. And such a situation occurs when computers in a very short period of time actually become so smarter than people with explosive speed that people are unable to comprehend them more.

And the name of our team characterizes the faith in where the singularity was - nearby, close. We did not succeed very much, but we were able to raise money for the idea. The investor was called Amplify Partners. When they said Yes , others followed them. And if you come to the investor and say: “We have such an idea and we already have 4 investors who are ready to put money”, then “no” no longer exists as an answer. At this moment there is only “yes” answer.

There were no teams at first. I was and Ilya. In general, in the first year of the NEAR existence, we never had more than 4 people. Plus, Ilya and I have never paid a salary. But we still clearly did not grow together. And it was necessary either to leave NEAR and go to work again, or take extreme measures. We constantly sat down, analyzed the current direction, searched for new ones. As a result, we noticed that it is very difficult for people from other countries to pay money. And just by that time, several of my friends left Memsql and, for various reasons, began to be interested in blockchain. And I went to communicate with them and find out what blockchain is. And he came to the conclusion that to carry out the plan - to simplify the transactions globally - it is impossible. For two reasons. The first-existing blockchain systems are quite slow. The second - existing systems are such that it is impossible to figure out to a person.

I thought: the blockchain, in the end, is the same database, simply distributed and decentralized. If I wrote databases for 5 years, then perhaps I can apply my skills. And I began to understand. And I came to the conclusion that there is a good chance that I can write better than others. That, perhaps, it is my skills, as well as my ties with the guys who also have the same skills, will allow me to build a team and defeat those who have already begun to solve this problem. The platform that I wanted to write is a platform on which developers can write their systems that require such a primitive as a piece of information that is not controlled by anyone, with a set of rules. Roughly speaking, this is a platform on which developers can place their sets of rules.

And again, Ilya and I went on the investors, say: “Look, guys, we figured it out, we all understood in this life, we will now build a blockchain.” As in the series "Silicon Valley" when he said: "We will make a blockchain." And the investor girl says to him: "Are you out of your mind?" We went to investors. And it turned out very badly. We needed to come up with something. And Ilya just had a birthday. He organized a barbecue party. And he simply called all these children-investors: "We went to barbecue to us, we’ll chat about the crypt." They all arrived. And we set up so that our engineers will simply accidentally get into these guys. And in between, to say the ideas that we came up with the previous month. And by the end of this party, these guys come to us and say: “You know, some progress has occurred in a month, let's meet again.” The plan worked. And we came to them again. And this time we closed them, they gave us money. The funny thing is that they told us “yes” when we were on the 5th floor in the building. And we got into the elevator. And even the 1st floor did not reach, and another investor wrote: "We heard ..."

We raised something like $ 2 million-was enough to live a couple of years. They brought several more completely stunning people. And we already had a team with which we could build something. And so NEAR began. We quickly dealt with ecosystems. They found what teams are engaged in garbage, that is, obviously they just want to quickly get it, and which ones - with business. They quickly became friends with teams, which also build something adequate. This is similar to “hunger games”: the task of being the last survivors, but competitors are united in groups, because at first you have a higher chance if you are part of the team.

On competition with Ethereum, Near Crowd platform and dream investors

Initially, we completely wanted to focus on speed. And the idea about what should be used was secondary. But gradually we completely re -focus. And the speed was secondary. Because in reality today you do not need to be a thousand times faster. It is enough to be, let's say, 10–20. This will already cover today's needs. You can accelerate further later. But the fact that people cannot use is a big problem. And we threw all our strength to her decision.

We are called the Ethereum killer. Because functionally Near and Ethereum are almost the same thing. This is a blockchain that allows you to expand arbitrary smart contracts on it. And we took ideas from Ethereum. And Ethereum took ideas from us. Vitalik and I talked repeatedly. We are more or less friends with him. We met, recorded a video where we ask each other about technology. NEAR is one of the closest protocols for Ethereum and the spirit of how it works, and by the fact that we are friends. Our advantage is much easier for the user.

It all started to write a system in which people can save data and receive money. And today there is such a system on Near. It is called Near Crowd. This is a platform where the guys come who need marked pictures. And there are a large number of people with the Philippines, from Ukraine, India, other countries, and they mark these pictures and get a penny. Но нет никого в середине, потому что нет никакой компании за этим. Это просто контракт на блокчейне. И за счет этого копеечку никто не забирает. 100% того, что компания заплатила, уходит в конечном итоге этим ребятам. Если в каких-то географиях они вообще не могут принимать деньги, в Ираке или в Крыму, то эта система у них работает, потому что их никто не остановит получить деньги.

Наша команда сегодня — уже 150 человек. Через год после первого раунда мы пошли поднимать деньги и хотели поднять достаточно много под достаточно большую оценку. С разбегу сразу пошли к Andreessen Horowitz, который топ-1. У меня была мечта в жизни — взять деньги у них. И они нас помучили. И дали деньги под другие условия, не те, что мы хотели. Это оказалось проблемой. Потому что теперь и другие инвесторы знают, под какие условия мы согласились. Но мы все равно подняли нормально денег, чтобы еще жить где-то 3–4 года. Потом был еще раунд, и в совокупности мы подняли порядка $50 млн. Но вся компания сегодня стоит уже несколько миллиардов, так что инвесторы точно вышли с плюсом.

Если человек хочет многого добиться в жизни, он должен брать много рисков. Нельзя добиться многого, если постоянно пытаться идти по протоптанной дороге. Я в своей жизни много брал рисков. Уйти из Microsoft в MemSQL. Или запустить первую компанию, потом NEAR, пивотнуться в блокчейн. Моя первая компания в YC, потом попытка NEAR строить год — это все меня научило, что делать не надо. Это были неуспешные опыты. Я научился, что делать не надо. Первый год NEAR-блокчейна мы работали хорошо, мы эти ошибки не повторили. И смогли перейти фазу с того, что мы не знаем, что делаем, к тому времени, когда мы понимаем точно, что строим, что у этого есть рынок. После этого я ушел целиком в технологию. Компанию последние год-полтора строит в основном Илья. Я же понял, что за это время насытился строительством компании. Мне больше не надо. Я теперь счастлив. Я хочу строить сложные системы.