Arkady Volozh is a Russian top manager, founder and head of Yandex, who has shown a vivid example of worthy competition to Western business.
Today, the Yandex search engine occupies a strong leadership position in Runet, has a large audience and provides a huge industry of services: mail, blogs, virtual money, games, free hosting.
Arkady Volozh: biography
A native of Kazakhstan (Guryev, now Atyrau) was born on February 11, 1964. Arkady Volozh, whose family was intelligent, grew up surrounded by humanitarians. Mom Sofya Lvovna taught music, father Yuri Abramovich was an oilman, the famous violinist V. Usminsky was his uncle
Arkady, unlike his relatives, was interested in the exact sciences, especially mathematics, which led the young man to the physics and mathematics school of Almaty. It was here that I met with Ilya Segalovich, which grew into a strong male friendship.
After leaving school in 1981, friends went to Moscow to enter Moscow State University. Having successfully failed the exams, the guys nevertheless became students, but of different educational institutions: Arkady Volozh entered the Institute of Oil and Gas named after I.M. Gubkina, and Ilya - to the metropolitan exploration institute. The guys went their separate ways, but only temporarily: Yandex will unite them in the future business of Arkady’s whole life.
Influenced by change
Having completed his studies in 1986, a promising young specialist Arkady got to the Institute of Management Problems, where, along with the rest of the research staff, he was involved in processing huge amounts of information. Promising scientific horizons were opened before Volozh, which was immediately crossed out by perestroika that struck the USSR. In 1988, the "Law on Cooperation" entered into force, which pushed the young man to the first cautious steps in business - an area hitherto unknown to the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The Institute, where Arkady worked, received an order from the CPSU District Committee on the mandatory creation of a cooperative on the basis of the institution. Volozh Arkady Yuryevich with several other comrades was elected to work with an educated society, called “Master, ” and became its co-founder.
First steps in business
The work in the cooperative consisted of a mass of diverse and unusual things for the Soviet era. So, the organization procured seeds from collective farmers and delivered them to Australia, in exchange receiving foreign personal computers. The barter course was quite simple: a computer car changed to a carriage of seeds.
Arkady, who was responsible for the technical part of the issue and was involved in setting up the received office equipment, understood the full potential of the new business. Therefore, I postponed my dissertation for a while and set about studying the language of all businessmen - English. The American Robert Stubblebine helped him in this, as it turned out, nurturing the idea of supplying office equipment to the territory of the Soviet Union. I turned it only on hand, and he invited Robert to join the "Master". However, for certain reasons (possibly ideological), the cooperative leadership rejected this idea.
In 1989, Volozh Arkady Yuryevich left the "Master" and, together with an American friend, organized the company CompTek in the capital, the purpose of which was all the same supplies of office equipment to Russia. A stable, easy-to-set up business, found buyers himself. Volozh’s competence, due to the circumstances of being re-qualified as a competent practicing businessman, included technical issues related to setting up office equipment. Even while working in the "Master" Arkady managed to earn 2 personal computers. Having realized them, the young man acquired an apartment in the capital, which he would hardly have succeeded in under other circumstances, even if the name Arkady had received worldwide recognition in the scientific world.
How to simplify the search process?
Volozh, who was engaged in the processing of significant amounts of information, constantly thought about the need to simplify the process of finding the necessary information. For the most part, Arkady was assisted by Borkovsky, also Arkady, who studied computer linguistics. Volozh's idea was to create a certain mechanism for searching for the necessary information and Borkovsky’s vast knowledge in the field of the morphology of the Russian language contributed to the formation of Arcadia in 1988. Having hired competent programmers, the founders resolutely moved to the implementation of the plan.
Founder of Yandex: on the road to success
The first successful project was the classifier of inventions - an order from the Institute of Patent Information. The small program, weighing 10 MB, was liked by the customer and other organizations related to patent science. This software brought profit for 3 years; Further, things somewhat declined. In addition, the 90s stood in the courtyard, forced to put state employees in the framework of survival and lead to decline in science.
This prompted Arkady in 1993 to decide to join Arcadia, which faced the risk of collapse, to CompTek. This is precisely what helped Volozh protect both the staff of talented employees and those available in the field of search technologies. In addition, CompTek at that time was doing fine: personal computers were selling off with a bang. The company, expanding the scope of its own interests, simultaneously took up the distribution of network technologies in Russia. In the 90s, Volozh's friend Ilya Segalovich joined them.
The first successes of Arcadia include colossal work on the digital edition of the Bible. Almost half of the holy book was typed by hand; circulation transferred to floppy disks began to diverge quite well. Next came a large order to create an electronic version of the works of Russian classics.
