Meeting poSEEDelki in Yandex
On November 10, for the first time, #poSEEDelki, an informal meeting of entrepreneurs organized by GreenfieldProject, was held at the Yandex office in Moscow, at which Yandex representatives told how they managed to maintain the startup spirit inherent in startups and revealed some of the details of the inner kitchen. And at the traditional discussion of new business ideas from the participants, seven projects were presented at once.
More than 70 people gathered at poSEEDelki in Yandex, so even had to urgently look for a larger audience. While guests were waiting for company representatives, meeting host Petr Tatishchev from GreenfieldProject carried them into a discussion of what was pushing people to create a startup. As it turned out, the desire to get rid of boredom or to conform to the spirit of the times, greed and other human shortcomings and weaknesses often mixes with the desire to change the world for the better. Tigran Khudaverdyan , head of the Yandex portal services department, and Grigory Bakunov
came to chat with the guests, deputy head of the development department. The topic of their presentation was quite free, and most of the time they answered questions and criticism of the professional community. We managed to talk about Google and Rambler, about the approach to launching new services, about why Yandex is not going to release its browser, about the development of mobile Yandex.Maps and much more. The full presentation is available in the video .
Grigory Bakunov said that Yandex is primarily interested in startups of a certain direction. For example, those involved in multimedia technologies or developing methods for studying user behavior on the Internet ( more) Tigran Khudaverdyan noted that in the external environment they are more often looking for people, rather than projects. According to him, several dozens of projects are being developed inside the company, some of which are startups of employees.
They also talked about how Yandex managed to maintain the "spirit of creativity" inherent in young projects. Based on their experience, the guys gave some advice to a business that is growing from a startup to something more:
• Motivate every employee: he must believe that he is doing the most important thing in the world. Support their desire to create, because people always stand behind the success of the company. Refusal of many strict rules that prevent creating new ones can have a positive effect on people's attitudes.
• Protect a creative frame from excessive red tape and bureaucracy.
• If your users have developed habits in using the service, do not break them. For example, when Yandex began to show the exchange rate with two digits after the decimal instead of four, this caused discontent among the mass of accountants, who compared their calculations with the dollar on the main page of the portal. As a result, it was decided to return to the option with four decimal places.
After an interesting conversation with Yandex representatives, which lasted about an hour, any of the participants in the event could speak to the audience. As a result, seven people spoke about their business ideas or start-up projects, which was a record for poSEEDel.
The guests of the event discussed the following projects: print advertising on napkins , which will be provided free of charge to cafes and restaurants; Darru.ru- Gift giving operator, formed at the October Harvest startup tournament and already nominated for the Startup of the Year 2010 award; TRIONA - a niche SaaS service that allows you to automate the management of a beauty salon; сarpool-service "NetProbok" , whose team is ready to help the Moscow City Hall to solve transport problems; automatic washing project , where payment is automated, and the owner is washing the car; GiftMaster - a recommendation service and a gift aggregator that can “shoot” in the form of an application for social networks; and Grigory Bakunov sold the idea of a dating site for a bottle of soda , where the male audience will pay for each action.
The next poSEEDelki will also be visiting and will take place on October 20th at the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. Participants will talk about the ideal office for a startup, and will also be able to explore the school campus.