May 18, 2009 at 15:07Stepan Pachikov: “If you have an idea that you understand, you can develop it into a startup”
On May 13, a lecture for students of the specialization “Management in the field of Internet technologies” of the State University of Management was delivered by Stepan Pachikov , the legendary IT aksakal, one of the most successful start-up workers in the USSR and all Russia.
Chief Architect Evernoteand the organizer of at least two successful software startups began with a half-joking disclaimer: “I have never been a professional lecturer, and I have not lectured for 25 years. Therefore, I do not bear responsibility for damage from the use of knowledge gained during the lecture. ” Well, after a warning, he explained what he’s specifically going to tell: “Today I’ll tell you what is important for a successful startup. At first I wanted to call my lecture “What should not be done so as not to ruin the company”, but decided not to introduce negativity in the name. Of course, I will also tell you about my current Evernote company: it’s a sin not to take the opportunity to advertise your company and your product for free. ”
By itself, the biography of Stepan Pachikov can be studied as a training course for beginner startups. True, at the lecture he only briefly told his live story, referring to articles, his own and others: “The World Wide Web of Samizdat” , “Silicon Fever” , “The Fate of Paragraph in America” - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , “ Letters from afar ”- part 1 and part 2 .
“I studied first at the Novosibirsk Physics and Mathematics School, then at Novosibirsk University, from which I was kicked out after dissident actions in connection with the events of Prague in August 1968. I had to transfer to a fraternal university in Tbilisi, from which I was also almost expelled when they got information about the reason for my previous deduction. Then he continued his studies at Moscow State University, where he was one of the first to study the theory of blurry sets and blurry logic. After graduation, as a senior researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences, he worked on creating models of the world economy. He predicted, for example, how in the future the change in oil prices will affect the world economy. In the 80s, he organized the first children's computer club in the USSR with Garry Kasparov, and a little later, in 1988, I had the idea to organize my own company, something like soviet bell labs. To do this, my friends and I got together and wrote about 20 topics that we would be interested in doing, and what we could offer. These were a variety of topics - for example, among them was the task of determining the sex of the chicken depending on the shape of the egg and the search for large deposits of oil. Behind these, in particular, technologies was a team of people whom I met at the seminar of Academician Gelfand. As a result, we stopped all the same on the task of handwriting recognition. They organized a company that later became Paragraph, and already in the beginning of 1990, before the collapse of the USSR, they went to the States to the Сomdex Spring exhibition, and a couple of weeks before the putsch they became the first Soviet company to sign a contract with Apple. January 15, 1993, at 10 o’clock in the evening, the idea occurred to me to make a time machine. The explanation was simple - I had a son, and I wanted to send him to Syracuse from the time of Archimedes. Of course, in fact, it was a virtual time machine, recreating a model of that era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” a recreating model of the era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” a recreating model of the era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ”
About Evernote, which recently spoke in Russian, its chief architect spoke separately. “The idea of the company was to solve the problem of the imperfection of human memory, to make the memory of any person at least as Garry Kasparov’s, and preferably much better. I often jokingly say that a person is always in one of two states: either he sits in front of his computer, or not. At a time when there is no computer, a person most often has a mobile phone in his pocket, which can be used as a kind of external brain. Therefore, my initial vision was this: a mobile phone becomes a continuation, an extension of human memory. Now we say that we are expanding human memory without specifying exactly how, because your memory is everywhere: in the computer, in the phone, in your head, on the Internet, in general, somewhere out there in the cloud. But she is always there, and she cannot be lost. Moreover, unlike real biological memory, it is improving all the time.
Here the question arises, what is a good memory. My understanding is this. Firstly, it is an opportunity to quickly and without unnecessary efforts to remember what may someday be useful. Secondly, the ability to always have access to this information, wherever you are. Finally, it is an opportunity to find information, even if you do not know exactly what you are looking for and cannot clearly describe it. ”
Stepan Pachikov could not help but share his experience in the field of creating and promoting startups: “From my own experience I began to understand that if you are engaged in a business for which you do not have a sense of smell, you should not start it. I even wanted to make today's lecture an epigraph from Knysh: “Don’t poke your contribution out of your business”. If you have an idea that you understand, you can develop it into a startup.
The first thing you will encounter when trying to create your own company is the need to be able to tell your idea in 30 seconds. This is a key skill. For example, one day, while boarding a United Airline plane at the San Francisco airport, I met Alexander P., a partner of a well-known venture company, who asked me to tell what we are doing. While we were standing nearby, stuffing our luggage on the upper shelves, I managed to tell him the essence of our project and immediately set an official presentation day at their company located in New York, where we flew.
Once you have a product idea, it’s important to understand if there is a big market for it or if there will be a big market in the near future. In addition, having formulated the goals and objectives of a startup, you should be able to explain how you are going to realize your idea, what exactly you are going to do and how. Here it must be added that your strategy for entering the market is especially important for any investor, that is, you must explain why your product will crowd out the rest or occupy a large niche in the market, and this is a very difficult task.
Then you need to assemble a strong team. One of the many mistakes that I noticed with my friends and acquaintances comes down to the problem of relationships in the team and the problem of who to take into it. It is convenient to work with friends, you can ask more from friends, but there are also problems here - let's say the risk of turning a company into such, I would say, a patriarchal economy, in which personal relations begin to dominate, and the company begins to build and operate around them. All this is then very difficult and painful to break. But lately I understood the role of Chekhov's “Cherry Orchard” for the IT industry - I had to be both in the role of Ranevskaya and in the role of Lopakhin in relation to the firms of my friends. “Paragraph” I sold in the last century was a team of friends and like-minded people, which helped the company to rise quickly and almost ruined it. Now I see, that his success is 50 percent luck. Today, in the 21st century, the industrial, iron principle of the “right” construction of the “right” company is more often effective. As one executive friend of mine likes to say, "We will do it right."
Very often they ask how and where to look for money for a startup. Unfortunately, I did not have time to get acquainted with your curriculum and can repeat the banal truths known to you. The following statement is non-trivial: the biggest mistake you can make when collecting money is greed. Here it is much more important to get not the best possible rating of the company, but to get money on time and from the right people. Money should not smell, because often the decision of the next investor or potential partner depends on who your investor is.
Another important point that I would like to touch upon here is the relationship with venture capitalists. Venture capital funds are just another type of business. Typically, venture capitalists take money from private and infrequent sources, sometimes make mistakes and often lose money at firms that are burned out. Therefore, as a rule, venture capitalists begin to talk when they see the result of 25 dollars to one. The logic here is that only one of the many companies will fire, so it’s very difficult to come to them and say: “Give me a million and you will get two next year.” If you have such modest plans, it is better not to have business with venture funds. ”
A lot of questions were asked during the lecture, and they were very different. Stepan Pachikov's answers to the most interesting of them are given below.
- Tell me, can you talk about Evernote in 30 seconds?
- Evernote is a service that allows you to remember various information at any time and makes it always available, wherever you are and no matter what device you use. Evernote allows you to search for data by many indirect signs - for example, find a note made on a napkin in a cafe in Paris, handwritten in Russian. The business model is very simple - it is a basic free service, which is planned to be earned in several stages. First, we are going to offer those who exceed the traffic pay for this excess. We also plan to make targeted advertising a source of profit.
- How do angels differ from venture capital funds and venture capitalists?
- Venture capitalists differ from venture funds in that they are simply employees of these funds (Laughs). Venture funds are money from various sources: private investors, organizations. Angels use their money. As a rule, if an angel gives you money, then he waits for them to return to him, and does not interfere in the process of building a company. In turn, the venture capitalist will closely monitor how this money is spent, what happens in the company and when you need to intervene to change the management of the company. These are such sometimes annoying helpers.
Another feature associated with some venture capital funds: if they feel that the smell is scorched, they try to save their money, not you (Laughs).
- What startups do you like, and how would you make a startup now if you didn’t have the funds to implement it?
- My personal approach to the organization of startups has changed with age, at different stages of my life I would develop ideas differently. Now, suppose I have a good idea now. And suppose I’m going to find money for it, having given some, perhaps most of it, because if I do not have time to realize the idea in a couple of years, someone else will implement it. In general, for me personally, the most difficult thing in creating a startup is to recruit a professional, non-trivial team. I have a lot of ideas, and I'm not afraid of the market.
- How to calculate the capitalization of a startup company during a sale?
“There is no universal way.” Both the buyer and the seller have a different view of this. For example, when we recently evaluated one company, we had to argue for a long time about what to take into account: profit or income for several years. It should be noted that, as a rule, in calculating the company's capitalization, its future, predicted value is taken into account. In general, the calculation of capitalization is a serious thing. It is rather an art than a science.
- What ideas do you consider the most promising and popular for startups today?
- You all read the Internet and the press today, listen to the news and understand this no worse than me. In my opinion, this is all about genetics, molecular biology. In the field of Internet technologies, there are also many things. Just watch what is happening on the market today, in industry, in technology, what Google is doing today in the field of mobile phones, and catch trends. I believe that the days of ordinary computers are numbered, and in the near future a man with a laptop will look like a man with a fax machine now looks.
Chief Architect Evernoteand the organizer of at least two successful software startups began with a half-joking disclaimer: “I have never been a professional lecturer, and I have not lectured for 25 years. Therefore, I do not bear responsibility for damage from the use of knowledge gained during the lecture. ” Well, after a warning, he explained what he’s specifically going to tell: “Today I’ll tell you what is important for a successful startup. At first I wanted to call my lecture “What should not be done so as not to ruin the company”, but decided not to introduce negativity in the name. Of course, I will also tell you about my current Evernote company: it’s a sin not to take the opportunity to advertise your company and your product for free. ”
By itself, the biography of Stepan Pachikov can be studied as a training course for beginner startups. True, at the lecture he only briefly told his live story, referring to articles, his own and others: “The World Wide Web of Samizdat” , “Silicon Fever” , “The Fate of Paragraph in America” - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , “ Letters from afar ”- part 1 and part 2 .
“I studied first at the Novosibirsk Physics and Mathematics School, then at Novosibirsk University, from which I was kicked out after dissident actions in connection with the events of Prague in August 1968. I had to transfer to a fraternal university in Tbilisi, from which I was also almost expelled when they got information about the reason for my previous deduction. Then he continued his studies at Moscow State University, where he was one of the first to study the theory of blurry sets and blurry logic. After graduation, as a senior researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences, he worked on creating models of the world economy. He predicted, for example, how in the future the change in oil prices will affect the world economy. In the 80s, he organized the first children's computer club in the USSR with Garry Kasparov, and a little later, in 1988, I had the idea to organize my own company, something like soviet bell labs. To do this, my friends and I got together and wrote about 20 topics that we would be interested in doing, and what we could offer. These were a variety of topics - for example, among them was the task of determining the sex of the chicken depending on the shape of the egg and the search for large deposits of oil. Behind these, in particular, technologies was a team of people whom I met at the seminar of Academician Gelfand. As a result, we stopped all the same on the task of handwriting recognition. They organized a company that later became Paragraph, and already in the beginning of 1990, before the collapse of the USSR, they went to the States to the Сomdex Spring exhibition, and a couple of weeks before the putsch they became the first Soviet company to sign a contract with Apple. January 15, 1993, at 10 o’clock in the evening, the idea occurred to me to make a time machine. The explanation was simple - I had a son, and I wanted to send him to Syracuse from the time of Archimedes. Of course, in fact, it was a virtual time machine, recreating a model of that era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” a recreating model of the era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” a recreating model of the era in which I wanted to give parents the role of guardian angels for children traveling through time. As a result, we began to create three-dimensional models, and it turned out that at that time we were leaders in the field of graphic 3D modeling languages. After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ” After that, several companies became interested in us, but in the end I bought Silicon Graphics, whose corporate vice president I worked for a little over a year. Here is a brief summary of my story in the last century. And after that, in the 21st century, I decided to organize Evernote. ”
About Evernote, which recently spoke in Russian, its chief architect spoke separately. “The idea of the company was to solve the problem of the imperfection of human memory, to make the memory of any person at least as Garry Kasparov’s, and preferably much better. I often jokingly say that a person is always in one of two states: either he sits in front of his computer, or not. At a time when there is no computer, a person most often has a mobile phone in his pocket, which can be used as a kind of external brain. Therefore, my initial vision was this: a mobile phone becomes a continuation, an extension of human memory. Now we say that we are expanding human memory without specifying exactly how, because your memory is everywhere: in the computer, in the phone, in your head, on the Internet, in general, somewhere out there in the cloud. But she is always there, and she cannot be lost. Moreover, unlike real biological memory, it is improving all the time.
Here the question arises, what is a good memory. My understanding is this. Firstly, it is an opportunity to quickly and without unnecessary efforts to remember what may someday be useful. Secondly, the ability to always have access to this information, wherever you are. Finally, it is an opportunity to find information, even if you do not know exactly what you are looking for and cannot clearly describe it. ”
Stepan Pachikov could not help but share his experience in the field of creating and promoting startups: “From my own experience I began to understand that if you are engaged in a business for which you do not have a sense of smell, you should not start it. I even wanted to make today's lecture an epigraph from Knysh: “Don’t poke your contribution out of your business”. If you have an idea that you understand, you can develop it into a startup.
The first thing you will encounter when trying to create your own company is the need to be able to tell your idea in 30 seconds. This is a key skill. For example, one day, while boarding a United Airline plane at the San Francisco airport, I met Alexander P., a partner of a well-known venture company, who asked me to tell what we are doing. While we were standing nearby, stuffing our luggage on the upper shelves, I managed to tell him the essence of our project and immediately set an official presentation day at their company located in New York, where we flew.
Once you have a product idea, it’s important to understand if there is a big market for it or if there will be a big market in the near future. In addition, having formulated the goals and objectives of a startup, you should be able to explain how you are going to realize your idea, what exactly you are going to do and how. Here it must be added that your strategy for entering the market is especially important for any investor, that is, you must explain why your product will crowd out the rest or occupy a large niche in the market, and this is a very difficult task.
Then you need to assemble a strong team. One of the many mistakes that I noticed with my friends and acquaintances comes down to the problem of relationships in the team and the problem of who to take into it. It is convenient to work with friends, you can ask more from friends, but there are also problems here - let's say the risk of turning a company into such, I would say, a patriarchal economy, in which personal relations begin to dominate, and the company begins to build and operate around them. All this is then very difficult and painful to break. But lately I understood the role of Chekhov's “Cherry Orchard” for the IT industry - I had to be both in the role of Ranevskaya and in the role of Lopakhin in relation to the firms of my friends. “Paragraph” I sold in the last century was a team of friends and like-minded people, which helped the company to rise quickly and almost ruined it. Now I see, that his success is 50 percent luck. Today, in the 21st century, the industrial, iron principle of the “right” construction of the “right” company is more often effective. As one executive friend of mine likes to say, "We will do it right."
Very often they ask how and where to look for money for a startup. Unfortunately, I did not have time to get acquainted with your curriculum and can repeat the banal truths known to you. The following statement is non-trivial: the biggest mistake you can make when collecting money is greed. Here it is much more important to get not the best possible rating of the company, but to get money on time and from the right people. Money should not smell, because often the decision of the next investor or potential partner depends on who your investor is.
Another important point that I would like to touch upon here is the relationship with venture capitalists. Venture capital funds are just another type of business. Typically, venture capitalists take money from private and infrequent sources, sometimes make mistakes and often lose money at firms that are burned out. Therefore, as a rule, venture capitalists begin to talk when they see the result of 25 dollars to one. The logic here is that only one of the many companies will fire, so it’s very difficult to come to them and say: “Give me a million and you will get two next year.” If you have such modest plans, it is better not to have business with venture funds. ”
A lot of questions were asked during the lecture, and they were very different. Stepan Pachikov's answers to the most interesting of them are given below.
- Tell me, can you talk about Evernote in 30 seconds?
- Evernote is a service that allows you to remember various information at any time and makes it always available, wherever you are and no matter what device you use. Evernote allows you to search for data by many indirect signs - for example, find a note made on a napkin in a cafe in Paris, handwritten in Russian. The business model is very simple - it is a basic free service, which is planned to be earned in several stages. First, we are going to offer those who exceed the traffic pay for this excess. We also plan to make targeted advertising a source of profit.
- How do angels differ from venture capital funds and venture capitalists?
- Venture capitalists differ from venture funds in that they are simply employees of these funds (Laughs). Venture funds are money from various sources: private investors, organizations. Angels use their money. As a rule, if an angel gives you money, then he waits for them to return to him, and does not interfere in the process of building a company. In turn, the venture capitalist will closely monitor how this money is spent, what happens in the company and when you need to intervene to change the management of the company. These are such sometimes annoying helpers.
Another feature associated with some venture capital funds: if they feel that the smell is scorched, they try to save their money, not you (Laughs).
- What startups do you like, and how would you make a startup now if you didn’t have the funds to implement it?
- My personal approach to the organization of startups has changed with age, at different stages of my life I would develop ideas differently. Now, suppose I have a good idea now. And suppose I’m going to find money for it, having given some, perhaps most of it, because if I do not have time to realize the idea in a couple of years, someone else will implement it. In general, for me personally, the most difficult thing in creating a startup is to recruit a professional, non-trivial team. I have a lot of ideas, and I'm not afraid of the market.
- How to calculate the capitalization of a startup company during a sale?
“There is no universal way.” Both the buyer and the seller have a different view of this. For example, when we recently evaluated one company, we had to argue for a long time about what to take into account: profit or income for several years. It should be noted that, as a rule, in calculating the company's capitalization, its future, predicted value is taken into account. In general, the calculation of capitalization is a serious thing. It is rather an art than a science.
- What ideas do you consider the most promising and popular for startups today?
- You all read the Internet and the press today, listen to the news and understand this no worse than me. In my opinion, this is all about genetics, molecular biology. In the field of Internet technologies, there are also many things. Just watch what is happening on the market today, in industry, in technology, what Google is doing today in the field of mobile phones, and catch trends. I believe that the days of ordinary computers are numbered, and in the near future a man with a laptop will look like a man with a fax machine now looks.