December 18, 2007 at 20:37David Yang: Yosi Vardi called Cybiko the largest invention of mankind after MP3
You will find the original and audio recording of the interview on this blog
. My questions are answered by the founder of ABBYY, Cybiko, a company not so long ago acclaimed in the USA with its innovative development.
His name is David Yang and he is one of the most famous entrepreneurs working in the IT field in Russia. His biography is included in the American Who is Who - 2001 reference book. David Yang is a laureate of the Russian Government Prize in the field of science and technology.
David Yang - Founder of ABBYY
In addition to the IT sector, David is also involved in the restaurant business. Among his projects are FAQCafe and ARTEFAQ - establishments for meetings of creative people and a pleasant pastime. But IT is far from being gone, and therefore David and Co. recently launched a new project called IIKO - a restaurant management system.
If you want to get acquainted with the extraordinary personality of David Yan - read the interview.
Recently, young people do not want to go to study, but immediately rush to work. What is your opinion about this trend?
It’s true, I observe it very often with students, the desire to do “something interesting” and not to learn. But I believe that at first people should make an effort to overcome this reluctance and force themselves to unlearn. And moreover, to do this not for the diploma, but in order to gain knowledge that many will never receive in their life.
A lot still depends on the university, on the environment where you find yourself. It is very difficult to study alone, when all the rest do not study around, but go only to discos and cafes.
It is necessary to overcome all these temptations, try to get involved as much as possible, get knowledge, skills and learn self-discipline. Then it will help in real work.
David, what did you get from studying at MIPT?
I and my friends who graduated from MIPT, I think, would not have taken place if they had not received this school. We had a peculiar situation, since we were obsessed. We first studied for 3 years at a physics and mathematics school and studied at this school, we went to electives in physics. Graduates of our school who enrolled in the physics and technology department returned in the summer for vacations and conducted electives with us. We were obsessed, we participated in competitions, we are one third of our class of 30 people. And most of us as a result went to the physics and technology department. 12 people came from our school, which was a historical record, more came only from the Moscow 18th School of Physics and Mathematics.
If you get to the physics and technology department, then you must study, otherwise you will simply fly out. And this disciplined, we studied at night. There the system is arranged there, you will not be allowed to the test session, if you have not passed the so-called puzzles. The atmosphere we were in made us learn. At some point, the desire to implement some projects overpowered. Honestly, from the 3rd grade I wanted to be a physicist and went to the physical and technical college and until the last year I continued to be sure that I would be engaged in science, in particular, solid state physics.
Initially, when the idea of the Lingvo electronic dictionary arose, there was no idea to leave physics and leave physical tech. There was a desire to make a program during the holidays and return to physics. Then life turned differently, but the years before this they taught me to work when I don’t feel like it, this is what I said about self-discipline. In life, you have to do this all the time. The “bad news” for young people is that life is designed so that you spend 90% of your time on routine and 10% on creativity, regardless of what you do: writing a book, fine art, physics, or business.
If you do not learn how to pull the strap, to be a marathon runner at an early age, then you won’t be able to learn this from life.
Universities are mostly technical knowledge. Where did you get knowledge about the business environment and work in it?
University - technical knowledge ... partly yes. But there is a phrase that I heard for the first time from my parents who studied at the physics department of Moscow State University: "they do not teach knowledge in the university itself, but about where you can read about it." The actual knowledge that you acquire is a small part of what you acquire in a good university. In a good university you gain the ability to learn, the ability to set goals yourself and achieve them. You learn a model of thinking, the main thing that is taught at the physics and technology laboratory is how to think about a problem, how to research it, how to achieve a result. And this is what you need in business and medicine, in everything. Fizteh was created in the image of MIT (massachusetts institute of technology).
I was recently at MIT and talked with management, with students, and a really very similar atmosphere. It is true there, more attention is paid to the visual arts, contemporary art. There is the famous Media Lab, opened by Seymour Papert, where art, science and technology are docked. At the Physics Institute, the emphasis on technical disciplines is more, although there are a huge number of artists, artists who have left the Physics Institute. Starting from Filippenko, ending with Vladimir Smolyar - a famous performance artist, or Alexander Ilichevsky - a fashionable young writer who received the Booker Prize 4 days ago, the highest award in literature.
I do not agree that they mainly provide technical knowledge. They are taught to think, they are taught to achieve a goal.
I gained knowledge in the field of business and economics by self-education, as well as all my friends who graduate from physics and technology, but do not work now in the field of physics.
If you have been taught to learn, then you can read and figure it out yourself. My friend Karen Musaelyan, Managing Partner of Merrill Lynch, is one of the hundred most famous US bankers. He ended up on Wall Street from Road Island, where he was involved in physics after physical training. On the plane, having read two Talmuds on financial and market management and passing the entrance test at JP Morgan is better than an MBI.
As a result, he was taken and he quickly gained the position of vice president of JP Morgan. He was also asked: “Where have you been taught this way, and are there any other such financiers at the same physical school?”
The main thing is to learn how to gain knowledge and achieve the goal, and everything else will already follow.
Are ABBYY specialists being hired by your company mainly from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology?
No, we do not have any qualifications for a university that a person must complete. We have several stages of admission. The first stage is a resume, when screened by external signs. Then several interviews take place. Then - the entrance exam, these are the tasks that need to be solved. And according to the results of solving problems, the candidate is invited to interns. The internship runs from 1 to 6 months. After which a qualification exam is passed and after a qualification exam, a person becomes a full-time employee.
Six months ago, we collected statistics on passing examinations in the field of computer programmers and engineers, and 30% were graduates of the physics and technology department, 30-40% were several faculties of Moscow State University, and the remaining 30% were all other Russian universities.
We still have a large department for applied linguistics, where people from the Russian State Humanitarian University and a number of other universities related to applied linguistics mainly get there. Recently, people from the faculty of Moscow State University have appeared, there are strong guys from RUDN University, etc.
Currently there are programs that understand, recognize the meaning of printed text? Or has science not yet reached this point?
This is done by a large number of research groups in the world, research in the field of semantics. The goals are different. You cannot create a system that will understand everything. She needs to understand some purpose in the application. It is one thing to create an expert system, determination by the symptoms of diagnosis. Another thing is to understand in order to distinguish spam from non-spam. The third is to try to understand the correspondence associated with preparing for terrorist attacks or by correspondence to understand about the attempt of some violations in the financial sphere. There is a need for search engines to index and search by meaning.
There is a direction associated with annotating a document, i.e. for scientific and other works, you must have a brief summary of the document to enable the reader to familiarize yourself with this or that document.
There is a direction related to machine translation from language to language. And in order to create a system that translates with a quality close to that of a human translator, you need to understand what was discussed in the original document, then formulate the same thing in another language.
Of the very serious areas related to semantics, little has been studied yet, but the threat of being important is the understanding of continuous speech, to be able to recognize it without tuning to the voice of the speaker. This is one of the most difficult tasks - recognition of continuous speech without tuning to the voice of the speaker, which is called Speaker Independent Continuous Speech Recognition.
The particular difficulty of this task is that of a speech signal. If you examine the sound wav file that you recorded, it turns out that up to 70% of the information in the file is already missing, it is not in the physical signal, but there are some 30%. However, you understand me almost 100%, recognize what I am saying, because your brain recovers lost 70% of the information. Check it out is very simple. If I start to speak something in Armenian, I will dictate some address in Armenian. The signal volume will be the same, the signal-to-noise ratio is the same, but you will be able to recognize what I have spelled, maybe the same 30% of the information. You will be able to recognize some vowels, but 70% you will not be able to recognize, because you will not be able to recover lost information.
To teach a computer to recognize this kind of text, you need to learn to understand what the speaker is saying. This is further complicated by the fact that spoken language has dangling sentences, in the general case does not contain complete grammatically correct forms, etc.
Semantic analysis is complicated many times over because the parsing that should precede the semantic is very difficult. This is a direction that could describe what you called "understanding" of the printed text.
In each of these areas there are research groups that are trying to do something, somewhere more successfully, somewhere less successfully. Now science does not know the current system that would solve all these problems.
Our company has been engaged in research in the field of applied linguistics and semantics for 12 years. And we create something that can be figuratively called a semantic universe. This is a certain system based on a universal semantic hierarchy. This is a kind of model of knowledge about the world, which has a hierarchical system of language-independent semantic classes. At the deepest levels of nesting of this tree, language-dependent elements appear, i.e. tokens.
After some time, we will be able to officially announce that it will be this as an application. But I can’t do it now. Officially, we will begin to talk about how this technology will be applied in an applied sense. This information will be available later, I think, by 2008.
Tell us, what is the current situation with the NLC project?
I started talking about him in a previous question. This is a kind of technology in the field of applied linguistics and semantics. We are now on the eve of the beta. In 2008, we plan to demonstrate a beta version of a commercial product.
And who will test the beta version?
We have partners with whom we agreed on this topic and in the beginning it will be done by a limited circle of people.
How have you progressed in the development of artificial intelligence? What has been achieved during the existence of ABBYY?
In terms of the public, the word artificial intelligence is perceived with some futuristic connotation. But in fact, this is the name of a class of technology that was given by the founding fathers of this trend in 1956 and, in general, does not include anything supernatural. All technologies related to recognition, as a rule, relate to technologies of artificial intelligence.
The technology used in FineReader belongs to the class of artificial intelligence technologies. All kinds of technologies related to classification, with decision-making, up to the fact that artificial intelligence methods are used in the Electrolux washing machine, which decides how long to wash and how much powder to fill up.
Specifically in our company, this is FineReader. Our latest version is more accurate, smarter, better recognizes low quality texts, is able to deal with defects, even when the letters are cut in half. This is the most basic achievement.
A number of methods used in NLC for parsing, analyzing and synthesizing - they also apply to artificial intelligence methods, but it is too early to relate to achievements. When a commercial product appears, then it will be possible to talk about achievements in this area.
What types of information can FineReader recognize?
The program doesn’t care where the source of the graphic information comes from: scanner, camera, whatever. Its task is to turn graphic information into an editable text file. At some point, PDF was also included in these formats. Not only raster graphic information, but also vector graphic information began to be recognized, turned into editable text.
Are all of your company's developments successful or are there any that have been phased out?
It all started with electronic dictionaries, this of course has been preserved. Then we started doing morphology, a spell checker, which organically entered the Lingvo, FineReader and NLC systems. Then OCR is a whole line of recognition of not only unstructured documents, but also structured documents: bank payment orders, invoices, invoices, invoices, questionnaires. In parallel - handwriting recognition technology.
All of the above - we started and continue to actively apply.
Some of the lexicographical areas can be attributed to such things that we have suspended. We are not only the authors of the program that manages the Lingvo dictionaries, but also the authors of a number of dictionaries that are included there. Of the 130 dictionaries that are part of Lingvo, some of them were created by our experts, our lexicographers. And we licensed part of the authors.
And at some point we suspended work on highly specialized content, strengthened the team and started working on general lexical content. In particular, a large English-Russian dictionary on paper has recently been published with the Russian Language Media and Bustard publishing house. This is a two-volume large English-Russian dictionary, the most relevant today in terms of vocabulary.
But in the near future, the suspended part in the field of content and lexicography will again revive at a completely new professional level.
The fact is that we founded the company ABBYY Press, which will specialize in the publishing business. Within the framework of this company, we will create our own content, our own dictionaries, reference books, various information materials. And we will publish them not only in electronic form, but also on paper.
Thus, having suspended part of our highly specialized lexicographical activity in the field of ABBYY, we after some time moved this direction to a specially allocated unit - an independent company.
We understood that what we do, we must do well and be the best in our field. Having understood that it would be too expensive for us to achieve high quality of highly specialized content within the framework of a programming company, we decided to create a special professional structure by recruiting specialists from this field there.
Maybe we still need to talk about platforms. We released FineReader version 5.0 for Mac and after that we no longer moved in this direction. They blame us for this, people demand our products for the Mac platform and so far we, unfortunately, have nothing to answer. Because it is very expensive.
We considered the cost of development and so far we cannot afford it. But I think that this is still a temporary phenomenon, after some time we will revive this area again and release our products for Mac. Because this platform impresses us, it is very dynamic and we would like to see our products under Mac.
What are the most memorable steps you can highlight from your business?
Hard times are remembered, hard ones - in a good, creative sense, when there is a lot of work. When everything is calm and good - less settles in memory. The first thing that comes to mind is the beginning when Sasha Moskalev and I sat together in Chernogolovka, doing Lingvo. As we ran, searched for our first investors, then it was the NTTM center, which helped us with a loan to start our work.
As we sold our first programs by direct dialing of organizations, this was in Soviet times before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The beginning of the work of Kostya Anisimovich, Vadim Tereshchenko and Kostya Zuev on the FineReader system.
The first stages of promotion to the Western market, organized by Sergey Andreev, our first contacts with German, American and Ukrainian partners, which led to the creation of ABBYY Ukraine, ABBYY Europe and ABBYY USA.
Later, of course, the Cybiko project.
Pocket PC Cybiko This is a very bright, very difficult life stage. When in 1998 the idea came of creating a handheld communication computer, which allowed young people to get to know each other from a distance and send messages to each other.
Then there was no sms, bluetooth was on paper in the form of specifications, experienced chips were just released, wifi was the size of a large PCMCIA card and consumed so much power that no one handheld device could pull it. These are such dense times. We created a company, we launched the product on the market, we made mass production, we sold a quarter of a million copies of Cybiko in 4 months. It was a very dramatic and interesting time. We were recognized on the streets of New York. The total circulation of all publications about the Cybiko project amounted to about 650 million copies. I met Steve Case, CEO of AOL (America On Line), Time Warner, after which they invested in Cybiko.
I met Yosi Vardi, the founder of ICQ.
Yosi Vardi and David Yang And Yosi Vardi then said that Cybiko is the largest invention of mankind after the MP3. It was very nice to hear on a forum in Arizona.
These were very interesting years, when I slept for two hours a month and I had waking dreams. For the first time in my life, I experienced this phenomenon when I was walking through an airport in Zurich and saw a dream while walking along a corridor. It was a very stressful time. This is when, just entering the American market, NASDAQ fell off, there was a crisis in America, half a million people lost their jobs. Realizing that this is a long story in America, having just scrambled out, we entered the European market with Cybiko and at that moment the September 11 terrorist attack took place and that was all. The recession also rolled into the European market and we had to restructure the company.
These are the things that are remembered.
I recall the beginning of FAQCafe, also a great time - 2004. A slightly unusual direction for me, more like a hobby. But from a financial point of view, FAQCafe is a very successful project.
Now the market has divorced many miniature programs that perform simple tasks. Advise the Russian software developers in which direction should they go? Should they develop these kinds of programs or still focus on serious software products?
Both are needed. Sometimes having developed a small program, people will recognize you and this will become a springboard into a big business. So it can be said about Lingvo and ABBYY. Still, Lingvo should be classified as small programs. This is how it was in the beginning, along with 10 different dictionaries that existed at that time in Russia.
What you don’t need to do is stop there. Having developed a small niche program and having achieved a certain popularity, you need to capitalize it.
What is capitalization in this case? This is to create a team, because one in the field is not a warrior. You can’t always hope that I and my friend Petya will do small programs all our life. What's next? A breakdown will definitely happen. Or Petya will leave or Microsoft will leave with a similar program and this business will close as a class.
If you're lucky, you managed to make a small niche program that shot and became popular - you need to move on immediately. We need to recruit people, we need to look for investors, we need to popularize the brand and release several more programs under this brand. If the founder soberly feels that he does not have any entrepreneurial or professional qualities, then you need to hire a manager, then you need to move, to seize the moment.
As for large programs. It will not work out so immediately to develop a large program. Even if you develop it, you still need to be able to sell it. A major program - it also costs a lot. And if there is no name, if there is no background, if there is no track records - who will buy it?
Or in this case, you must immediately enlist the support of a major buyer, a major client. There are relationships that have developed on a different basis. There was a large company that sold computers, serviced 1C, large points of Gazprom, and established professional and trusting relationships. And this company said: Yes, solve such a managerial task, we will buy it from you for 100 thousand. dollars.
Then, you can try to take a chance, recruit a team, start developing. Maybe something will work out. But it doesn’t always work out, even if there is a customer who is willing to pay.
Risks will lie in the fact that professional people will not succeed in recruiting, they will be able to recruit people of average quality who put the wrong decisions into the architecture. Six months will pass, a prototype will appear. And it will become clear that it slows down (in the sense of the program running slowly), that it does not satisfy the customer's needs for scalability.
We'll have to start all over again, and time is lost and the customer begins to get nervous after 6-8 months: Well, where, where? You said that everything will be.
You admit that two months ago it was decided to throw everything away and start all over again. It turns out that two or three years are lost, the customer is unsatisfied, the relationship is broken, the team has not been created, there are no new customers.
And naturally, investors appear who, the customer is not stupid, to pay all this money in advance. He will pay 10-20 percent and will wait.
And to make the program you need more money. And here money of friends and acquaintances, such angelic investors, who say: Look, you see an order of 100 thousand dollars, give me 20 thousand dollars, I’ll hire a couple of programmers.
As a result, these investors are completely upset by the situation, what is called disappointed, their money disappeared.
In general, trying to start immediately with large programs is a very big risk, even if there is a customer. If there is no customer, then the risks are even greater, because, in addition to all these risks, the risk is added that the task is not set precisely.
This is not an idle question, I know such situations, they are all the time. Nevertheless, the company, believing that it knows how to solve this problem, begins to solve it according to its own understanding, but it does not have enough analytics, not enough substantive knowledge to do what the market really needs. She gives out some kind of solution that she is trying to sell. The first customers peck at it, try to use it and then they discover that it does not solve this, this, this, and this is not convenient at all, and this is generally wrong. Some things can be fixed, and some things relate to architecture, the very foundation, and this, in principle, cannot be changed, it must be rewritten again. And then what to do?
Therefore, here, as in any innovative business, the holy word is a team. In the book by Jim Collins Good to Great (in the Russian translation of "From good to great"), it is written very clearly, "first - who, then - what." First decide who your team is, with whom you are going into battle, with whom you will work, and then decide what you will do. This is the perfect truth that every young entrepreneur needs to understand.
You have repeatedly said that a successful business is the right team. Give some tips on how to choose the right team for your business to grow.
I would very much like to see simple recommendations, simple tips that could, like a litmus test, determine the right person or the wrong one. Of course, the task is more multidimensional and recommendations that are suitable in one situation are not suitable in another.
I recently read a book by Danny Meyer, entitled - Danny Meyer Haute Cuisine, as it is translated into Russian. This is one of the most successful American restaurateurs. He talks about how they created their first restaurant and how they made the rest of the restaurants. Restaurants that quickly became one of the top 20 restaurants in the United States.
This is a legendary man, very successful financially, very successful in terms of business, quality of cuisine, etc.
He tells how he selected a team for his business in the hospitality market. He says that at some point he realized that there are things that you cannot teach a person. Either they are given from birth, or not given. You don’t have to waste time on such people, you need to tell them - thanks and continue with those who have it. He calls this the principle of 49 to 51. He came to the conclusion that if there was a person who was 100% fit for work in the hospitality business, then he should have 51% of innate cordiality and hospitality and 49% of technical professionalism. It is in this ratio, hospitality and cordiality that is slightly larger than the professional part.
He used to think that a professional is a professional, a 100 percent professional should work. No, that's right - 51% of innate cordiality and 49% of professionalism.
And then he chose so. He said: “You will never teach him 51% of hospitality. If you take a candidate and see that he has 51% cordiality, but not 49% professionalism, then take him and teach. And sooner or later he will become a good employee. If the opposite is true, then you will never teach him hospitality, just do not waste time on him. ”
The funny thing is that this logic applies to business in general, only you need to replace hospitality with a desire to make a better company, a better product. If he has a desire to make the best company, the best service, the best product, but there is no 49% professionalism, then take it and learn.
But if he has no desire to make a better company, a better product, then he should not be taken, certainly he should not be taken at first.
This is extremely important for a startup, for a young company. For the first skeleton to consist of people obsessed with the idea of doing a better thing, contrary to their own interests. So that the interests of business stand above personal interests.
It may be sublime words and to some they seem meaningless, but in fact they are very practical.
The morale and personal qualities of a person in the early stages of a project are absolutely crucial. Professional skills are also extremely important, but if you have the ability, you can teach them over time.
Having created such a team of people who are inspired to do something great, even if it locally contradicts their personal interests, who are ready to compromise, sacrifice personal ambitions, but the main thing is to do it.
With such people you can go into battle and build a business. Then, gradually it is necessary to pick up a team of high professionals and the ratio of 51 to 49 should somehow be maintained.
We try to ask questions and understand from the interview, what is the main goal in life for people, do they see this goal? As they see the goal for the coming year, for the next five years, for the next 30 years. We ask these questions, we listen to their answers and try to understand whether they will work in a team, whether they will be team players or whether they are lone wolves. We try not to take lone wolves. You can work with them separately, remotely, they are very effective in the short term. If you need to do something quickly, such single wolves, working remotely, give a very quick result. But if they are taken to the office, they spoil the team, they destroy the team with their individualism, their assessments of people and a demonstration of superiority in their field.
If we take managers, we look whether people were engaged in social work at school, institute. A person has not changed in any way since the time of school and even kindergarten. A person with an active lifestyle, as a rule, appears in school and university time, literally - the head of the group.
We look at the ability and desire of a person to improve, self-study, self-discipline.
Grades at school testify not so much to knowledge as to internal discipline of a person. If a person was a triple, this is a signal, this is a property of his character. This does not mean that we will not take it, we will look very closely at his personal possibilities of self-organization and self-discipline.
There are such guys, the head is in place, a very clear, fast, bold mind, but at the same time in poor grades at school: deuces, threes. The man says: "Yes, I understood everything, but I did not have a relationship with teachers, I did not like to study."
This does not mean that we will definitely not take it, it means that we will very closely look at it.
Sometimes such a person is a good seller, but it is unlikely that such a person is ready for a long trip, for a heavy strap of several years, to work on the same project, not to get off anywhere, get along in such a family. So many parameters from his past life very vividly symbolize what will happen in the future.
You once said: "I do not think that we have succeeded." What is success for you?
Honestly, I don’t really remember why it was said. In my opinion, this was taken out of context by a journalist for a catchy headline. What success is - I don’t know ... If you asked me what happiness is, I would tell you that happiness is the right path. Happiness is not a state, it is a process. You cannot achieve happiness, you can go to it ..
The process of achievement is real happiness, and the fact of achievement is temporary satisfaction.
As for success, this is all relative. Of course, our employees are pleased to realize that there are 30 million users of the FineReader system in the world, 5 million Lingvo users. It pleases, this is what makes many work more intensively and with greater dedication. Because a successful business can take place only when the company is engaged in useful business for people. The main goal of any company should be customer satisfaction, this is the primary goal.
And all financial indicators and financial goals are a consequence, a secondary goal.
I am categorically against the wording when financial goals in a business are put in the first position.
This is a short-term business. Let's go - earned - fled.
And if we want to create a company for many years, epochs, “for eternity”, then we must set the most important goal - to make people happier, improve the lives of people around. If we set this goal and achieve it, we can find a way how to get money from it.
Here is an example of Wikipedia should be indicative or an example of Skype, which we now use.
Initially, Wikipedia existed as an absolutely non-profit phenomenon. Wikimedia Foundation are people who were inspired by the idea to give everyone the opportunity to access information, to knowledge. And now there are already many options how to get money on this. They went the most direct way to Donations and people who want it just give money.
The same is a well-known recent example of an English group that posted its new album for free on the Internet, with an appeal to fans who liked the album to pay for downloading any amount that they consider necessary. As a result, they earned several million dollars in 2-3 days.
I think this applies to everything that happens, not only business, not only their business activity, but people in general.
Some develop projects to earn a lot of money, others, such as Sergey Brin, want to be known and remembered as the performers of big changes. What is the purpose of your business activity?
ABBYY's mission is to improve people's lives. By creating artificial intelligence technologies and programs for entering data into a computer and translating from one language to another, we turn information into useful knowledge.
To paraphrase this wording in other words, we help people better understand each other. Indeed, we are inspired by this; if you want to, believe it or not.
We want people to better understand each other, on what continents they would not be, what languages he would not speak. So that they better understand not only contemporaries, but also their predecessors.
With the help of our technologies, millions of books published both today and hundreds of years ago are introduced into information systems and books become available.
At first, the data is on the dusty shelves of the library, then the data turns into information, and the information into knowledge. One of the definitions of information says, information is usable data. And knowledge is information suitable for decision making. Here is the genesis. All of our technologies are designed to make this happen.
This chain can be formulated as follows: person - knowledge - information - data - information - knowledge - person. From person to person, in whatever age he is, in whatever language he speaks, wherever he is geographically, he transfers this knowledge to another person through this chain.
We are encouraged to create a set of technologies that allows us to create this faster, better, expand our borders and reduce barriers in this process. How to make money on this? We'll find.
We do not need money for the money itself. The vast majority of everything that we earn, we invest in further development.
All that has been done now is done on our own reinvestments. Compared to our turnover, we received scanty investments.
Of the 100 dollars that we once invested with Sasha Moskalev, we now have: 650 people in the world, 7 offices in 7 countries, millions of users.
We did all this with our own money, which we invested in the process.
Blood is necessary for the existence of an organism, a biological being. Money is blood for a creature named - business, it is by no means an end in itself, for us at least.
I think that this view is shared by a large number of employees. In the company itself, we communicate a lot on this topic and we built it from the very beginning. Most people who are now in the company's management are from the very first days in the company, since 1991, since 1992.
Starting with the CEO of the Chief Executive Officer - the general director Sergey Andreev, continuing with the financial director Vadim Tereshchenko, the director for research and development - Konstantin Anisimovich, Aram Pakhchanyan - the vice-president for corporate projects, Vladimir Selegey - the director for linguistic technologies, Kosty Zuyev and .d. I can list people for a long time. These are all the guys who work in the company almost from the very beginning, they have been working in the company for more than 15 years.
What is the reason for the lag of our country from the west? For example, why did your former Cybiko project not see Russia?
The fact that Cybiko did not see Russia has no direct relation to the situation in Russia. It was a purely technical moment, it was a matter of time. As for the backlog of Russia. Of course, the reason for the lag is the Soviet era. This is not only the socialist economy itself. There are consequences of this era that complicate the rapid development of the economy today, when the socialist system is no longer there. It seems to me that today it is a problem of the lack of people who can commercialize technology, innovation.
By the number of ingenious people, Russia has always been ahead. There has never been a shortage of geniuses, talented people, in particular, talented engineers. But we need more people who can build a business on these ideas. I think that gradually the situation is normalizing.
Are you planning to launch anything innovative like Cybiko was?
Two and a half years ago, my partner and I founded a small company in the field of software and this company should create a management system for the new software.
. My questions are answered by the founder of ABBYY, Cybiko, a company not so long ago acclaimed in the USA with its innovative development.
His name is David Yang and he is one of the most famous entrepreneurs working in the IT field in Russia. His biography is included in the American Who is Who - 2001 reference book. David Yang is a laureate of the Russian Government Prize in the field of science and technology.
David Yang - Founder of ABBYY
In addition to the IT sector, David is also involved in the restaurant business. Among his projects are FAQCafe and ARTEFAQ - establishments for meetings of creative people and a pleasant pastime. But IT is far from being gone, and therefore David and Co. recently launched a new project called IIKO - a restaurant management system.
If you want to get acquainted with the extraordinary personality of David Yan - read the interview.
Recently, young people do not want to go to study, but immediately rush to work. What is your opinion about this trend?
It’s true, I observe it very often with students, the desire to do “something interesting” and not to learn. But I believe that at first people should make an effort to overcome this reluctance and force themselves to unlearn. And moreover, to do this not for the diploma, but in order to gain knowledge that many will never receive in their life.
A lot still depends on the university, on the environment where you find yourself. It is very difficult to study alone, when all the rest do not study around, but go only to discos and cafes.
It is necessary to overcome all these temptations, try to get involved as much as possible, get knowledge, skills and learn self-discipline. Then it will help in real work.
David, what did you get from studying at MIPT?
I and my friends who graduated from MIPT, I think, would not have taken place if they had not received this school. We had a peculiar situation, since we were obsessed. We first studied for 3 years at a physics and mathematics school and studied at this school, we went to electives in physics. Graduates of our school who enrolled in the physics and technology department returned in the summer for vacations and conducted electives with us. We were obsessed, we participated in competitions, we are one third of our class of 30 people. And most of us as a result went to the physics and technology department. 12 people came from our school, which was a historical record, more came only from the Moscow 18th School of Physics and Mathematics.
If you get to the physics and technology department, then you must study, otherwise you will simply fly out. And this disciplined, we studied at night. There the system is arranged there, you will not be allowed to the test session, if you have not passed the so-called puzzles. The atmosphere we were in made us learn. At some point, the desire to implement some projects overpowered. Honestly, from the 3rd grade I wanted to be a physicist and went to the physical and technical college and until the last year I continued to be sure that I would be engaged in science, in particular, solid state physics.
Initially, when the idea of the Lingvo electronic dictionary arose, there was no idea to leave physics and leave physical tech. There was a desire to make a program during the holidays and return to physics. Then life turned differently, but the years before this they taught me to work when I don’t feel like it, this is what I said about self-discipline. In life, you have to do this all the time. The “bad news” for young people is that life is designed so that you spend 90% of your time on routine and 10% on creativity, regardless of what you do: writing a book, fine art, physics, or business.
If you do not learn how to pull the strap, to be a marathon runner at an early age, then you won’t be able to learn this from life.
Universities are mostly technical knowledge. Where did you get knowledge about the business environment and work in it?
University - technical knowledge ... partly yes. But there is a phrase that I heard for the first time from my parents who studied at the physics department of Moscow State University: "they do not teach knowledge in the university itself, but about where you can read about it." The actual knowledge that you acquire is a small part of what you acquire in a good university. In a good university you gain the ability to learn, the ability to set goals yourself and achieve them. You learn a model of thinking, the main thing that is taught at the physics and technology laboratory is how to think about a problem, how to research it, how to achieve a result. And this is what you need in business and medicine, in everything. Fizteh was created in the image of MIT (massachusetts institute of technology).
I was recently at MIT and talked with management, with students, and a really very similar atmosphere. It is true there, more attention is paid to the visual arts, contemporary art. There is the famous Media Lab, opened by Seymour Papert, where art, science and technology are docked. At the Physics Institute, the emphasis on technical disciplines is more, although there are a huge number of artists, artists who have left the Physics Institute. Starting from Filippenko, ending with Vladimir Smolyar - a famous performance artist, or Alexander Ilichevsky - a fashionable young writer who received the Booker Prize 4 days ago, the highest award in literature.
I do not agree that they mainly provide technical knowledge. They are taught to think, they are taught to achieve a goal.
I gained knowledge in the field of business and economics by self-education, as well as all my friends who graduate from physics and technology, but do not work now in the field of physics.
If you have been taught to learn, then you can read and figure it out yourself. My friend Karen Musaelyan, Managing Partner of Merrill Lynch, is one of the hundred most famous US bankers. He ended up on Wall Street from Road Island, where he was involved in physics after physical training. On the plane, having read two Talmuds on financial and market management and passing the entrance test at JP Morgan is better than an MBI.
As a result, he was taken and he quickly gained the position of vice president of JP Morgan. He was also asked: “Where have you been taught this way, and are there any other such financiers at the same physical school?”
The main thing is to learn how to gain knowledge and achieve the goal, and everything else will already follow.
Are ABBYY specialists being hired by your company mainly from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology?
No, we do not have any qualifications for a university that a person must complete. We have several stages of admission. The first stage is a resume, when screened by external signs. Then several interviews take place. Then - the entrance exam, these are the tasks that need to be solved. And according to the results of solving problems, the candidate is invited to interns. The internship runs from 1 to 6 months. After which a qualification exam is passed and after a qualification exam, a person becomes a full-time employee.
Six months ago, we collected statistics on passing examinations in the field of computer programmers and engineers, and 30% were graduates of the physics and technology department, 30-40% were several faculties of Moscow State University, and the remaining 30% were all other Russian universities.
We still have a large department for applied linguistics, where people from the Russian State Humanitarian University and a number of other universities related to applied linguistics mainly get there. Recently, people from the faculty of Moscow State University have appeared, there are strong guys from RUDN University, etc.
Currently there are programs that understand, recognize the meaning of printed text? Or has science not yet reached this point?
This is done by a large number of research groups in the world, research in the field of semantics. The goals are different. You cannot create a system that will understand everything. She needs to understand some purpose in the application. It is one thing to create an expert system, determination by the symptoms of diagnosis. Another thing is to understand in order to distinguish spam from non-spam. The third is to try to understand the correspondence associated with preparing for terrorist attacks or by correspondence to understand about the attempt of some violations in the financial sphere. There is a need for search engines to index and search by meaning.
There is a direction associated with annotating a document, i.e. for scientific and other works, you must have a brief summary of the document to enable the reader to familiarize yourself with this or that document.
There is a direction related to machine translation from language to language. And in order to create a system that translates with a quality close to that of a human translator, you need to understand what was discussed in the original document, then formulate the same thing in another language.
Of the very serious areas related to semantics, little has been studied yet, but the threat of being important is the understanding of continuous speech, to be able to recognize it without tuning to the voice of the speaker. This is one of the most difficult tasks - recognition of continuous speech without tuning to the voice of the speaker, which is called Speaker Independent Continuous Speech Recognition.
The particular difficulty of this task is that of a speech signal. If you examine the sound wav file that you recorded, it turns out that up to 70% of the information in the file is already missing, it is not in the physical signal, but there are some 30%. However, you understand me almost 100%, recognize what I am saying, because your brain recovers lost 70% of the information. Check it out is very simple. If I start to speak something in Armenian, I will dictate some address in Armenian. The signal volume will be the same, the signal-to-noise ratio is the same, but you will be able to recognize what I have spelled, maybe the same 30% of the information. You will be able to recognize some vowels, but 70% you will not be able to recognize, because you will not be able to recover lost information.
To teach a computer to recognize this kind of text, you need to learn to understand what the speaker is saying. This is further complicated by the fact that spoken language has dangling sentences, in the general case does not contain complete grammatically correct forms, etc.
Semantic analysis is complicated many times over because the parsing that should precede the semantic is very difficult. This is a direction that could describe what you called "understanding" of the printed text.
In each of these areas there are research groups that are trying to do something, somewhere more successfully, somewhere less successfully. Now science does not know the current system that would solve all these problems.
Our company has been engaged in research in the field of applied linguistics and semantics for 12 years. And we create something that can be figuratively called a semantic universe. This is a certain system based on a universal semantic hierarchy. This is a kind of model of knowledge about the world, which has a hierarchical system of language-independent semantic classes. At the deepest levels of nesting of this tree, language-dependent elements appear, i.e. tokens.
After some time, we will be able to officially announce that it will be this as an application. But I can’t do it now. Officially, we will begin to talk about how this technology will be applied in an applied sense. This information will be available later, I think, by 2008.
Tell us, what is the current situation with the NLC project?
I started talking about him in a previous question. This is a kind of technology in the field of applied linguistics and semantics. We are now on the eve of the beta. In 2008, we plan to demonstrate a beta version of a commercial product.
And who will test the beta version?
We have partners with whom we agreed on this topic and in the beginning it will be done by a limited circle of people.
How have you progressed in the development of artificial intelligence? What has been achieved during the existence of ABBYY?
In terms of the public, the word artificial intelligence is perceived with some futuristic connotation. But in fact, this is the name of a class of technology that was given by the founding fathers of this trend in 1956 and, in general, does not include anything supernatural. All technologies related to recognition, as a rule, relate to technologies of artificial intelligence.
The technology used in FineReader belongs to the class of artificial intelligence technologies. All kinds of technologies related to classification, with decision-making, up to the fact that artificial intelligence methods are used in the Electrolux washing machine, which decides how long to wash and how much powder to fill up.
Specifically in our company, this is FineReader. Our latest version is more accurate, smarter, better recognizes low quality texts, is able to deal with defects, even when the letters are cut in half. This is the most basic achievement.
A number of methods used in NLC for parsing, analyzing and synthesizing - they also apply to artificial intelligence methods, but it is too early to relate to achievements. When a commercial product appears, then it will be possible to talk about achievements in this area.
What types of information can FineReader recognize?
The program doesn’t care where the source of the graphic information comes from: scanner, camera, whatever. Its task is to turn graphic information into an editable text file. At some point, PDF was also included in these formats. Not only raster graphic information, but also vector graphic information began to be recognized, turned into editable text.
Are all of your company's developments successful or are there any that have been phased out?
It all started with electronic dictionaries, this of course has been preserved. Then we started doing morphology, a spell checker, which organically entered the Lingvo, FineReader and NLC systems. Then OCR is a whole line of recognition of not only unstructured documents, but also structured documents: bank payment orders, invoices, invoices, invoices, questionnaires. In parallel - handwriting recognition technology.
All of the above - we started and continue to actively apply.
Some of the lexicographical areas can be attributed to such things that we have suspended. We are not only the authors of the program that manages the Lingvo dictionaries, but also the authors of a number of dictionaries that are included there. Of the 130 dictionaries that are part of Lingvo, some of them were created by our experts, our lexicographers. And we licensed part of the authors.
And at some point we suspended work on highly specialized content, strengthened the team and started working on general lexical content. In particular, a large English-Russian dictionary on paper has recently been published with the Russian Language Media and Bustard publishing house. This is a two-volume large English-Russian dictionary, the most relevant today in terms of vocabulary.
But in the near future, the suspended part in the field of content and lexicography will again revive at a completely new professional level.
The fact is that we founded the company ABBYY Press, which will specialize in the publishing business. Within the framework of this company, we will create our own content, our own dictionaries, reference books, various information materials. And we will publish them not only in electronic form, but also on paper.
Thus, having suspended part of our highly specialized lexicographical activity in the field of ABBYY, we after some time moved this direction to a specially allocated unit - an independent company.
We understood that what we do, we must do well and be the best in our field. Having understood that it would be too expensive for us to achieve high quality of highly specialized content within the framework of a programming company, we decided to create a special professional structure by recruiting specialists from this field there.
Maybe we still need to talk about platforms. We released FineReader version 5.0 for Mac and after that we no longer moved in this direction. They blame us for this, people demand our products for the Mac platform and so far we, unfortunately, have nothing to answer. Because it is very expensive.
We considered the cost of development and so far we cannot afford it. But I think that this is still a temporary phenomenon, after some time we will revive this area again and release our products for Mac. Because this platform impresses us, it is very dynamic and we would like to see our products under Mac.
What are the most memorable steps you can highlight from your business?
Hard times are remembered, hard ones - in a good, creative sense, when there is a lot of work. When everything is calm and good - less settles in memory. The first thing that comes to mind is the beginning when Sasha Moskalev and I sat together in Chernogolovka, doing Lingvo. As we ran, searched for our first investors, then it was the NTTM center, which helped us with a loan to start our work.
As we sold our first programs by direct dialing of organizations, this was in Soviet times before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The beginning of the work of Kostya Anisimovich, Vadim Tereshchenko and Kostya Zuev on the FineReader system.
The first stages of promotion to the Western market, organized by Sergey Andreev, our first contacts with German, American and Ukrainian partners, which led to the creation of ABBYY Ukraine, ABBYY Europe and ABBYY USA.
Later, of course, the Cybiko project.
Pocket PC Cybiko This is a very bright, very difficult life stage. When in 1998 the idea came of creating a handheld communication computer, which allowed young people to get to know each other from a distance and send messages to each other.
Then there was no sms, bluetooth was on paper in the form of specifications, experienced chips were just released, wifi was the size of a large PCMCIA card and consumed so much power that no one handheld device could pull it. These are such dense times. We created a company, we launched the product on the market, we made mass production, we sold a quarter of a million copies of Cybiko in 4 months. It was a very dramatic and interesting time. We were recognized on the streets of New York. The total circulation of all publications about the Cybiko project amounted to about 650 million copies. I met Steve Case, CEO of AOL (America On Line), Time Warner, after which they invested in Cybiko.
I met Yosi Vardi, the founder of ICQ.
Yosi Vardi and David Yang And Yosi Vardi then said that Cybiko is the largest invention of mankind after the MP3. It was very nice to hear on a forum in Arizona.
These were very interesting years, when I slept for two hours a month and I had waking dreams. For the first time in my life, I experienced this phenomenon when I was walking through an airport in Zurich and saw a dream while walking along a corridor. It was a very stressful time. This is when, just entering the American market, NASDAQ fell off, there was a crisis in America, half a million people lost their jobs. Realizing that this is a long story in America, having just scrambled out, we entered the European market with Cybiko and at that moment the September 11 terrorist attack took place and that was all. The recession also rolled into the European market and we had to restructure the company.
These are the things that are remembered.
I recall the beginning of FAQCafe, also a great time - 2004. A slightly unusual direction for me, more like a hobby. But from a financial point of view, FAQCafe is a very successful project.
Now the market has divorced many miniature programs that perform simple tasks. Advise the Russian software developers in which direction should they go? Should they develop these kinds of programs or still focus on serious software products?
Both are needed. Sometimes having developed a small program, people will recognize you and this will become a springboard into a big business. So it can be said about Lingvo and ABBYY. Still, Lingvo should be classified as small programs. This is how it was in the beginning, along with 10 different dictionaries that existed at that time in Russia.
What you don’t need to do is stop there. Having developed a small niche program and having achieved a certain popularity, you need to capitalize it.
What is capitalization in this case? This is to create a team, because one in the field is not a warrior. You can’t always hope that I and my friend Petya will do small programs all our life. What's next? A breakdown will definitely happen. Or Petya will leave or Microsoft will leave with a similar program and this business will close as a class.
If you're lucky, you managed to make a small niche program that shot and became popular - you need to move on immediately. We need to recruit people, we need to look for investors, we need to popularize the brand and release several more programs under this brand. If the founder soberly feels that he does not have any entrepreneurial or professional qualities, then you need to hire a manager, then you need to move, to seize the moment.
As for large programs. It will not work out so immediately to develop a large program. Even if you develop it, you still need to be able to sell it. A major program - it also costs a lot. And if there is no name, if there is no background, if there is no track records - who will buy it?
Or in this case, you must immediately enlist the support of a major buyer, a major client. There are relationships that have developed on a different basis. There was a large company that sold computers, serviced 1C, large points of Gazprom, and established professional and trusting relationships. And this company said: Yes, solve such a managerial task, we will buy it from you for 100 thousand. dollars.
Then, you can try to take a chance, recruit a team, start developing. Maybe something will work out. But it doesn’t always work out, even if there is a customer who is willing to pay.
Risks will lie in the fact that professional people will not succeed in recruiting, they will be able to recruit people of average quality who put the wrong decisions into the architecture. Six months will pass, a prototype will appear. And it will become clear that it slows down (in the sense of the program running slowly), that it does not satisfy the customer's needs for scalability.
We'll have to start all over again, and time is lost and the customer begins to get nervous after 6-8 months: Well, where, where? You said that everything will be.
You admit that two months ago it was decided to throw everything away and start all over again. It turns out that two or three years are lost, the customer is unsatisfied, the relationship is broken, the team has not been created, there are no new customers.
And naturally, investors appear who, the customer is not stupid, to pay all this money in advance. He will pay 10-20 percent and will wait.
And to make the program you need more money. And here money of friends and acquaintances, such angelic investors, who say: Look, you see an order of 100 thousand dollars, give me 20 thousand dollars, I’ll hire a couple of programmers.
As a result, these investors are completely upset by the situation, what is called disappointed, their money disappeared.
In general, trying to start immediately with large programs is a very big risk, even if there is a customer. If there is no customer, then the risks are even greater, because, in addition to all these risks, the risk is added that the task is not set precisely.
This is not an idle question, I know such situations, they are all the time. Nevertheless, the company, believing that it knows how to solve this problem, begins to solve it according to its own understanding, but it does not have enough analytics, not enough substantive knowledge to do what the market really needs. She gives out some kind of solution that she is trying to sell. The first customers peck at it, try to use it and then they discover that it does not solve this, this, this, and this is not convenient at all, and this is generally wrong. Some things can be fixed, and some things relate to architecture, the very foundation, and this, in principle, cannot be changed, it must be rewritten again. And then what to do?
Therefore, here, as in any innovative business, the holy word is a team. In the book by Jim Collins Good to Great (in the Russian translation of "From good to great"), it is written very clearly, "first - who, then - what." First decide who your team is, with whom you are going into battle, with whom you will work, and then decide what you will do. This is the perfect truth that every young entrepreneur needs to understand.
You have repeatedly said that a successful business is the right team. Give some tips on how to choose the right team for your business to grow.
I would very much like to see simple recommendations, simple tips that could, like a litmus test, determine the right person or the wrong one. Of course, the task is more multidimensional and recommendations that are suitable in one situation are not suitable in another.
I recently read a book by Danny Meyer, entitled - Danny Meyer Haute Cuisine, as it is translated into Russian. This is one of the most successful American restaurateurs. He talks about how they created their first restaurant and how they made the rest of the restaurants. Restaurants that quickly became one of the top 20 restaurants in the United States.
This is a legendary man, very successful financially, very successful in terms of business, quality of cuisine, etc.
He tells how he selected a team for his business in the hospitality market. He says that at some point he realized that there are things that you cannot teach a person. Either they are given from birth, or not given. You don’t have to waste time on such people, you need to tell them - thanks and continue with those who have it. He calls this the principle of 49 to 51. He came to the conclusion that if there was a person who was 100% fit for work in the hospitality business, then he should have 51% of innate cordiality and hospitality and 49% of technical professionalism. It is in this ratio, hospitality and cordiality that is slightly larger than the professional part.
He used to think that a professional is a professional, a 100 percent professional should work. No, that's right - 51% of innate cordiality and 49% of professionalism.
And then he chose so. He said: “You will never teach him 51% of hospitality. If you take a candidate and see that he has 51% cordiality, but not 49% professionalism, then take him and teach. And sooner or later he will become a good employee. If the opposite is true, then you will never teach him hospitality, just do not waste time on him. ”
The funny thing is that this logic applies to business in general, only you need to replace hospitality with a desire to make a better company, a better product. If he has a desire to make the best company, the best service, the best product, but there is no 49% professionalism, then take it and learn.
But if he has no desire to make a better company, a better product, then he should not be taken, certainly he should not be taken at first.
This is extremely important for a startup, for a young company. For the first skeleton to consist of people obsessed with the idea of doing a better thing, contrary to their own interests. So that the interests of business stand above personal interests.
It may be sublime words and to some they seem meaningless, but in fact they are very practical.
The morale and personal qualities of a person in the early stages of a project are absolutely crucial. Professional skills are also extremely important, but if you have the ability, you can teach them over time.
Having created such a team of people who are inspired to do something great, even if it locally contradicts their personal interests, who are ready to compromise, sacrifice personal ambitions, but the main thing is to do it.
With such people you can go into battle and build a business. Then, gradually it is necessary to pick up a team of high professionals and the ratio of 51 to 49 should somehow be maintained.
We try to ask questions and understand from the interview, what is the main goal in life for people, do they see this goal? As they see the goal for the coming year, for the next five years, for the next 30 years. We ask these questions, we listen to their answers and try to understand whether they will work in a team, whether they will be team players or whether they are lone wolves. We try not to take lone wolves. You can work with them separately, remotely, they are very effective in the short term. If you need to do something quickly, such single wolves, working remotely, give a very quick result. But if they are taken to the office, they spoil the team, they destroy the team with their individualism, their assessments of people and a demonstration of superiority in their field.
If we take managers, we look whether people were engaged in social work at school, institute. A person has not changed in any way since the time of school and even kindergarten. A person with an active lifestyle, as a rule, appears in school and university time, literally - the head of the group.
We look at the ability and desire of a person to improve, self-study, self-discipline.
Grades at school testify not so much to knowledge as to internal discipline of a person. If a person was a triple, this is a signal, this is a property of his character. This does not mean that we will not take it, we will look very closely at his personal possibilities of self-organization and self-discipline.
There are such guys, the head is in place, a very clear, fast, bold mind, but at the same time in poor grades at school: deuces, threes. The man says: "Yes, I understood everything, but I did not have a relationship with teachers, I did not like to study."
This does not mean that we will definitely not take it, it means that we will very closely look at it.
Sometimes such a person is a good seller, but it is unlikely that such a person is ready for a long trip, for a heavy strap of several years, to work on the same project, not to get off anywhere, get along in such a family. So many parameters from his past life very vividly symbolize what will happen in the future.
You once said: "I do not think that we have succeeded." What is success for you?
Honestly, I don’t really remember why it was said. In my opinion, this was taken out of context by a journalist for a catchy headline. What success is - I don’t know ... If you asked me what happiness is, I would tell you that happiness is the right path. Happiness is not a state, it is a process. You cannot achieve happiness, you can go to it ..
The process of achievement is real happiness, and the fact of achievement is temporary satisfaction.
As for success, this is all relative. Of course, our employees are pleased to realize that there are 30 million users of the FineReader system in the world, 5 million Lingvo users. It pleases, this is what makes many work more intensively and with greater dedication. Because a successful business can take place only when the company is engaged in useful business for people. The main goal of any company should be customer satisfaction, this is the primary goal.
And all financial indicators and financial goals are a consequence, a secondary goal.
I am categorically against the wording when financial goals in a business are put in the first position.
This is a short-term business. Let's go - earned - fled.
And if we want to create a company for many years, epochs, “for eternity”, then we must set the most important goal - to make people happier, improve the lives of people around. If we set this goal and achieve it, we can find a way how to get money from it.
Here is an example of Wikipedia should be indicative or an example of Skype, which we now use.
Initially, Wikipedia existed as an absolutely non-profit phenomenon. Wikimedia Foundation are people who were inspired by the idea to give everyone the opportunity to access information, to knowledge. And now there are already many options how to get money on this. They went the most direct way to Donations and people who want it just give money.
The same is a well-known recent example of an English group that posted its new album for free on the Internet, with an appeal to fans who liked the album to pay for downloading any amount that they consider necessary. As a result, they earned several million dollars in 2-3 days.
I think this applies to everything that happens, not only business, not only their business activity, but people in general.
Some develop projects to earn a lot of money, others, such as Sergey Brin, want to be known and remembered as the performers of big changes. What is the purpose of your business activity?
ABBYY's mission is to improve people's lives. By creating artificial intelligence technologies and programs for entering data into a computer and translating from one language to another, we turn information into useful knowledge.
To paraphrase this wording in other words, we help people better understand each other. Indeed, we are inspired by this; if you want to, believe it or not.
We want people to better understand each other, on what continents they would not be, what languages he would not speak. So that they better understand not only contemporaries, but also their predecessors.
With the help of our technologies, millions of books published both today and hundreds of years ago are introduced into information systems and books become available.
At first, the data is on the dusty shelves of the library, then the data turns into information, and the information into knowledge. One of the definitions of information says, information is usable data. And knowledge is information suitable for decision making. Here is the genesis. All of our technologies are designed to make this happen.
This chain can be formulated as follows: person - knowledge - information - data - information - knowledge - person. From person to person, in whatever age he is, in whatever language he speaks, wherever he is geographically, he transfers this knowledge to another person through this chain.
We are encouraged to create a set of technologies that allows us to create this faster, better, expand our borders and reduce barriers in this process. How to make money on this? We'll find.
We do not need money for the money itself. The vast majority of everything that we earn, we invest in further development.
All that has been done now is done on our own reinvestments. Compared to our turnover, we received scanty investments.
Of the 100 dollars that we once invested with Sasha Moskalev, we now have: 650 people in the world, 7 offices in 7 countries, millions of users.
We did all this with our own money, which we invested in the process.
Blood is necessary for the existence of an organism, a biological being. Money is blood for a creature named - business, it is by no means an end in itself, for us at least.
I think that this view is shared by a large number of employees. In the company itself, we communicate a lot on this topic and we built it from the very beginning. Most people who are now in the company's management are from the very first days in the company, since 1991, since 1992.
Starting with the CEO of the Chief Executive Officer - the general director Sergey Andreev, continuing with the financial director Vadim Tereshchenko, the director for research and development - Konstantin Anisimovich, Aram Pakhchanyan - the vice-president for corporate projects, Vladimir Selegey - the director for linguistic technologies, Kosty Zuyev and .d. I can list people for a long time. These are all the guys who work in the company almost from the very beginning, they have been working in the company for more than 15 years.
What is the reason for the lag of our country from the west? For example, why did your former Cybiko project not see Russia?
The fact that Cybiko did not see Russia has no direct relation to the situation in Russia. It was a purely technical moment, it was a matter of time. As for the backlog of Russia. Of course, the reason for the lag is the Soviet era. This is not only the socialist economy itself. There are consequences of this era that complicate the rapid development of the economy today, when the socialist system is no longer there. It seems to me that today it is a problem of the lack of people who can commercialize technology, innovation.
By the number of ingenious people, Russia has always been ahead. There has never been a shortage of geniuses, talented people, in particular, talented engineers. But we need more people who can build a business on these ideas. I think that gradually the situation is normalizing.
Are you planning to launch anything innovative like Cybiko was?
Two and a half years ago, my partner and I founded a small company in the field of software and this company should create a management system for the new software.