September 1, 2017 at 17:42As the star of Brazilian TV shows accidentally helped open an IT company in Russia
September 1, 2008, exactly nine years ago, ITSumma got its first office in Irkutsk. We consider this day to be one of the company's three birthdays - there is another day of legal entity’s official registration and the day when the soap opera star came to a talk show in Brazil’s prime time and talked about makemebabies.com, which immediately attracted a powerful stream of visitors and which therefore became one of our first customers. Two photos could be uploaded to the site, they were mixed, and a photograph of a child who would have turned out in people in the photo was issued.
In our blog we write about technologies, our developments, interesting thoughts, but today I would like to speculate on why success is almost always an accident. Including the appearance of ITSumma - this is a coincidence. Under the cut - my thoughts about this and the history of the creation of the company.
At one of the conferences where entrepreneurs talked about their success stories, I drew attention to one interesting point - almost all of them said that the business turned out by chance. This is quite interesting - no one says that he consciously went to make this or that business. I thought - is chance always the main factor of success, or is it the specific character of the personality that led them to be “lucky” in the end? Is it possible for a person to learn to think and behave himself in such a way that such "accidents" occur?
In 2008, a friend of mine who was living in St. Petersburg at the time was developing face recognition software. Together with their partners from Israel, they launched makemebabies.com .
An article about the site on Mashable was read by the star of Brazilian TV shows, uploaded photos, and absolutely by accident she got a child, one in one similar to their little son. She came with this photo to an evening talk show in Brazil. Within a few hours, three million people visited the site, the site fell. At that time I was engaged in system administration on freelance, my friends called me and asked for help. For almost two days I did not sleep, trying to prevent the site from falling. And then the guys asked to maintain the site constantly and help them develop a new one so that they would not fall anymore. So our company appeared.
Then these friends from Israel came to us in Irkutsk, and we all joked: just think, the producer of that Brazilian television show still does not know how many lives he changed, without even assuming it. One of them is now engaged in the manufacture of guitars, and its new model is more anticipated than the new Fender models in 2017. He began to make guitars with the money he earned from that joint venture, which received occasional success.
The first “big” ITSumma client came to us too, one might say, by chance - lightning struck the data center where it was serviced. Today we are nine years old, and I still do not understand how we managed to go this way to a successful business.
Now 60 people work at ITSumma, we have offices in Irkutsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg and we are trying to open an office in the USA
Somehow even more rational people than me explained to me - the bottom line is that I just don’t notice the “unsuccessful” events, they are simply considered ordinary life, and when something “special” happens, you pay attention to it. That "luck" depends on the number of unsuccessful attempts that you made before that.
And then I realized one of the most important decisions for myself. When something does not work out for the first, second or third time, this does not mean complete failure; it means only what the next time can happen. Many successful entrepreneurs have stories of failures - it is very rare that someone is lucky from the very beginning. The founder of the Finnish studio Rovio Peter Westerbucka made dozens of unsuccessful games with friends, and only with Angry birds became famous all over the world, earning millions of dollars. Few people know that before starting Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, while in high school, were already trying to create a company by developing devices for the number of passing cars in their native Seattle. The device did not work, but it was the joint work experience and software development that gave Gates and Allen the opportunity to create Microsoft three years later.
You need to stop treating failure as a problem, and think like this: "Now, no luck, but it brings me closer to success." And then you’ll be lucky. That is, you can only succeed if you constantly do something, and if you continue to move forward - sooner or later, but “luck” will come. If you stop after the first attempt - yes, almost certainly a miracle will not happen. But if you made, say, a hundred attempts, then with one of these attempts, something will definitely work out.
In our blog we write about technologies, our developments, interesting thoughts, but today I would like to speculate on why success is almost always an accident. Including the appearance of ITSumma - this is a coincidence. Under the cut - my thoughts about this and the history of the creation of the company.
At one of the conferences where entrepreneurs talked about their success stories, I drew attention to one interesting point - almost all of them said that the business turned out by chance. This is quite interesting - no one says that he consciously went to make this or that business. I thought - is chance always the main factor of success, or is it the specific character of the personality that led them to be “lucky” in the end? Is it possible for a person to learn to think and behave himself in such a way that such "accidents" occur?
In 2008, a friend of mine who was living in St. Petersburg at the time was developing face recognition software. Together with their partners from Israel, they launched makemebabies.com .
An article about the site on Mashable was read by the star of Brazilian TV shows, uploaded photos, and absolutely by accident she got a child, one in one similar to their little son. She came with this photo to an evening talk show in Brazil. Within a few hours, three million people visited the site, the site fell. At that time I was engaged in system administration on freelance, my friends called me and asked for help. For almost two days I did not sleep, trying to prevent the site from falling. And then the guys asked to maintain the site constantly and help them develop a new one so that they would not fall anymore. So our company appeared.
Then these friends from Israel came to us in Irkutsk, and we all joked: just think, the producer of that Brazilian television show still does not know how many lives he changed, without even assuming it. One of them is now engaged in the manufacture of guitars, and its new model is more anticipated than the new Fender models in 2017. He began to make guitars with the money he earned from that joint venture, which received occasional success.
The first “big” ITSumma client came to us too, one might say, by chance - lightning struck the data center where it was serviced. Today we are nine years old, and I still do not understand how we managed to go this way to a successful business.
Now 60 people work at ITSumma, we have offices in Irkutsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg and we are trying to open an office in the USA
Somehow even more rational people than me explained to me - the bottom line is that I just don’t notice the “unsuccessful” events, they are simply considered ordinary life, and when something “special” happens, you pay attention to it. That "luck" depends on the number of unsuccessful attempts that you made before that.
And then I realized one of the most important decisions for myself. When something does not work out for the first, second or third time, this does not mean complete failure; it means only what the next time can happen. Many successful entrepreneurs have stories of failures - it is very rare that someone is lucky from the very beginning. The founder of the Finnish studio Rovio Peter Westerbucka made dozens of unsuccessful games with friends, and only with Angry birds became famous all over the world, earning millions of dollars. Few people know that before starting Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, while in high school, were already trying to create a company by developing devices for the number of passing cars in their native Seattle. The device did not work, but it was the joint work experience and software development that gave Gates and Allen the opportunity to create Microsoft three years later.
You need to stop treating failure as a problem, and think like this: "Now, no luck, but it brings me closer to success." And then you’ll be lucky. That is, you can only succeed if you constantly do something, and if you continue to move forward - sooner or later, but “luck” will come. If you stop after the first attempt - yes, almost certainly a miracle will not happen. But if you made, say, a hundred attempts, then with one of these attempts, something will definitely work out.