The main theses of Oleg Tinkov in an interview with “The Secret of the Firm”

Last week, the updated Secret of the Firm published an interview with Oleg Tinkov, Russia's most controversial entrepreneur.

The conversation turned out to be emotional and interesting, capturing the timeline from the beginning of the nineties to the current moment.

Megamind provides the most interesting quotes from the interview.

About motivation and crisis

Yes, and we, businessmen, have survived a little, you can count on the fingers. I mean real businessmen, not oligarchs who muddle something with the state. Compared with the 1990s, now there is no entrepreneurship in the country at all. But this is a normal situation. We were hungry and poor, we had to do something, and now everyone is wealthy. I speak 3-4 times a year to students - mechmath of Moscow State University, physics and technology. My goals are rational - to recruit the best people. And I see that the students are very well dressed, the girls are beautiful. But they have no motive. Like my children will never have a motive to work like me. My son is friends with the son of Misha Friedman. They even have some kind of joint business on the Internet, but it's all funny and naive. This is a kindergarten. Because you need a powerful motive.

But so far there is no particular crisis. Everything worsened only in comparison with the greasy years. I do not see much suffering. Just think, the ruble fell twice - in Ukraine, the currency fell four times! Maybe, by the way, there will be a boom in entrepreneurship in the coming years. And we will buy less boots. The student will not have five pairs, but two. Nothing tragic happens. We have more than 5 million customers. Everyone pays, there is money.

About banking and business management

Any business is cyclical. And the banking retail business is especially cyclical. We are at the very beginning of a bad cycle. The next two years will be bad. Then the system will be cleaned up, people will deal with debts, and new growth will begin. Yes, now we do not issue 100-150 thousand cards a month, as before, we issue only 40-50 thousand. Risks began to grow two years ago, and jumped a lot a year ago. We are one of the few who were ready for this. In the retail business, only three commercial banks now earn money - Alfa-Bank, Sovcombank and us. And the only important thing is whether you earn money or lose. Everything else is the details. In 2013, we earned $ 180 million in net profit, in 2014 - $ 90 million, and in 2015 we will be profitable. And something tells me that this year we will be the only non-state profitable retail bank in Russia. I wonder when a business earns and pays dividends. I personally received $ 30 million last year. This is what I understand, business.

I’m not at all ready to invest in anything, I have never done it and am not going to. I do not know how to be a partner. I can only buy 100% of the company and offer the founders a job. Sometimes it’s good to work as an entrepreneur to become a good manager. Recently, for example, I was going to buy Ubank and the “Traffic police fines”. But they wanted too much money. In vain. Now the market is bad, many are pouring in. Maybe in the near future we’ll buy or pick someone.
An important point - I do not want to disperse. Because focus is very important. Write large so that everyone understands. Here is an example of Nogotkov. There are many reasons for his collapse, but the main one is that he did not focus on one business. He had too many hobbies, and all this sadly ended. There are many such examples.

About principles and vision

The main principle is that the client is always right. I always dance from the stove, from the client. I am trying to find new unmet needs and satisfy them. If this is electronics, then the Birch assortment could be bought not for dollars, but for rubles. If these are dumplings, then they could be brought home by subway, and they did not stick together, like the Soviet ones. If beer, then unfiltered and with a screw cap, do not open your teeth. If banking, then online, without branches and queues. We find a niche and begin to develop it.

I looked at niches and opportunities. A good entrepreneur sees what others do not notice. For example, now I see that there is no strong Internet player in insurance. Therefore, I am engaged in Tinkoff Insurance. I do not know why others do not go there. Are they blind, deaf or what?

(Ed. Note: “Intouch goes to insurance”) Well, it does. But we will quickly deal with them. There is also a Renaissance, but what kind of company is this. 10 years losing money. What kind of business is this? It’s ridiculous. I cannot call them businessmen. Of course, not looking at competitors at all is hat-making. When I was going to dumplings, there was a huge Talosto company on the market, a real monster. They produced a thousand tons of dumplings per day, and we bought stanochki for 200 kg. But after three years, we were already producing 3,000 tons, and they stopped a thousand. Forehead forehead can not, of course, compete. You can’t head on to Sberbank, to Baltika, to Tinkoff. Need to look for workarounds.

I choose for a very long time, on the principle of "measure seven times cut once." Sometimes I’m mistaken. For example, in a situation with Tinkoff Digital. This project cannot be called unsuccessful, because I have not lost money. But success, probably, also should not be called. I thought the RTB platform (Real Time Bidding - the online classified ad auction - “Secret”), based on Big Data and the latest technology, would grow. I thought that all the display ads on the network will go there, but this did not happen. No explosive growth. The market itself was too small. So you also need to look at the volume of the market, choosing a niche.
The problem is that in Russia the media advertising market is muddy and immature. This is a “gray” zone, largely built on kickbacks, relations between people, these you-wass. It is difficult at the technological level to deal with dullness. We were lucky - we were able to integrate this technology into the bank. If you visit our site a couple of times, you will see our ads everywhere.

About quotes and loss of money

And whose capitalization has not fallen? Sberbank, Yandex, Mail.Ru have lost all 70–80%. Only the hero of our time Sergey Galitsky with his “Magnet” does not fall so much. This country has fallen. What are your questions?
Overcoming thorns and stars, we settled down in the last quarter of 2013. And then the re-lending crisis began. People grabbed loans and began to return them more slowly. Plus, a stupid amendment appeared in the State Duma, which the press replicated (in November 2013, a bill appeared in the State Duma that could be interpreted as a ban on granting loans remotely, but it soon turned out that the deputies missed the union “or” by mistake, “Secret”) .
Western investors seem to want to invest in Russian business, but if something goes wrong, they immediately sell the shares. The situation is understandable and explainable. I told them in the eye: here you bought shares for $ 17, a month later you sell for $ 6. What are you doing? Well, such rules of the fund, managers answered me: if the stock falls by more than 20% per day, they are obliged to lose it, otherwise the fund manager will lose his job. So the collapse began. And then Ukraine arrived, geopolitics, and we fell along with everyone.

I lost a billion dollars. I went here to the office, I look - all the employees on Bloomberg are sitting, they are counting money. Guys, I say, remember this day, you see a person who lost a billion dollars in 20 minutes. And I smile. There was a lot of wildness in that smile. I'm a man, not a turtle. Of course, there were no suicidal thoughts, but it was unpleasant. And the question is not only a billion, it’s all the same virtual, but stupidity. One put a comma in the wrong place, the other wrote in the newspaper not so, and the third began selling shares. This is absurd.

This is the problem of Russia - everyone needs everything tomorrow. To make my billion, I have been in business for 25 years. And only people from Skolkovo will hatch here, they already want an apartment in Moscow City and Tesla. Give them a social elevator. Go to the stairwell and walk up. It is necessary to work, and not to look for the elevator. What is the problem of Sergei Polonsky and many others? They quickly grew up and quickly lost everything. Many from fast money go crazy. I earned slowly and calmly. Tinkoff Bank President Oliver Hughes is an Englishman. He says, guys, calmly, everything is fine, after 5 years the shares will return to the IPO level. This is Anglo-Saxon thinking. And we need everything in a year, a maximum - in three.

About the conflict with Rocketbank

I love startupers. I am an apologist for entrepreneurship. I help young children, heroes sing glory. I usually do this when I have nothing to do. And I have a lot of free time. Twitter is fun. I'm sitting, nothing to do, let's troll. Maybe the customers at Rocketbank will increase, I will extend their agony for a month. Although, of course, they will not survive. God forbid someone will buy. For me they are like small children, I help them.

They have a very expensive customer service, they do not have the right products and income. There is Interkommerts bank, there are clients - and the Rocketbank application is somewhere in the middle. They live on a commission of 2% of Mastercard, but something else the bank takes. What they earn on, I do not understand. This model is doomed. They have 6,000 customers in two years, and we have days when we issue 3,000 cards a day. You understand the scale. The only option is that some bank decides to create a product for hipsters and buys them. But they have already burned so much money that it makes no sense to buy. Sorry for them. For me, “Rocketbank” is not a specific startup, but a generalized image, an example of how you can’t do business. Such projects live from round to round. They scattered investors, looted prosral, raised a new round and so on to infinity. And now you can’t live like that. Or you need to do a startup with your own money, or in a super niche where you can immediately earn a net profit. For the most part, startups attract investments, rent a new office, drink smoothies in coworking, poke their tablets. No one thinks about profit and economic feasibility. Why do we need to earn money, we are building a company. This is not entrepreneurship, but some shit. Investment money corrupts. When we were young, we did not have business angels, foundations, or rounds. But we did not complain. we did not have business angels, funds, rounds. But we did not complain. we did not have business angels, funds, rounds. But we did not complain.

About ecosystems

In the USA, the model is different. There is a stock market. But in Russia it is not. The largest source of capital in the world is the stock market. Not investment funds, and not bonds. Therefore, Twitter can afford not a dime to earn and have a billion-dollar capitalization. Therefore, the business models of Apple, Tesla, Microsoft do not work for us. If you want to create Apple, board a plane and fly to the USA. There is an ecosystem there, but we don’t have it. There are several funds, but these people are crazy. We have the right to life model for making money, but not capitalization growth.

The question is in this industry. Young people are sitting on social networks, rubbing around my accounts. And the more they sit, the less they do. I can afford to spend time on social networks, I am the owner of the bank, but they are not. Their startups do not satisfy consumers, do not build new ones, but master money and live from investor to investor.
Call it aggressive positivism. I really want to help - the guys behind the form have lost their content. Everything looks beautiful, cool, but if you ask, for whom are you doing this? What for? They will think. All Western funds "closed" Russia. Russian - they distributed all their money. I do not believe in public investment either. That's all, the only chance to survive is to start making money.

Kaspersky 20 years in this thread. I don’t have time left for international projects. Let the children do it. I'm old, I'm not ready. These are very complex markets. Kaspersky - an exception that confirms the rule. It makes me laugh when people fly to California to open an office without a product or sales in Russia. They do not understand that the level of competition there is an order of magnitude higher. I lived in the USA for six years, sold beer, lost money. Our startups are like astronauts, there are no brakes at all.

About future

Maybe tomorrow your Mamut will decide not only to make the best media about the business, but also to build the best online bank. And will come to me. Because there’s nowhere else to go. If he offers $ 2 billion, I will probably agree. So, not forever. And further into space, following Polonsky.