Arkady Volozh is a Russian top manager, founder and head of Yandex, who showed a vivid example of worthy competition for Western business.
Today, the Yandex search engine occupies a strong leadership position in Runet, has a large audience and provides a huge industry of services: mail, blogs, virtual money, games, free hosting.
Arkady Volozh: biography
A native of Kazakhstan (Guryev, now Atyrau) was born on February 11, 1964. Arkady Volozh, whose family was intelligent, grew up surrounded by humanitarians. Mom Sofya Lvovna taught music, father Yuri Abramovich was an oilman, his uncle was the famous violinist Usminsky V. L.
Arkady, unlike his relatives, was interested in the exact sciences, especially mathematics, which led the young man to the Physics and Mathematics School in Alma-Ata. It was here that the acquaintance with Ilya Segalovich took place, which grew into a strong male friendship.
After graduating from school in 1981, friends went to Moscow to enter Moscow State University. Having failed the exams together, the guys nevertheless became students, but from different educational institutions: Arkady Volozh entered the Instituteoil and gas them. I. M. Gubkin, and Ilya - to the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute. The paths of the guys parted, but only temporarily: in the future, the work of Arkady's life - "Yandex" will unite them.
Influenced by change
Having completed his studies in 1986, a promising young specialist Arkady got into the Institute of Control Problems, where, along with other researchers, he was engaged in processing huge amounts of information. Promising scientific horizons opened before Volozh, which were suddenly crossed out by the perestroika that broke out in the USSR. In 1988, the "Law on Cooperation" came into force, which pushed the young man to the first cautious steps in business - an area hitherto unfamiliar to the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The institute where Arkady worked received an order from the district committee of the CPSU on the mandatory creation of a cooperative on the basis of the institution. Volozh Arkady Yuryevich with several other comrades was elected to work with an educated society, called "Master", and became its co-founder.
First steps in business
Work in the cooperative consisted of a lot of diverse and unusual things for the Soviet era. Thus, the organization purchased sunflower seeds from collective farmers and delivered them to Australia, receiving foreign personal computers in exchange. The barter rate was quite simple: a carload of computers was exchanged for a carload of seeds.
Arkady, who was responsible for the technical part of the issue and was engaged in setting up the received office equipment, understood the full potential of the new business. So I put it off for a whiledissertation and began to study the language of all businessmen - English. In this he was assisted by an American, Robert Stubblebine, who, as it turned out, was hatching the idea of supplying office equipment to the territory of the Soviet Union. I suppose it turned out to be only at hand, and he invited Robert to join the "Master". However, due to certain reasons (possibly ideological), the leadership of the cooperative rejected this idea.
In 1989, Volozh Arkady Yuryevich left Magistr and, together with an American friend, organized the CompTek company in the capital, the purpose of which was all the same deliveries of office equipment to Russia. Stubbline, who easily established a business, found buyers himself. The competence of Volozh, who, due to circumstances, retrained into a competent practicing businessman, included technical issues related to setting up office equipment. Even while working at Magister, Arkady managed to earn 2 personal computers. Having realized them, the young man bought an apartment in the capital, which he would hardly have succeeded under other circumstances, even if the name of Arkady had received worldwide recognition in the scientific world.
How to simplify the search process?
Volozh, who processed significant amounts of information, constantly thought about the need to simplify the process of finding the necessary information. For the most part, Arkady was assisted in this by Borkovsky, also Arkady, who studied computational linguistics. Volozh's idea to create a mechanism for searching for the necessary information and Borkovsky's extensive knowledge in the field of morphology of the Russian language contributed to the formation of the company in 1988"Arcadia". Having hired competent programmers, the founders resolutely moved towards the fulfillment of their plans.
Founder of "Yandex": on the way to success
The first successful project was the classifier of inventions - an order from the Institute of Patent Information. A small program weighing 10 MB was liked by the customer and other organizations involved in patent science. This software brought profit for 3 years; then things went downhill a bit. In addition, the 90s were in the yard, forced to put state employees in the framework of survival and led to the decline of science.
This prompted Arcadia in 1993 to decide to take Arcadia, which was in danger of collapse, into CompTek. This is what helped Volozh save both the staff of talented employees and the developments that were available in the field of search technologies. In addition, CompTek was doing very well at this time: personal computers were selling with a bang. The company, expanding the sphere of its own interests, simultaneously took up the distribution of network technologies in Russia. In the 90s, Volozh's friend Ilya Segalovich joined them.
Colossal work on the digital edition of the Bible can be attributed to the first successes of Arcadia. Nearly half of the holy book was typed by hand; the circulation, transferred to floppy disks, began to diverge quite well. Then a large order was received to create an electronic version of the works of Russian classics.
"Yandex" is a search engine of Runet
Along with the main activities, the program departmentwas engaged in finalizing the search device, completed in 1996 and called "Yandex". After 2 years, Yandex was in 7th place in the top most popular Russian-language sites.
In 2000, Arkady Yuryevich Volozh, the founder of Yandex, became CEO of an independent Internet company of the same name. In 2007, he returned to science and headed the Department of Data Analysis at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The successful Russian entrepreneur has many awards and prizes on his account, and his fortune in 2013 was estimated at $1.15 billion.
