-I am pleased to introduce to you the main trainer on the program today, you can also be introduced as the main business guest, I am pleased to introduce to you Dmitry Voloshin, the founder and head of Simpals, with that much complex structure, which is very difficult for us to cover and understand and that is our challenge and we are waiting for Dmitry today to talk about himself, about the business and many more interesting things.
-Thank you! He presented himself in a very pompous and beautiful way and it turns out that he is a very important person. Today I want firstly to get to know you better, and secondly to tell you not about sophisticated marketing tools. And how in reality in our country you can make a product that is in demand worldwide, that is, I want to convince you that there are no borders and should not be upset that you live in a small poor republic, which imposes extraordinary restrictions on your abilities. Thank God there are no limits, we live in a world where everything is possible and the task of today’s presentation is to convince you of that. As I was introduced as a person who heads a company that does absolutely different, impossible things that are not related. It is true, it is partly true, because we have never had a priority to make a lot of money, to be the coolest, the biggest billionaires. We just have a lot of people working for us and they all have different interests and we try to do things that we like. There are a lot of people and we have a lot of interests, so we do web sites and three nines, Point, Play, a couple dozen other sites and we do sports events like marathons, swims, races, triathlons and we do a lot of social projects. We have advertising network Numbers. We have forums, offline products and one of them, one of them I want to tell today, is called the project lobster, I do not know maybe you’ve heard, not heard, but a long time ago, four years ago I got a passion, freediving. Before you tell what it is, I would like to two words, which of you want to speak, have he any hobby in life, which would seem to have no relation to the business. But here you are burning with it. Who wants to say please. Pigeons? Great. More. Filmmaking? Unprofessional, amateur? Professional means business. You know the difference between professional and amateur? Professional makes money, on amateur you spend money. At the professional you earn money, it does not mean that professional is cool amateur is not cool. Same as in sports, amateurs spend money to do sports, professionals earn money and it does not matter how fast they run. And who else . Yes, come on.
-Handmade, handmade.
-That’s great. Let’s go to .
-I graduated from perfumery school and have a lifelong passion for perfumery. now I’m developing my own organic shampoos.
-That’s fine. The girl first.
-Good afternoon. You never know where you’ll meet a millionaire. When I was coming up, I asked Dimitri if you were coming? He said I’m here to see you, and who are you? I said Alla. My mistake was that I should have said Alla and who’s next… To get Dmitry interested.
-Was there a project for me? Was there a pitch ready? Do you know what that is? Elevator pitch. You have three minutes to quickly sell a project to a millionaire while he’s in an elevator and can’t do anything.
-I should have said let me help you, because you had some heavy bags.
-What do you think is in those bags?
-I’m Alla, I’m a sociologist, I have an otlichnitsa complex. I study a lot, I work as a teacher.I work a lot with scientific literature.I still have the habit from my student days that I read scientific articles and take notes of these articles and now just two weeks ago I was at my parents and we threw out my notes, which were still from student days. I understand that it is capital, it is capital intellectual, excerpts from articles, but was thrown out. And I thought that maybe on the basis of my hobbies, interests, to make some blog aimed at students who are interested in sociology, political science, maybe management.
-I see. I hear you.
-Drifting…
-Drifting? What’s that?
-I just like cars.
-I know drifting is swimming, where one hooks onto the other and floats. Unexpectedly for a girl. Young man, what do you got?
-Foreign languages, numismatics…
-If you are interested, it is possible to make a separate assault to try to make a business on your hobby, on what asks our heart, what you are burning. Because it’s very difficult to make a good quality product when only your mind wants it but your heart is indifferent to it, you understand only that yes it will bring money but if you’re not burning with it, there’s very little chance to make it successful. What is freediving, I tell you. In a nutshell, this is when a person takes a full lung full of air and begin to swim back and forth in the pool, who can swim at one gulp of air more, the winner. Everything is very simple, this sport is held competitions around the world. I traveled a lot, watched and noticed that every one uses a piece on the neck put a bicycle tire stuffed with lead shot, hang it around your neck. Yes this is such a sinker, because the thing is that when a person picks up a full lung of air, this part of his body begins to rise up and swim so very hard and that you took a neutral position underwater and horizontal, so it’s easier to swim, and if no, you constantly need to dive, you waste oxygen. So you put this thing on and you put it down. And that’s how they used to do it, they probably do it now – they take bicycle tires, fill them with lead shot, put them on their neck and dive. Everyone from beginners to world champions swim in a bicycle tire. I thought it was very strange why there is not some device, a normal one, that a person can wear and swim decently, get out of the water to be congratulated, photo and video that you have some beautiful thing.Look at cyclists, runners, works billions invested in sneakers to come faster, and here 0, but I want to give you to understand that the market is very small. Freediving is a sport, half of which you never heard of, that it exists – and it’s engaged, I don’t know, about 100 thousand people in the world know about it and do it, so the market is narrow and there’s not enough products, but since I got into it, I decided to make some noise. So I came back from a world championship, where I had set a national Moldovan record and I decided to make a collar like that, to develop it. We got together with the guys, we were creative, we thought, we had different concepts. The basic idea was that it would not put pressure on my neck, but on my lungs directly, so it would be in the place where it goes up, that it would go down and be adjustable, so I could pick up any weight, because everyone has different volumes of lungs and therefore I wanted a person to be able to adjust to himself. We made a prototype that didn’t work after long experiments, because we wanted to make it with magnets. It all went to hell, these pictures that are flashing now, it took six months of different experiments. It wasn’t that I put all my stuff aside and just did it with the guys and it all fell apart in the background of the main activity. I gave there an hour a day maybe and there wasn’t a person who was only doing it, I just took from different departments and every hour or two I could spend on it, if any of you were doing it, you could give it all your free time and spend that much, there six months on experiments. At the end of the concept was born alive, finally we invented a latch, which here allows you to snap properly weights and gain any weight, you can, you can pick up different things, they have different weight all choose what you need. Now Vadim will show you a black prototype, which first appeared, we let the rows, you look. Then experiments, you understand, inside lead, or rather not lead, but a special alloy, outside rubber. This thing hangs on the neck, the tail goes on the back, there are special inserts of soft silicone that does not press on the collarbone, to be comfortable, too, experimentally was exposed and plugs that they do not pop out and got here is such a device that you have a red, trendy with a set of trucks that cling to the back and now we will show you and you look what happened, there too red, red here. Let’s unpack it, girls, and let it go around, it’s very heavy, and it’s supposed to be heavy.So it was conceived that he lay down, here it unbends here some, such, so put it on and when you lie down, here on purpose thin, so that your hands were, I as an athlete who directly engaged in freediving, hardly any of you could do if you do not dive yourself. Maybe there are nuances, that is, when I swim to better hydrodynamics, I just fold my arms this way. If it is thick, I can not bring them together and therefore will slow down, so all the nuances are taken into account here, hydrodynamic, does not create resistance in the water and with a set weight. No, no, that’s the thing, it does not slip, we did somersaults, tried different ways, but the shape has changed several times. The shape was very difficult to make, we did it on the computer, then printed on a 3D printer, then made a silicone mold, poured lead, then lined with rubber, with rubber was a lot of fuss, because there is no specialist in Moldova, we had to do a lot of experiments with the material in the mold. we have one more, let the guys to look at it quickly.
-Can I try it at lunch?
-Dive in?
-There is some extra weight, too? This weight does not affect the speed?
-It does, on the plus side.
-One plus is the weight, but it doesn’t add to the speed.
-On the speed and does not affect, the man if the load and pick up if the right weight, you’re full, packed in the water, hanging, absolutely in the water column, not going down and up and you need to spend effort just to move forward. If you don’t have it, you’re always surfacing, you constantly have to dive and the trajectory is wavy and you need to spend a lot more oxygen, here you only move forward. You breathe out at the finish line and you faint. I had a few blackouts.
-What’s the maximum time?
-Me, 6.5 minutes. That’s cool, yeah, for…
-Are the weights all the same weight?
-Here they are different, see the tail, I can unbuckle and add as much as I want.I’ll show you.
-Is there a chart, as a function of weight, of things from a person’s weight?
-No, I know a huge number of people whose weight volume is small. It doesn’t depend on the weight of the person, it depends on the volume of the lungs. The more lungs you have, the heavier this thing needs, the less lungs you have, you need less. How many healthy men I’ve seen, their lung capacity is so big that they need 1.5 kilograms and they need more than a chest that’s so big that they can sit for 11 minutes without air, the world record is 11 minutes. Yes, and they do not have enough of it, they like floaters pop up and that’s it, there is a special technique of packing air into the lungs, when you pack more. Then we thought about the name and so the lobster name came up, because it looks like an arthropod in this disassembled state, yes it’s called a lobster. After we made it, we tested it in the pool, everything worked out in the pool, we decided to go on the market directly, which I actually have to talk about. How about we made a great product. How do you tell the whole world that such a product exists and that you bought it. Yes it’s clear, you make a page on Facebook, you make a remote video, like what a cool product we have. (Video). In the style of Apple, you know, all sorts of smartphone rotators, there’s all sorts of things, well, yeah, showed how it works, how it helps you become more dynamic, hydrodynamic that it repeats the anatomy of your body and not strain while breathing, which consists of. This is an inexpensive roller, you can do it with friends to get together there in a month to do a roller. This is not a question, but the roller is necessary, it is important to properly package the product, whatever the product you have is very important packaging. I want it, I don’t know what it is, I just want it, let it be, I’ll put it on my sideboard, so you can’t spare money on it. Here are the basic three products, what we have a website, pages on Facebook and video, we began to promote. forgot, forgot not seen anything … It’s very simple, in our case, as we have clients freedivers, we found freediver sites, we started going to freediver groups, I already had a bunch of freedivers I knew, who I sent the link that there was a new product, plus I knew guys who dive very well, world champions knew. So we took part in different championships, different competitions, sports events, where we offered free lobster to the organizers, so they rewarded the champions, a standard strategy. That’s how we spent a few months, they were all in the negative, of course. The problem is that our product is heavy, the full set weighs 4 kg and shipping costs insane money, some countries more expensive than it costs itself. The cost of our product was, is now worth 150 euros a piece of Moldovan lead, but oddly enough the cost included the cost of space, people who are engaged in melting the lead and rubber, the work of managers. If you take it all into account, we got the cost of the first about 100 euros, one to make.
It would seem that here what can it cost. Selling for 150, and the cost of 100, the income was small, plus we began to develop a dealer network, because the project is interesting, bright we had requests to represent this product in different countries, plus we went directly to the guys themselves said. Guys, let’s be distributors. And the distributor has what, 30% discount. 20% discount from 150 euros count and there’s nothing left there 20 euros.
The first lobster in the distributor we gave zero or minus, just to increase sales, increase sales, increase production and decrease the cost of the product
And one person works on reducing the cost of production, another person works on increasing the volume of sales, so increasing the reduction of the cost of production is the optimization of production. It’s the rejection of external, well for example there is this thing that we ordered from a separate person. Here’s this mechanism of fastening, this thing is steel, it is welded a special way, we ordered these things separately, we calculated that this is a big percentage we had to give from it, in the end we took the equipment, the welding machine, the person and he makes Then took more people to adjust the conveyor, because before we had one man did all the stages of production, there is a roller about the stages of production, and now we have a man doing lead casting, the other does stubs, 3 rubber, 4 packing, due to this reduces the cost, because as Ford said, all you know him that conveyor engine progress. That’s what we came to, came at that time it was 3-4 months ago that the queue for orders yes. After the show, Vadim went to an exhibition in Italy, he took a lobster there, showed it to us, met an Italian dealer, there turned out to be a lot of free riders in Italy and they all wanted it and we can’t cope. How long was our waiting list of 80 grand? You order a lobster and you get it in 2.5 months, it’s not very cool, we were written to, some people refused and we were very ashamed, we wrote letters like that, guys, what’s wrong with you.
-We just said that we would do it in a month and a half.
-I mean, that’s not right either, we didn’t know honestly, we sold about 200 of them, it’s not very much, don’t think it’s a big business, it’s just developing. but the next step is to expand. We decided to expand our production and to enter another market, we decided to do other colors to interest fashionistas, all the freedivers also people not deprived of taste and usually these all and money well I would not say that they are straight very big riches.
The cost of delivery to Italy 40 euros from Moldova lobster and very many Italians say, and I do not want to pay 40 euros, expensive for them, the question is, they know how to count money, for them 40 is quite a large percentage.
Here then we did a colored version, where you can, you dial, you buy a base of one color, then these things you choose yourself, this also gave a certain. Bus, people began to liven up, began to buy, order a variety of multicolored tails, participated in competitions. is the man who is directly involved, he is now on vacation Sergey Logvinenko, project manager, so he went to one of the competitions, there puts these things, tells what this stuff. always there are lines, all interested. here’s what we have to date, 33 countries that buy our lobsters, 6 dealers in these countries, there are highlighted in red and the number of orders now can not tell. We had a slip in July and August , that’s not the season for the pool , all the people go to the ocean to dive deep , here and since September comes back and that usually people write reviews that they almost always have better personal results in this pool , and stories of the most enjoyable , what I would brag about would actually be that I was pleased , I will tell you directly that we were drunk that day that in our lobster, in that giant, which played the man, the world record was set by Voronkov, he collected, here this man who has lungs as two people, he did not have enough, he collected such snot out of these two probably, from three made a thing and bang, here received a prize. We were very pleased that he used a Moldovan design.
– Question, that is an absolutely unique product, there are no analogues?
-Unique as a load, but it is the best product, weight for free diving in all the championships, it is considered the best, number one in the world.
-This is your personal development, you have patented, you protect your development, because China has been designated receiving this product, and we know their talent for replication.
-Look what happened with the patent. So we decided to get a patent for it, when it was already selling for 3 months, but we couldn’t do it, because nobody produces lobster in the world but us. And when he sees that all over the world they have them, he says guys, what do you want to patent, that is you have to first patent it, and then release it.
-And the fact that it’s yours doesn’t interest you?
-Well, how do you prove it’s ours? Well, we are not afraid of the Chinese, the Chinese will not do it is not spinners, which every second needs. Here you have to worry so that it is very hard to break into the market. It is very small, very narrow, the Chinese are not interested. But it’s our mistake, I admit that we should have patented it first, and then entered the market, and don’t make that mistake, it happened with this one, the next ones we do now, we’ll do them a little differently.
Now our task, we go to amazon, eBay. It’s easy to go to eBay ahead of time, you open a business page, you register because eBay doesn’t have its own warehouse, it just works like 999, and you just send it like you do in Moldova. With Amazon it’s a little bit more complicated. Amazon doesn’t work this way. And if it works, we are not satisfied at all, they have a huge warehouse and we want to put our lobsters in the warehouse, so they ship around the world themselves, with their price tags, through their postal contacts and it’s difficult for us to do this, because we are Moldovans.Now we are looking for an American company that will help us through them to place on amazon. I think within a month we will do that and we can go on amazon, type in lobster and see our Moldovan weight and buy it. And this slide is a very important slide, it speaks about the next step, the next stage of development of our product. We want to make lobster, to take it from a highly specialized sector to the mass market. What this means, we will enter this market and say, dear friends, who likes to dive, ordinary people? You come to Turkey, you dive in pools, you dive at home, you like it, especially children. We say that there is a special product for diving, put it on the neck, you can dive one and a half times more, you can stay under water one and a half times more and will develop the direction that any person, any family would be nice if you had such a thing at home, if suddenly you go somewhere to vacation, take it with you and it is small, weighs 1.5 kg, it has a different color, it has no tail, as the professional version, this is an amateur . Wrapped around the neck of mom, dad, parties, dive, have fun, If it works, it will certainly be another scale, other money that is, we will try to create a market, to create a trend, like spinners and other things do.
-Like flippers, you don’t want flippers…
-Yeah, for those on the water, what do you call them, who watch the fish? No, no, no, no. Not divers. I knew it. Well, there are people who put on a mask, snorkel, lie down on the surface of the water and look at the fish. It’s good for them, too, to have balance in the water.
-How quickly a child can take off such a thing?
-It’s absolutely, everything is absolutely safe. We’re going to shoot a video clip saying this thing won’t sink you. It’s slippery enough, you just stand up, it slips and falls down or you turn on your side, it slips and falls down. It won’t sink, there’s no locks, no latches, you just stand up and it falls off. This is also very important, because parents don’t want their child to drown, because if it’s too deep, you just drown. We will try to dig in this direction, to have a really big serious adult product. Why have I told you this story, so that you could think about what you have, your hobby, your passion and it’s possible to make a business out of it, to do something that no one bothers about, for example if you do rowing, but come up with some stuff for rowers, that you feel it is necessary, no such thing. In fact this project, it does not cost huge money, it costs up to 10,000 euros to enter this market, any of you can find a loan or borrow money to start, but then you can earn a completely different level of funding may be. At the next stage you can raise other money. That’s why maybe we are at the end if we still have time.
-We still have half an hour and we would like to ask you to tell us about your company, how it all started, maybe structuring.
-I wanted to help, they won’t let me… Why do you want to know about our company? They want to be helped, not how cool other companies are.
-We are inspired, we study the experience including, the risks, mistakes or successes…
-Other people’s experience, useless experience. It does not help anybody. Here’s a concrete tool, here’s what I have to do. I have this problem, help me solve it. And to tell you how cool and strong we are, how lucky we are and how we’ve done things, you can’t use that for yourself. Because we have our own business, our own way, our own ideas, our own spirit, everything is our own, and it does not help, so I’m against business training, they only inspire for a day or two, you go so cool, I can do it too, then everything is forgotten and everything goes back to normal. I’ll be like that too, you’ll see. I’m just showing you a new direction. Maybe you haven’t thought about it, that you can do some little things that you can touch with your hands and bring them to the world market, it’s absolutely real and it’s not complicated. You have no idea how big the world is, how gigantic the market is and it’s hungry, you can feed it anything, absolutely anything. We just don’t believe in it, we’re afraid of it. In fact, you can sell broken matches if you present them correctly, they will sell. That’s what I wanted to, what message I wanted to get across.
-How do your customers feel about shipping one of these, if it costs 150 euros and shipping is 100, how do you deal with that?
– Vadim….
-I am figuratively speaking, if I want to order something from aliexpress, something that costs 20 dollars, and delivery costs 30 dollars, then I close this page.
-There are two nuances.Nuance number 1, they have no choice.Nuance number 2, see the first.
-When we work with Amazon, we will bring a lot of luck, it makes no sense to carry a little luck.
-You kind of got carried away with the lobster, shipping. It’s very interesting of course and say that the opportunities are endless. I am interested in a very grounded question. Dmitry, you live in Moldova. The main specifics of our country is agriculture. Has it ever occurred to you to go into agriculture?
-No. Why should I go into agriculture?
-I did not say that you should do it.
-I’m saying if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, even if it makes millions, don’t do it.
-Do you think it is possible to make a good business project in agriculture?
-Yes, I believe that you can earn millions from agriculture, but I would still focus on Moldovan agriculture for the world, not Moldovan agriculture for Moldova. We are now thinking to do sports gels, sports nutrition based on apples, which we throw away as garbage, if these apples to make a sports gel, sell to the world, it will be cheap, in the local market I will not sell, no one needs them. Grow mushrooms or nuts, for example … This business does not catch on because it does not seem scalable to me, that is, we are not interested in doing business that has some kind of boundaries.
-What is your education?
– I’m an engineer, but to be honest I haven’t worked as an engineer, so I forgot to say we make cartoons, I forgot to say something, we also do animation, we make cartoons, maybe you saw our funny cartoons about death. I work there as a director, so I’ve never worked as an engineer, I must be ashamed. Well now here comes a garage, here’s a garage that’s doing innovation, now we’re doing a couple more projects and when young people come in there, there’s aspiring electronic engineers or from mechanical engineering faculties. I can at least talk to him, they won’t boot, it’s very difficult, it’s impossible, I say take a transistor, a p-n-p junction, solder. I mean, I’m good at it, so it’s hard to get me wrong, that’s a plus.
-But what about the rest?
-What about the rest, the rest is a 4.
-In the rest of the business, when business leaders have to understand, understand everything about their business.
– I understand the question, certainly for the start, for the beginning, the man who does business, who heads the business must understand all the processes that take place in his company .But over time, the role of the director, the role of the seo, the role of the owner of the business shifts from operational activities, he must stop to engage in operational activities and control every process in the company, stop just the man behind the entire company, any employee who works, I need to know that at the head of my company is the dude on whom I would like to go after him, that’s his main function. Ask me what’s going on right now you have 150-170 people working there. Ask me what, 90% of the people do what?
-I don’t know. I don’t even know half of these people by sight. That’s not a plus for me. I just have memory problems, alzheimer’s will be in my old age, I think in my old age. My main role as the guys say, you stay out of our processes, take the flag, go run to the North Pole, shout, wave the flag, all this from you everybody expects it, so do it. Come up with some projects. Here are three people for you, don’t touch the rest, I beg you very much. Roma is for me all the time, Roma is our operational director, in fact he is the general director. I’m just a seo business. He knows everything that happens in the company, he has his own web, his tentacles in all departments. When I come from where, I say it’s all bullshit, we’re doing it all wrong, we’re going to do it now. And they tie my hands, they come into my office, what are you doing, you’re hindering our work, we’re going to make money. Let’s take the programmer off now with three nines. So we lost 500 thousand here. Then we take off the designer, then we take off the marketing specialists, then we take off two more managers, who deals with sales in numbers, we lose another 300.000, I get so sad. I say: Okay what do I want to do? I want to plant trees. Here you have two people, here’s Vadim, and sit quietly in the corner and do not interfere with people’s work. That’s how we do things, and we already have some resources. But over time, I want to create a department in the company that will report only to me and will not do anything else, I want to do trees, I want to do lobsters, whatever I want, but so far it is not possible, everyone is making money, trying to survive, because at us 20% of our projects bring money, 80 spend it. I mean, we have a problem that a lot of projects don’t make any money, but we like doing it. We have an animation studio where 20 people have been working for 10 years, they haven’t earned a penny, but they have spent a lot of money, and they made great cartoons. We’re making a product for virtual reality. Do a cartoon in virtual reality, that is, in the world there are a dozen if any such cartoons, this is the new trend. A sportsman, you may have heard, who deals with sports, is another 20 people who also do nothing, but spend money, intensively, in large quantities, to understand organize a marathon – it costs one and a half to two million lei. For him to just hold it. It is impossible to find that kind of money. Phosphorus, a bunch of people who send money to phosphorus, also the project does not bring money. Social projects, verde. md has recently launched five more people who also do nothing, spend money… We have a professional project in general…
-Dima, what are the key competences a business owner should have?
-Competences, knowledge and skills? I think that for the owner, well he becomes, yes, that is, they are not born, it’s very important for a person who creates a business, I think one quality, now someone from you will say, the most important quality of an entrepreneur. You may be stupid, you may not be charismatic, you may not know anything about accounting. But if you can bash your head against the wall, you’ll succeed, that’s 80% of the success. If you don’t give up, if you don’t give in to anything, you just chisel and you go on doing anything. That’s what I’m absolutely sure of. it’s different for the master.His next task is to inspire people, people simply have to look at him, to be inspired that some good company is working, what a great man is heading, to be like this man, to follow him and of course this is the main quality, not operational activity, not understanding marketing and negotiating skills, just for people to look and say, wow, what a great guy. It is cool that he is at the head of the company, not that schmuck in a tie.
-Tell me, how does your day work? Based on what you said.
-I’m gonna lie so you don’t get disappointed. At work, at work 24 hours a day. I work out every day, either running or swimming. I work out early in the morning, in summer now we get up at 6:00 am, at 7 am the workout starts at 8 am and then I sit at home, I talk to my wife, my kids, I don’t come to work before 11:00 probably, it’s rare. And then I take Romanian lessons usually, the last six months I’m trying to learn Romanian, I’ve been learning it for two years and I’ve learned it for six months, I have meetings or meetings in the afternoon, it’s terribly exhausting, because I’m already out of the age of the director and I, and often, especially there are things that no one can do. As the director on a cartoon there is no others, it is my personal project I like to be engaged, on a marathon I cannot allow that what that crappy made. There are such 5-6 projects which people come to me to meet and I have to make a lot of decisions. I am an old man, it tires me out quickly, and at about 6 o’clock I go home. Sometimes I work at home, I don’t come to work, I solve questions through Skype, Skype, Skype Skype is dying, through Messenger, through other means of communication, but lately I try to make sure I don’t get disturbed by operational activities, because I write, I write a block, now I am writing a book about this story about our death, a children’s Harry Potter type of Moldavian. Now I concentrate more on creativity and to think of a new project, for this you need a clear mind. If he is busy with operations, solving many problems, nothing comes to mind, and I, Vadim won’t lie, am constantly bringing some ideas, and let’s do this, and let’s do that, all 5, 10 and the principle of it and expect me to give something new and see what will happen next with the company, I understand that the source of income the company has now, it will not last forever and I now need to think about what this company will earn in 5 years, because most likely those sources will die out, because civilization moves very quickly. You have to think about that right away one step ahead, and what we’re going to do after that. Well, it depends. Well in general I never was, I eat healthy, it disgusts me, but I eat it. I work out, it turns out that the body itself begins to demand, it rejects food that is heavy, unhealthy, you just don’t like eating a piece of meat, it’s hard for you, why did I eat, you go to fish and baked goods, all kinds of pies belyashy too, it’s hard and you start to feel your body. Better understand your body, yes it gives you subtle signals and you hear them, because before the signals came, but if you are thick-skinned, you do not feel them, now you hear them.
-Do you participate in any sporting events?
– Yes, of course, at first I couldn’t, because I organized it. I’ve always participated, now I’m lying. Yes, yes, yes, swims, I need to see to gather the guys and here I did not get a banana, and here I did not hang a medal.
-Is 999 your first project? First success?
-Well it’s the first one which started to bring money. I mean before that there were three, four projects which were all aimed at wow cool too but they didn’t bring money and 9 is the first project which started to bring money.
-As far as we know, it didn’t happen in one year? Hundreds of years before it started making money.
-In general I consider that we are lucky with this project, we have many people in the company who believe in karma and reincarnation, and that nothing simply happens in life and therefore I consider that not by chance that 999 went to us and not to other company, we try all money that we earn, to return back to those projects about which you told 80% who spend our money, we do it consciously, because we believe that thus the universe will support us n So this company is probably beneficial to the Universe, it will give us more money to spend even more money back. If you start to spend money in the wrong way, to squeeze it, then nothing good will come out of it and we love what we do.
-You’re not just a businessman, you’re a philosopher.
-We’re all philosophers who are good at what they do. We run without headphones so we have time to be alone with ourselves. It’s like meditation. We go to different practices sometimes, vipassana, maybe you’ve heard, 10 days of silence, it’s a separate topic of conversation.
-Tell us a little bit about the marathon in the desert, how?
– Various. I loved the water after this marathon, I never knew that it is so tasty, when you run and have 10 km to run in the sand with a backpack, and the temperature above 40, and you know that someone will give me all the water is finished. There are only a few sips left and your legs are all tangled and your eyes are swimming and you know when you sip, there in 2 km, in 3 km. You take this gulp in your mouth, you twist it in your mouth, it’s so tasty, water is so warm, you know, but so cool. Nothing cooler than water in this situation, you finish it, swallow it and run for minutes, you’re just so high. There are dozens 3-4 wrote reports, now trying to make a book based on the report on the marathon de sable in the desert, when we ran 250 miles in the Sahara, I wrote there 5 reports and only 100 pages of text turned out, with photographs 200-300, that is necessary to sit down to read, just an hour and a half to spend, and wrote it probably 2 months. Vot and probably someday I will assemble all this stuff and issue some kind of book that you can read. It is very motivating, many people read them, they also begin to do sports, run, jump, write their reports, motivate other people, as a virus, very cool. So if you are interested, we are still doing a movie more about MDS. In 2-3 months, we will make a film an hour, in the sands in the Sahara, make a movie, watch the movie, the movie is easier than, it is harder to read, and watch easier. Come on, be brave, ask me something that makes me feel uncomfortable, something tougher.
-Is sport an element of the corporate culture in your company?
-We have no corporate culture, no dress code, no corporate culture, if a person wears a tie, they look at him funny, you are allowed to swear, you can open the door to my office with your foot, what else do we have, you can drink, smoke, walk in whatever, bring animals, corporate culture in our company is a prohibited word, you can not say.
-Working time? Can I come when I have completed a task and then leave?
– It depends who, if they are operators who work with clients then you can come at night, but there are no clients at night, that is, Numbers comes 9 to 6, and enough programmers, we ask them to come in the daytime, some come at night, in silence they work better.
-About sports, probably the highest concentration of triathletes and marathon runners in one company. How many percent in the company are marathon runners, a lot, runners, swimmers but it’s not because we select them, again, answering the question that they look at the owner and say, well, this is probably right, you start training. And yes, I worked for someone, 3 months after the institute. And those three months was enough for me to understand that I don’t want to work for somebody else, I had to work for this, ended up in a scuffle with my colleague, he was a red-haired nasty guy, we were doing this, Archicad, we did interior design and then I met computer graphics, basically everything started I saw that computer, what is computer graphics, it was 96, it was just reborn and I had a strong impression. I decided to quit design, to quit all this nonsense, because some thugs were working there. I began to study computer graphics then, to do video advertising, 96-97, my career began with commercials, I began to do commercials on the computer.
-That was the idea of the first business.
-It was not a business, I had a desire, I just wanted to eat, my parents are all in Orenburg, I don’t have any relatives here, I was alone in Chisinau, and my wife came in ’97, so I had to somehow feed the family. It was not about business, I just learned graphics, I was very interested, I started doing computer graphics and stuff like that. As the first client to find you no portfolio, no work, who are you, a boy from the street, I made a TV commercial tvt, recorded it on tape and went around all the offices showing what a great job I do, what a great graphics I do… I went around walking walked around for six months, could not find anyone, then I accidentally went to Sun TV at the TV center, they saw, said just looking for a contractor, make us the screensaver for our TV channel. I worked like that for about five years alone, the music video Ozone, you know the band, I shot all the clips for them, four clips, and I was the director, with Dan Balan we did. There was no studio back then, there was no simpals, it was just me and one guy, he does computer graphics, I shot, directed, then we collected everything, and in 2002 I realized that the studio was already bringing in some money, we decided to start a company that would do, we didn’t know what it would do, but we needed everything in the bank account, because there were a lot of people wanting to do commercials, commercials 5 years after the company stopped making money, because I took all the people who did and gave everything away And by that time the IT department was on its feet and was able to feed the studio back. That is, if before I was supporting the programmers with commercials, then it was the other way around. We stopped making commercials, started making cartoons, and it grew.
-Did you have an idea to move abroad? Why did you decide to stay in Moldova?
-I didn’t have such thoughts, and thank God, because I believe that you should live where your loved ones live, who make you feel good. Here is the highest concentration of such people in the world for me. I have everywhere, I have many friends all over the world, 1-2 everywhere. And here I have a lot, so I’ll live here, and thank God the borders are open, the planes are cheap, I can go anywhere, the main base, the main headquarters is in Chisinau. I’m not going to leave, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but thank God we don’t get involved in politics, we don’t like it, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to get us out of here.
-There’s an interesting saying. If you don’t get involved in politics, politics gets involved in you.
– Well, maybe.
-Colleagues, if there are more questions, let’s wrap it up.
-Here’s a question about cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Your opinion.
– I don’t know anything about finances, I don’t really know what VAT is, and I don’t think that cryptocurrencies are the future of currencies. That is, all currencies in 50 years, there will be no paper and no accounts, and the banks will be distributed. I don’t recommend to invest money in cryptocurrencies now, to go buy a pack of bitcoins or ether, but you have to look close and read about it. Friends, thank you very much. I hope that I helped somebody with something, that maybe something has changed in somebody’s head. If there will be any questions, ask contacts on Facebook, you can write to me, ask, I will be happy to answer you, help.
