Ilya Osipov

Ilya (Viktorovich) Osipov (b. 6 January 1975) — a Nizhny Novgorod IT businessman, media manager, serial entrepreneur, blogger and public figure (he advocates civil rights and freedoms in the sphere of information distribution). "The guru of the Nizhny Novgorod internet".

Online nicknames: Ilya Os, Ilya000.

Married for more than 13 years to Anna Prasikova (linguist, teacher, fitness instructor). Two children, Savva (10 years old) and Varvara (5 years old).

In Russia he is best known as the founder of one of the largest city websites, NN.RU, sold after 14 years of development to Hearst Shkulev Media/InterMediaGroup. In 2006-2008 director of the "Moskva.Com" portal, owner and manager of the "Birzha Plus" publishing house from 2009 to 2011.

Co-founder of the startup I2IStudy.com, the startup Numbuster, the startup Bankrot.Pro, the event series MDDay (Mobile Developer Day) and others.

Political views: Liberal, Libertarian.

Amateur sportsman: long-distance running

He was subjected to unlawful police detention in connection with his activity in the Nizhny Novgorod Civic Movement.

Favourite quotation : Everything that can be — is, (c) unknown Civilisation is the exchange of values for conveniences. (c) Stanislaw Lem.

Favourite joke: Children in the basement were playing startups. Investor Potapov was tortured to death.

MBTI psychological type: ENTJ

Logical-intuitive extravert.

The essence of the phenomenon

An American-type businessman : a technocrat, a hands-on researcher, an inventor.

He spreads services that help people around the world to learn and to communicate. The distinctive feature of Osipov's innovations : they are free for intellectuals, they allow people to earn from the labour they invest, and they increase the potential mobility of the population.

Autobiography (from the Web)

Osipov Ilya Viktorovich, born in 1975.

I work professionally in the internet business. My areas of interest: the Web, mobile applications, virality, gamification. I take part in various capacities: startup founder, investor, mentor, consultant, manager. I have a couple of successful sales of projects built from scratch. Apart from the internet, I am interested in the stock market and in property investment.

Projects I created or took part in (of course, I was not the only one who had a hand in them): the city portal NN.RU, the city portal NNOV.RU, the event series MDDay.ru, the entertainment site NNOVER.RU. The portal Moskva.com ( now closed). The mobile application and network Numbuster, the language learning platform I2IStudy.com, the Bankrot.pro project and others. I also took part in the city portals ruKazan.ru, tumix.ru, www.dzerzhinsk.ru and so on. Co-founder of an e-commerce and logistics project: "Group buying in Nizhny Novgorod" and "Distribution Centres".

I used to program for dos and windows.

I write novellas and short stories (at an amateur level).

I am keen on unusual experiences: I have been to about 50 countries, made a parachute jump, flown a loop in a sports plane, and so on :-)

Where I studied: Schools No. 37 and No. 14 in Nizhny Novgorod. Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod State University. Faculty of Economics ("PromEk")

Personal achievements

Graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Nizhny Novgorod State University with a degree in «Management». Studied as a postgraduate.

In 1996, 1st place in the student programming olympiad at Lobachevsky University.

In 1996, 1st place in the All-Russian student olympiad in applied mathematics and computer science, as part of a two-person team (together with Ilya Semyonov), held by the State Committee for Higher Education of the Russian Federation.

Professional achievements

In 1999 he set up his own business together with Mikhail Iosilevich – the internet company NN.RU, and became its director (until 2001).

1999 - 2012 The internet company NNRU became the largest internet company in Nizhny Novgorod and the acknowledged leader in the field of web solutions and internet media. Its main line of business is the city's largest website, reflecting every side of city life, as well as 3 subsidiary internet companies. At present the whole group of companies employs more than 40 people in three offices in Nizhny Novgorod, and the company's turnover exceeds 1.5 million dollars a year.

2002 - 2013 Internet company OOO NNOV», a competitor of NN.RU, bought out, pulled out of a pre-bankruptcy condition, its debts repaid, the company restructured, a transition to growth and stable operation carried out. From 2003 to 2006 revenue grew 16-fold. At present OOO "www.nnov.ru" is the No. 2 internet company in Nizhny Novgorod after OOO "Internet company NN.RU".

2006 - 2007 Internet company Moskva.com (in the city of Moscow), one of the founders, director. By the end of 2006 traffic to the Moskva.com site reached almost 2 million users per month. Resigned in 2007 because of disagreements with the majority shareholder.

2009 Participation as a mentor and investor in the Alloka project.

2009 - 2011 Birzha Plus Publishing House. Bought out and became head of this oldest publishing house in Nizhny Novgorod (1 website, 1 magazine, 4 weekly newspapers). Carried out its restructuring. Sold it at the beginning of 2011, having realised that he was "not on the same path" with the print press.

2010 Sale of the stake in the Alloka project.

2012 Start of work on the idea of the I2IStudy.com project

2012 Preparation for sale and sale of the internet company NNRU. Bought by the largest player in the print press market, the company Hearst Shkulev Media (archive) (part of the international group Hearst (archive) .

2012 Participation as a mentor and founder in the series of events MDDay (Mobile Developer Day)

2012 Start of work on the idea and prototypes of the NumBuster project.

2013 Sale of the internet company NNOV. Bought by the same holding as NNRU.

2013 Move to full-time work at I2IStudy.com as project director.

A comment on the proposed ban on studying foreign languages

Pavel Pozhigaylo, chairman of the culture commission of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, has distinguished himself in the field of bans. A mathematician, a former GRU officer, a candidate of historical sciences and president of the Stolypin Foundation, he proposed on the air of the Voice of Russia radio station that Russians be banned from studying foreign languages. In his opinion, this would help to fight the departure of citizens from the country and would thereby improve demographics.

The experts of "Birzha" have no intention of giving up language learning. ..

Ilya Osipov, IT entrepreneur

- A ban on studying languages would mean the final "dumbing down" of the country. If such a ban were introduced, I would try to leave the country with my family as quickly as possible.

Experts are astonished at the initiative to ban the study of foreign languages.

A French radio report, 2012

Ilya Osipov is a local entrepreneur who has joined the opposition movement. Ilya Osipov owns a bar whose doors are always open for meetings of activists and opposition members.

"I stood there thinking about how dangerous it is to hold meetings in my own bar. I understand that I could lose everything. My licence could be taken away. Here it happens like this: a call comes in to the administration with a request to inspect the establishment. People come with an inspection and ask what kind of meetings are held here, what kind of people gather here. And after that they will find any pretext to take your licence away.

Ilya Osipov is also very active on the internet: he created the city's 2 main portals. Because of this, his activity in the opposition movement is exposed to additional risk.

"Various people from the security services drop in at our company. If in some cases they are interested in specific information, they can obtain access to it from the server without any difficulty. We understand that it is impossible to resist this. In most cases their requests are lawful, but the way they make them, in terms of form, is unlawful. The second aspect is the 'extremist opposition members', as they are called according to their own terminology. Personally I do not consider them extremists. We go to rallies together with them, they do not declare anything unlawful. As a result we deal with both sides. On the one hand we give opposition members the opportunity to express themselves on our site, we provide them with a kind of platform. On the other, we have to answer requests from the security services."

a report by Anastasia Betyo.

1000 signatures for the resignation of an antisocial mayor

Meanwhile, in Nizhny Novgorod an initiative group headed by blogger Ilya Osipov has begun collecting residents' signatures for the mayor's resignation and has already sent the first batch - about 1000 signatures - to the presidential administration. On 18 July a rally was held in Nizhny Novgorod under the slogan "Sorokin must resign". Political analyst Alexander Kynev noted that "civic activity in Nizhny has grown a great deal over the last two years and is connected with dissatisfaction over mass construction, while Sorokin's connection with the construction business is widely known"

Kommersant newspaper, No. 130 (5161), 25 July 2013

"For the preservation of the historical landscape"

City residents came out in favour of preserving the historical landscape of Nizhny Novgorod
30 September 2013

On 27 September, during a press conference at the Media Strike Hall, a mass campaign to save the historical landscape of Nizhny Novgorod was launched.

Those who gathered, among them many well-known residents of Nizhny Novgorod - the writer Zakhar PRILEPIN, the television presenter Ilya LASTOV, the internet businessman Ilya OSIPOV, the journalist Yuri NEMTSOV and other representatives of culture and business - spoke not only about the rapid, visible disappearance of this landscape under the onslaught of construction pits, but also about concrete steps towards creating parallel civic structures for the protection of heritage. These structures should take on the functions that state bodies are failing to perform.

Specifically - the carrying out of state historical and cultural expert assessments of valuable buildings and ensembles, which would make it possible to have them placed under state protection. An appeal to the residents of Nizhny Novgorod had been circulated beforehand.

The historian and human rights defender Stanislav DMITRIEVSKY, who has been defending the historical and architectural treasures of Nizhny Novgorod since the eighties of the last century, assessed the event as a long-awaited step beyond the narrow circle of the same few heritage-protection enthusiasts. The successful start of the campaign is to be followed up with a series of charity concerts, exhibitions and other educational events, where the collection of money will continue for the process of granting worthy elements of Old Nizhny the status of protected sites.

In the opinion of the businessman Ilya OSIPOV, who for more than a decade - like many other residents of Nizhny Novgorod - has been photographing the city's "rare and vanishing species", if the campaign succeeds it will become possible to act pre-emptively, and the chances of successfully protecting the urban environment will increase tenfold.

Of course, those who gathered recalled the "Kozma Minin precedent" as an example of successful popular fundraising; and now the townspeople have come forward as a kind of customer - customers for the Nizhny Novgorod they like, with an interesting and varied environment, a distinctive face and preserved historical buildings. "I want to live in Nizhny Novgorod, to walk with my child along Nizhny Novgorod streets, and not among faceless high-rise buildings that can be seen in Hong Kong, and in Singapore, and in any city on the planet" - such were the typical "shouts from the floor".

After the press conference a heated discussion arose about further actions. As the architect and expert Irina AGAFONOVA notes, the process of preserving a monument cannot stop at its inclusion in the state register; that in itself does not guarantee its untroubled future. Therefore the next stages must be restoration and functional use of the building. There are concrete proposals for these stages as well, which the initiators of the press conference are ready to put to the city and regional administrations later on. As soon as they are prepared, they will also be announced. But the first step must be placing the building under protection. Otherwise civilised investors, ready to restore a building and use it at a modest profit, investing in the development of the historical environment, will not be able to compete with predatory investors whose task is to pump as much money as possible out of the golden land of the city centre, creating in the process an overdense, homogeneous, visually oppressive environment.

It was also proposed at the press conference that a public movement for the preservation of the cultural heritage of Nizhny Novgorod be created.

Press service of the Dront ecological centre

Regional information business. For the magazine "Kommersant. Sekret Firmy"

"My partner Mikhail Iosilevich lived in that house over there, and I lived a few blocks from here," says internet investor Ilya Osipov, pointing out of the window of the Tinkoff restaurant in the Etazhi shopping centre - built, incidentally, by the mayor's company "Stolitsa Nizhny". "All business life is concentrated in the centre, where you can walk from one meeting to another so as not to sit in traffic jams. In the capital that is impossible - somehow I am not crazy about Moscow."

Iosilevich and Osipov are legendary figures of the Nizhny Novgorod internet. In 1999 they created the city portal nn.ru, on whose forums townspeople actively discuss their problems, buy and sell property and «make friends». «The internet is a global thing, but people always have local interests, they want to discuss something with their neighbours», -- Ilya says.

The partners started up in Russia earlier than VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, but skimmed off the real cream only in their home city. «By the time some five years had passed since the site was launched, the portal's recognition in the city was approaching 100%, we even began to be recognised in the street as though we were show business stars», -- Osipov laughs. nn.ru is still the most popular site in the city, visited by 70,000 people a day. Revenue is 2.5 million roubles a month. But the problem of the «low ceiling» quickly became a live issue for the partners – since WHICH? year turnover has been growing by only 10-20% a year, whereas earlier it doubled? annually. The partners even created a clone site, nnov.ru, in order to create the appearance of competition and to capture part of the advertising budgets. Then, together with partners from the capital, they tried to promote a city site for Moscow – «Moskva.com». But that venture came to nothing – in Moscow social media had already gained weight.

Rupert Murdoch made billions on traditional media and is now investing in the internet. Ilya Osipov did the opposite – in 2011 he bought out the publishing house «Birzha», which published the business newspaper of the same name, the most popular in the city. «They were not managing to move onto the internet properly, and we were techies, far removed from journalistic affairs; I was interested in trying to combine these two businesses and obtain a synergetic effect», -- Osipov reflects.

The experiment proved unsuccessful – the costs of the printing house and of maintaining a team of journalists ate up all the profit. Osipov closed some of the holding's publications, cut staff, and a year later sold the paper to structures close to the city manager. He maintains that he even made a little money on it.

Now Osipov has after all found a way to «break through the ceiling» – he invests money in IT startups. He says he is already involved in 11 projects, which release mobile applications, develop electronic digital signatures and work on «cloud» analytics of telephone calls. «I don't even need Moscow now – I have taken to flying twice a year to meetings in Silicon Valley. If a project is strong, it is better to present it there straight away», -- Osipov reflects.

True, immediately after the interview he «flew off» to another valley – not far from Nizhny Novgorod. On the bank of the Volga 4 hectares of land are for sale, where Osipov and his friends are thinking of building a cottage settlement – startups are of course a promising investment, but land near Nizhny steadily grows in value.

Kommersant Sekret Firmy magazine, No. 11 (325), 1 November 2012

An account of the student years of IT entrepreneurship for the NN-Today.ru portal

— Tell us about yourself: where did you study, what were you keen on?

— I studied at Lobachevsky University in the economics faculty, graduating in 1998, but despite the faculty I had enormous success in programming. I was the best-known student of our faculty in everything connected with that. I once even won a student programming olympiad. Whereas management, economics and business I passed with somewhat variable success.

— What was your first business?

— We started doing some kind of business from our second year, everyone was making attempts back then. At first we worked on geoinformation systems and 3D, and also developed the first city system, something very similar to 2GIS. Later I did some work for my father at his trading firm, acquired a bit of business experience, but did not stay on there.

— How did the nn.ru project come about?

— I received my diploma, and my partner Mikhail Iosilevich and I launched the nn.ru project practically out of nothing. We met on the internet, though it later turned out that we had a great many acquaintances in common, and that he had been in the same year as me. And then somehow, sitting in my kitchen, in literally an hour we came up with the business we have now been running for 12 years.

— What did you have to face, and how did you deal with the problems?

— Nn.ru began from zero: there was practically no money, my partner's father lent us $1000 and computers were brought from home, and we rented a room in my father's office for free, but after using it for half a year we moved to a new place. During the first three years we earned no substantial money, only enough to feed ourselves. As enthusiasts we worked until 3 in the morning. We launched it on 7 September 1999, and it began to bring us money in 2001.

— What gave the push to the income?

— It was changes in the market and occupying the right niche. When in the nineties we came and offered advertising on the internet, it prompted smiles, because nobody took the internet seriously at all — it was an incomprehensible medium for advertising. But a couple of companies turned up who believed in us straight away; those people already had established businesses, they believed in us and sponsored us by placing advertising. Now I understand that it was simply faith in the project, and it is thanks to such companies that one can say nn.ru came into being.

— Are you satisfied with what has come of it?

— My attitude to the site is mixed. There is a lot I do not like, but I understand that what came out came out, and came out very successfully. It is a regional project for the mass consumer, and it has occupied a mass market niche. So it is hard to speak of tastes and such things. More than a million people a month visit it. But because of the constant, to put it mildly, conflicts and negative atmosphere it is disliked, though I understand that this is a reflection of society. There is no point blaming the mirror.

— How do you assess the internet market of Nizhny Novgorod now? What is lacking?

— As a practising entrepreneur it is very hard for me to say. All the niches that are not taken, we try to take. We assess ourselves as a fairly large player, all the more so as we have many sub-projects and projects with partners.

— Where should entrepreneurs who want to work on internet projects begin now?

— Now, unlike at the end of the nineties, everything has changed: on the one hand there are fewer niches, on the other an educational and informational infrastructure has taken shape, so I would recommend doing everything not out of nothing, as we did, but going to startup gatherings, seeing what is presented and how, getting to know people like yourself, investors and business angels, learning about ways of attracting investment, talking about projects behind the scenes.

NN-today.ru

"Prigorod.Life", an interview from San Francisco

31 December 2013

Ilya Osipov, an IT experimenter known in Nizhny Novgorod as one of the founders of the local social network NN.RU (now bought out by Hearst Shkulev Media Group), has settled in a suburb of San Francisco. Over a Skype conference «Prigorod.Life» talked with this pioneering compatriot about the format of life in the USA for a young family with several children. - Good afternoon, Ilya! Many Nizhny Novgorod residents have «lost» you. From the photo gallery on Facebook one can gather that you spend months on end travelling around the national parks of the USA and software developers' conferences. How is the family arranged, if it is not a secret?

- My wife and I could not go to America for several months without seeing to the children's education, so the elder one attends an American school, where, incidentally, he is doing fine. A language environment with 100% immersion — he already speaks English quite decently, although in Nizhny Novgorod he also studied with a tutor for 2 years.

Because of my son's school, which acts as an anchor in space, we cannot simply travel like that, so all our excursions are around California. We have of course already seen a great many interesting things, both national parks and museums with dinosaur bones and simply amusement parks; over the holidays we plan to go to the Grand Canyon.

Since the long-term goal is for the children to enter one of the world's leading universities, they must know English brilliantly, at the level of a native language, both written and spoken, and without a real language environment I consider that impossible. So we shall probably live in two countries. As for my work, I have managed to become a remote employee of my own office, that is, I work entirely over the internet.

- Roughly half the entries on your FB consist of timings of 10-20 km runs and displays of a dietary menu, such as a glass of red at night, and recently impressive photographs appeared from the finish of the Berkeley Half Marathon.. one gets the impression that you are a newly-minted Forrest Gump. What is the point of such a strong emphasis on the dynamics of movement in your American way of life?

- Well, the achievements have only appeared recently I have done sport for a long time, but mainly it was fitness clubs. When the first child was born, there was very little free time. I trained myself to run daily at the Nizhny Novgorod stadium “Vodnik”, next door to which I lived, and then a bad ligament sprain and the move to Moscow completely knocked all my plans off course. Two years ago I started running again; I was prompted to it by the personal example of Sasha Bazanov, a Nizhny Novgorod event organiser and collector of travellers. Besides, long-distance running suits my character best, I am persistent and an individualist. And running does not require company, which suits me entirely.

I took part in the San Francisco half marathon, simply because it was held nearby. I ran it successfully, though unofficially. After that I immediately registered for the half marathon in Berkeley, which was put on by the same organisers. (That city is a few kilometres from SF). I think I ran the distance quite well for an amateur, in 1 hour 46 min. In all 8,000 people took part in it, that is, a great many. At the start I even placed myself in the group running behind a pacer with a sign saying 1 hour 40 min. A pacer is a person, usually a professional sportsman, who deliberately maintains such a tempo as to reach the finish in exactly the announced time, and runs the whole distance like that with a placard on a stick, serving as a reference point for the others.

To be honest, I prepared for a month, running 10 km every other day, and worked up a good speed. That is why I was able relatively easily to run 21 km (half a marathon). By the way, I came to the finish roughly 800th, that is, I made it into the top 10 percent.

- Direct observations of the American construction industry that can be made while running around the outskirts of large cities are interesting. For example, in Russia there are many foreign low-skilled workers, and it is customary to complain that they have flooded the suburbs and that, in particular, because of them it is hard to find physically oriented work — have you seen anything like that in the States?

- San Francisco is being actively built up and developed, although the regulation of the market is among the strictest in the USA (an enormous number of all kinds of restrictions). Nevertheless, in essence I live on a peninsula bounded on three sides by the ocean and the bay, and on the fourth the famous Silicon Valley begins. There is very little space in the city; usually to build something you have to demolish something. And demand is enormous, internet companies are gradually moving from the Valley to San Fran, actively developing Downtown and the new business districts in SoMa.

Young employees of growing internet companies, even ones located in the valley, often want to live in San Francisco; it is lively here, there are many events, much cultural life, here everything is treated with tolerance and forbearance.

In the city the interests of an enormous number of nationalities come together, there is an Italian district, a Chinese District, JapanTown… many Russians and people from the USSR, Russian speech is heard everywhere. It often seems that there are practically no locals. And people keep arriving, both from all corners of the world and simply from other US states as part of internal migration. Here there are: money and work. People come, property prices rise.

- By the way, what is distinctive about the American property market? You once told in one of the chats that you had grasped many interesting laws of price formation.

- I have always been a little involved in property, as one of the methods of investment. One cannot after all rely entirely on the internet and one's own work; in the end internet projects are very, very risky.

I cannot speak for the whole American market, but in San Francisco there are curious things; firstly property prices fluctuate very strongly depending on the district and even the block. Often — here is a «good» district and prices here are enormous, and here is a «bad» one, which in reality may be a few blocks from the first. With such fragmentation one must of course rely on local experts.

Secondly the market is very lively, that is, selling times are very fast, good properties sell very quickly, the liquidity and elasticity of the market are simply phenomenal. In Russia, on the other hand, properties can easily wait a year for their buyer.

Thirdly everything is transparent; on the internet you can simply, knowing the address of a property, look up who its owner is, when it was bought and for how much; moreover the history of that property is visible — the transactions, the rebuildings, the owners. All out in the open, it is very interesting. Of course there are a great many nuances to the market.

And lastly I want to note the fact that San Francisco stands on a tectonic fault, an earthquake may happen here at any moment

- I think many would be interested to compare everyday life : relatively elite Russian housing in the centre of a large Russian city, where you came from – what degree of comfort does it correspond to in the USA? In Nizhny Novgorod the area of public zones and children's playgrounds is shrinking. How are things with that in California?

- In SF there are few children, the municipal authorities are very worried about this and try to create every possible condition for those there are.

There are quite a lot of children's playgrounds. Very good in terms of materials and well thought out. Often a playground is surrounded by a fence such that a child cannot open the gate, so that the child cannot get out and disappear from the supervision of not very attentive adults. Playgrounds are everywhere, near schools, in residential blocks, by bodies of water, in parks, and even by the city hall.

In front of the city hall they brought in a lot of artificial snow for Christmas and dumped it there, specially so that children could play.

Life here is, in principle, very comfortable. The buildings are low, mostly one to three or four storeys, apart from Downtown. Many parks. Bodies of water. Within the city limits there are geese, ducks, gulls, swans, squirrels, raccoons, many different birds that I know nothing about. People are very calm. Everywhere it is the custom to let pedestrians pass..

- Are small suburban bungalows similar to the Nizhny Novgorod "dachas" and "garden plots" used in San Francisco?

- Practically — no. SF consists of huge neighbourhoods such as Richmond or Sunset, with tens of thousands of private houses, predominantly single-family ones. Despite the fact that the houses stand rather densely, they are separated from one another and have a small plot of land at the back. Mostly the buildings are two-storey. With such a way of life there is no need to have anything out of town.

Those who live outside the city, in the nearby towns, also feel cosy, I think. Silicon Valley is, in essence, a huge village with low-rise development, stretching south from SF for a hundred kilometres along the bay.

Many married couples, once their first child is born, aim to move from the city to the suburbs. To raise their children in calmer and more comfortable conditions. I have stayed with friends in such towns; it is not merely calm there. It is boring there

However, a couple of acquaintances do have dachas in the mountains, on mountain lakes, but these are rather not dachas in the Russian sense, but something like hunting lodges.

- How different is an American cottage from a domestic one? Built-in electronics, the "smart home" — how do they look on average today in the country from which, like Chapayev, these systems began their victorious march across the planet?

- The "people of California" are emphatically varied and every family lives in its own way, a huge cultural range.

However, I have noticed that the native residents are fairly conservative in everyday life. The cleverest gadgets are, as a rule, systems for automatic heating and maintaining a comfortable temperature. I have not seen anything more elaborate at anyone's home. Or perhaps I failed to recognise it

The usual difference from Russia is a gas fireplace, and a shower in which it is impossible to regulate the flow of water (the old American system is alive to this day).

- How much does an apartment acceptable for a young family cost, in a detached house and in a multi-storey building? Is it difficult to live in rented apartments?

- San Francisco and the Valley are very, very expensive. Practically the most expensive in the USA if you leave out the island of Manhattan in New York

Renting a decent apartment will cost from 2 thousand dollars a month, and it is customary to rent for no less than a year. Nobody lets for a month. Electricity and gas (used for individual heating — very inexpensive) are, roughly speaking, cheaper than in Russia.

Water is expensive. In SF you can drink it straight from the tap. The bill of my family of 4 for utilities is about 250 dollars a month, and more than half of that is for water. The meters, by the way, are all automatic. And they transmit the readings themselves, electronically.

- How do communities in the suburbs communicate with one another? Is there any local life in terms of street festivals, town meetings (of which there are rather few in Russia)? On what occasions do the local residents pay attention to you?

- The local residents pay no attention to us at all. We are surprisingly ordinary. San Francisco has plenty of freaks of all kinds to pay attention to.

The greater part of SF's residents are immigrants or people who have moved here from other states. A huge number of Asians. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese. The city constantly hosts events or festivals of district / city scale — mostly outdoors, the climate allows it. These include amateur performances, sporting events, performance art, parades. Farmers' markets, usually held on Saturdays, are also very popular.

- Where are the residents of the American suburb employed?

- In California there is a huge number of self-employed people; I read in a local newspaper, around 30 percent. That is, they pay taxes, but are not hired employees anywhere. These are freelancers and small entrepreneurs. This is the highest figure in the USA, and I suspect in the whole world as well.

As for the IT sphere, I think that 90 percent of it is represented on the West Coast (the Valley and San Francisco) and about 10 on the East Coast (mainly Boston). The "trick" of the western part of the country, on the whole, is that people are very open, and snobbery is rare. A great many meetings under the most varied pretexts are organised for entrepreneurs, where people come simply to get acquainted and (possibly) to listen to the speakers; on the whole the prices for taking part in events are very affordable. That is, you really pay 10-20 dollars for entry, as I understand it, just so that the organisers can cover the cost of hiring the hall. People are glad to get acquainted, and they talk about what they are doing, they introduce you to partners and share their contacts without any problem.

- How many startups are in your personal development?

- One startup that I am engaged in seriously. Incidentally, I prefer the old term "project". In the other projects I take part in one way or another, I am a mentor, co-founder, co-investor. For instance, the NumBuster project I thought up entirely back in Nizhny, but it is managed and developed by foreign partners. I like it very much and I constantly take part in it, but rather as a consultant and mentor. It is impossible to do everything yourself and sit on several chairs at once.

Should teams from Russia take part in this style of life? I think they should take part, but it is difficult to do remotely. That is, broadly speaking, why I am in California — to raise the efficiency and attract investment to the most productive ideas, including partners from all over the world.

- Good luck to you, Ilya. We hope that now you will do something interesting for America too.

- Certainly. I wish your readers a Happy New Year I wish you to open new years with new cities, it is useful in terms of clearing out the brain.

- Thank you for the insights. Until we meet again on the pages of our amazing publication.

Prigorodlife.ru

Interesting facts

Personally designed and wrote the first version of the forum on NNRU together with Alexey Pavlov and Andrey Shapochnikov NNRU.

Osipov's NNRU user number - user_id 2

Writes science fiction stories and novellas, but considers that there is no point in publishing them.

Before the world financial crisis he was planning to buy an island in South-East Asia.

Did not sell the domain Osipov.ru for 50,000 dollars to a namesake with the same first name - the chairman of the Yaroslavl Regional Duma (archive) .

Has done a parachute jump, flew a loop-the-loop in an aeroplane, dived with scuba gear, was on Elbrus at the 4200 mark, but did not reach the summit.

Since 2013 he has commanded advanced methods of psychological influence. "I dispersed some youngsters, about 5 of them. I walked up and stood in the middle of their group, standing there, silent, smiling. They fall quiet, exchange glances, shift their position from the bench to the archway. I follow them. Stood beside them, smiling: "Do talk, you are not bothering me, and am I not bothering you?" A couple of indistinct exclamations on their side and ta-da!: "You live here, well, we get it, we're off...".

Initiated (archive) the collection of more than 1000 signatures for the resignation of Mayor Sorokin, and sent them to the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. The last straw was a car park, to "ease" the construction of which the corrupt authorities were planning to demolish part of the historic Kulibin Park.