Entrepreneurs: Alexey Semeney’s AtContent
by Miki Saxon
As many of you know, Nick Mikhailovsky, my long-term Russian business partner, is a successful entrepreneur and active in the Russian startup community. He introduced me to his circle and working with these Russian entrepreneurs is an ongoing pleasure.
I worked with Alex and besides loving the idea of AtContent I found his story of how to get hired as an expert team when you have neither expertise nor a team creative and hilarious.
These days Alex lives in San Jose; here’s the story in his own words…
One day Alex and Nikita agreed to create one of the largest and powerful information companies in the world!
To achieve this goal they understood they had to solve a huge problem. They looked at the traditional publishing industry – publishing houses, existing Internet services, newspaper websites, etc., and current solutions of legal distribution.
They understood the publishing and content distribution market had problems with tracking content copies, copyright and legal distribution.
They decided to create a new technology service which would revolutionize publishing and content distribution.
At that moment, neither Nikita nor Alex had a job (they retired), no team, only $1500 in their pockets, fantastic idea and a coffeehouse between their homes where they met every day and ordered glasses of water.
They understood they should start with something and decided to become a partner of AnyChart (the company has a developer’s office in Irkutsk) by creating a Microsoft Silverlight based visual stock component for them.
Nikita called them and said, “Hey guys, we can do it for you because we have a great team with Silverlight experience which you don’t have.”
The AnyChart guys answered, “Deal! But please show us your team!”
The problem was that Alex and Nikita had no team and nobody in Irkutsk knew Silverlight platform…
But they found the solution; they decided to call all the programmers they knew and ask them to play the roles of members of this great Silverlight team!
After two day of phone calls Nikita and Alex found not only actors but really good programmers who wanted to learn Silverlight and work with them to build a great company!
So, during that one week of October Alex and Nikita got the contract with AnyChart, built a first team with Dmitriy and Aleksey (they still work with Alex and Nikita) and started to build future IFFace and AtContent.
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Flickr image credit: AtContent
June 7th, 2012 at 1:16 am
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