Already at the age of 14, he opened a children's labor exchange. I had some pocket money, but my school performance began to suffer and the business had to be closed. Volkov’s next business turned out to be much more “long-lasting”: in 1998, while a student at the history department of Moscow State University, he founded Social Discovery Ventures. Starting with software development, the company eventually transformed into a venture fund (and its founder, from a historian, retrained as a philosopher and even became a Doctor of Science). SDVentures' portfolio projects include the famous Lingualeo and Shazam, numerous dating sites and specialized social networks. In an interview with Inc. Volkov told how he chooses projects for investment, why an innovator needs to be able to philosophize, and why his offices are decorated with works of contemporary artists, and why his employees participate in art performances.

Connect everyone to everyone

Venture capital funds typically focus on a specific technology or industry. Build expertise in one specific area and can then create synergies between portfolio companies. We focused on products that involve social engineering and help connect people in the virtual space - social networks (they are used by people of all ages) and instant messengers (they have practically replaced SMS messages and telephone communications).

Good Internet projects can scale throughout the world. We invest in those that are primarily focused on Europe and America. And to differentiate ourselves from other funds, we provide companies with marketing expertise. In our office in New York there are many marketers who help projects from Eastern Europe to advance in the American market - so that they do not mess things up and reinvent the wheel. In addition, we have developed technologies for chatbots on our own - and provide them to the projects in which we invest. We can also provide them with streaming and video chat technologies.

Facebook, like any universal solution, is not tailored to a specific task (and will always be so). We invest in vertical social networks that bring people together for a specific purpose. For example, Street Life set out to connect people living in the same area and with the same zip code so that they could jointly solve their problems with garbage, safety, or nearby construction. We also invested in the Academia community of scientists - there you can publish scientific works and discuss them together.

It's easier to spend yours

When choosing a project to invest in, I am guided by my interest in the topic (and not just commercial considerations).

For example, Halo Neuroscience makes devices to increase neuroplasticity in the motor cortex. I was especially interested in studying this product since my doctoral dissertation is indirectly related to this topic. At the same time, from the very beginning we had no doubt that the company would become commercially successful (and it did). My own investment opportunities are wider than those of the fund.

When you work with other people's money, the responsibility is still greater. And I - since these are my personal funds - certainly have more freedom. Startup founders are more important to me than the business idea and company structure.

Over time, the idea may change beyond recognition, but it is the team that is responsible for translating it into a successful business. For example, one of my latest investments - Fable studio - wants to make a virtual friend with whom it will be interesting to watch movies, listen to music, study and shop on the Internet. The company's founder is former Oculus Story Studio producer Edward Saatchi, one of the world's best specialists in creating VR videos. We met, and I saw that he was distinguished by a practical approach to solving problems and understanding the needs of potential clients. In my opinion, this person is capable of building a successful business.

Who is Dmitry Volkov

Entrepreneur

Volkov is an active participant in the venture capital market. In addition to SDVentures, he manages RD Ventures and Gagarin Capital as GP (General Partner). In a number of other funds (including 500 Startups, iTech Capital and Blockchain Capital) Volkov is an LP (Limited Partner).

Philosopher

Dmitry Volkov is a Doctor of Philosophy and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Consciousness at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. His areas of scientific interest are problems of consciousness, personal identity, free will and moral responsibility. In 2014, Volkov organized an expedition on a sailing schooner to the shores of Greenland with the participation of leading philosophers of the world, and in 2017 and 2018, as part of a group of Russian scientists, he met with the Dalai Lama.

Volkov supports Russian museums (among them the Tretyakov Gallery and Garage) and contemporary artists (in 2015 he financed the release of a series of albums “Contemporary Art”). In 2017, the Artguide publication included the entrepreneur among the 50 most influential figures in Russian art. Volkov himself participates in art performances along with his employees.

Company as a person

Great companies have personality characteristics. People develop sympathy for each other when they find out that there are points of intersection between them, in addition to their profession. For example, singing, stamp collecting, radio or historical reenactments. It's the same with companies. Harley Davidson reflects the free, daring and self-confident male ideal, and Coca-Cola represents the American dream, a symbol of the nation. Apple's marketing grew from the image of a revolutionary - not a conformist and techie, but a creative free person. Personal characteristics are needed not only by clients, but also by company employees - this way they can build some kind of attitude towards it. You can love this image, feel sorry for it and even hate it, but for the most part people are tuned to positive emotions.

People who are dissatisfied with their work cannot create a service that will satisfy the audience. The falsehood, one way or another, comes through, and both consumers and employees feel it. If the company has some kind of ideology and values, then they should be cross-cutting for both users and employees. This does not happen 100%, but you need to strive for it.

Corporate Sovrisk

Contemporary art is part of the corporate life of our foundation. Our meeting rooms have constantly changing exhibitions of paintings, and in the evenings we host lectures by artists, collectors and curators. And the employees themselves participate in various performances. For example, we often go as a group to the Burning Man festival: with art projects, and not just to hang out. Corporate symbols - on T-shirts, T-shirts and backpacks - contain objects from our collection, and we often offer trips to Garage as gifts to employees.

When we started hanging paintings by contemporary artists in meeting rooms, it caused a colossal protest. Many employees reacted angrily: “We want to see good things - birches, sun and sky - and not these strange figures!” But any emotions - positive or negative - are success. When you introduce something into a company and it doesn’t react at all, that’s a big problem.

Contemporary art is discussed here even in smoking rooms. Of the 400 employees of the Moscow office of SDVentures, approximately 30% have a direct interest in this topic, 50% observe from the outside, 20% are skeptical. But the number of people who are involved in contemporary art is growing. People want the company to have something of its own, and if it is art, they are ready to support it.

Looking at how ordinary objects are seen by the artist, employees willy-nilly become infected with new ideas. For example, our analysts drew a transaction graph in the form of a picture, and the developers presented new software in an artistic form. In general, contemporary art stimulates creativity, and this unexpectedly sprouts in a variety of places. One of our system administrators became an artist himself and made a cool performance.

For business communications, it is important that the image of an entrepreneur is not two-dimensional. When a person simply writes that he founded 3 companies and invested $100 billion, this is not something you could feel sympathy for. That is why in the presentation for the foundation’s partners we add information about all these stories with contemporary art.

It is more pleasant to trust your assets to intelligent people. They live not only for today and think about philosophical and ethical issues. But if I were building some factories or doing transport loading, perhaps other qualities would be needed there.

Philosophy for innovators

In technology and business, a philosophical approach is very useful. It allows one to doubt established social and economic practices and teaches a person to doubt that the present situation will remain the same tomorrow. This skill, in principle, is useful to any person, but especially to an innovator.

Developing your ability to think critically is very important. According to American tycoon Mark Cuban, over time, philosophical education will be more in demand than technical education. Programming can be automated to a great extent; today it is not at all the same as it was 20 years ago.

About Dmitry Volkov

Investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, musician, philosopher...Dmitry Volkov has many guises, in each of which he succeeded. You can meet this person at a jazz concert playing the piano, on top of Mont Blanc or at a Dalai Lama conference. In 2016, he and his foundation earned $100 million from Internet services that we all enjoy using.

Childhood and youth

Many significant events took place in 1976. For example, the Apple company was founded, a new album by ABBA was released, and the world's population reached 4 billion people. And this year a future millionaire was born. He knows how to attract attention to himself. However, for Dmitry this was never an end in itself. He has always been and remains a man of thought and action.

He earned his first money at the age of 14. At this time, teenagers want to get a job. Dmitry organized a labor exchange in Moscow. His customer was the Moscow News newspaper. He not only recruited a team of distributors for her, but also became the inspiration for this team. And although there was always little time to study, he did not stop studying. As a university student, I plunged headlong into the Fido network. I felt at home there like a fish in water, I was looking for programmers for huge projects and was not afraid to be responsible for grandiose tasks. In 1997 he founded Social Discovery Ventures (SDVentures). And off we go: startup after startup, investment after investment... In 2016, I made a profit of $100 million - and this is not the limit.

Invest and Think - To Survive

The traces of his investments are in companies that are on everyone's lips. Have you ever Shazamed music using Shazam? Have you learned English with Lingualeo? Looking for neighbors, travel companions, friends with TripTogether, Roomi? This means his money worked for you too. He was an investor in the electronic payment operator Payonline, and the company itself received the Runet Prize.

He built a business out of the real needs of those around him. For example, it was necessary to train staff - and he simply hired teachers for this. But the training course was so good that other people began to join him.

Or here's another example. At some point, Dmitry noticed that his interface specialists were working on the side. What would another leader do in his place? I would fire everyone. But Dmitry acted more wisely: he created the UsabilityLab company, which began to search for and fulfill orders for third-party clients. By focusing on both design and conversion, she achieved good success. Both the employees and the boss turned out to be in the black.

Scientific activity

However, this person’s life seems to be divided into several parts. A business with a large income is an important aspect of activity, but not the only one. Dmitry is a philosopher, defended his doctoral dissertation on issues of consciousness and the works of Daniel Dennett. He is interested in concepts such as free will and moral responsibility.

Video: Dmitry Volkov answers questions about free will on the popular science Youtube channel “SciOne”

He became one of the founders of the Moscow Center for Consciousness Research at the State University. . The center helps scientists who work in analytical philosophy. One of his latest investments is the social network of scientists Academia.edu, which provides open access to scientific information.

Hobbies

Volkov is an amazing connoisseur of contemporary art. He subtly senses the needs of modern society for contemporary creativity, participates in events and acquires unusual objects. For example, in his collection there is a musical instrument that looks like an ordinary harp, but whose string tension depends on the Bitcoin exchange rate.

Together with Oleg Kulik, he created the art object OraculeTang - a monkey figure that hangs in a cage like a mask and is preparing for a dialogue with humanity.
And when he needed to play at the Street Piano Festival, he sat down at the instrument himself. During the performance, electroencephalograph sensors were attached to his head. The device recorded brain activity and transmitted it to a large screen. So the millionaire musician found himself, as it were, a “dissected” participant in the performance.

“To Survive” is the name of the film in which he played with Dmitry in his youth. He loves risks, so he climbs to the top of Mont Blanc, pilots helicopters or slides down untouched snow slopes, far from the slopes prepared by people. He celebrated his birthday on the highest peak in Europe, making it into all the world's news reports. An article about his trip in one of the Russian publications bore a symbolic title - “Catching up with the top of the receding mountain.” There is no doubt that Dmitry still has many peaks ahead...

Entrepreneur and investor Dmitry Volkov likes to talk more about philosophy and contemporary art than about business. He is preparing to defend his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, organizes street festivals for musicians, artists and scientists, sponsors exhibitions at the Tretyakov Gallery and constantly thinks about the meaning of life. At this time, his company is developing its own Internet projects and investing in others, for example, in the Shazam service, projects Lingualeo, TripTogether, Roomi and others. Volkov told The Secret about how he became an entrepreneur and philosopher, and explained why art and technology strongly influence each other.

I started my first business at school, when I was 14 years old. A friend offered to employ our peers, and we opened a children’s labor exchange; we didn’t think about legal issues then. It seems that “Moskovsky Komsomolets” accidentally wrote about us, guys with and without parents began to come and bring applications. We started looking for employers who needed young people, hired young people and teenagers as couriers and promoters, and took a commission for ourselves. The Moscow News publishing house hired 20 people through our exchange to distribute the Russian-language edition of the New York Times in Moscow, I was also among these 20 - I led the team. At some point, we stopped doing well at school, there wasn’t enough time for lessons, and the business had to be closed. By that time I was already earning money for personal expenses and helping my mother.

How Social Discovery Ventures came to be

In the 90s, I was one of the activists of the Fido network, the prototype of the Internet. I was then studying at Moscow State University at the Faculty of History, translating from English into Russian and vice versa, various people asked for help. One of these people, an American, once asked if I could find programmers to translate something from the ColdFusion language to ASP, and I said that I could. Having asked for a decent fee, for which, in my opinion, at that time it was quite possible to translate the entire Tolstoy into any language in the world, I set out to look for people capable of completing this task. I found one good programmer, then another, and four years later there were 200 of them. So in 1997, Social Discovery Ventures (SDVentures) was founded.

I'm not a programmer. I was bad at programming. But I was able to effectively structure the work and communicate between clients and programmers. That is why I began to further develop as an entrepreneur and leader.

At the age of 28, I discovered that all my time was consumed by work. Moreover, the more time I spent on work, the more time and attention it required. It was necessary to come up with a barrier so that work would not absorb me entirely. I decided to get a second higher education and entered the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. I had to leave work at 6 pm in order to be on time for classes. But by that time I already had a good team, so some of the functionality could be delegated. As a result, I received a second diploma and defended my PhD thesis on issues of consciousness and the works of Daniel Dennett. And now I’m preparing to defend my doctorate. This is a continuation of the ongoing research.

Spin-off companies

Photo: © Facebook / Social Discovery Ventures

We were mainly involved in custom programming. But some of our products and services have become the basis for new businesses - spin-off companies. For example, an online sales management system made for one of the clients eventually turned into the PayOnline company. She provided processing services for Internet businesses. In the 2000s, we received a $100,000 grant from Microsoft to improve this product. Now it is one of the market leaders.

Another company grew out of our internal needs for employee training. I have always devoted a lot of time to training teams, and Western experts often came to us. One day one of my friends, also an IT business owner, asked if his technical specialists could also join the course. This is how SoftwarePeople was born.

Another spin-off company is UsabilityLab. A very strong interface designer, Dmitry Satin, joined our team. The work went great. But at some point we noticed that our employees were doing “hack work.” They design not only for internal tasks, but also for external customers. I decided not to fire them, but to create a separate business. After some time, this company also became a leader in its industry. We have designed for many large customers: Beeline, MTS, Alfa Bank. While everyone else was designing, we were focusing on conversion.

In parallel with this, SDVentures invested in various Internet projects. Many investments turned out to be very profitable. In particular, investments in the social discovery industry and social technologies. We invest in sites for finding travel companions, community sites for learning foreign languages, technologies for instant messengers, and dating sites. Now the portfolio includes about a hundred companies.

In general, since childhood I understood that the world is global, so I immediately chose working with global partners as a priority. One of these is the DNCapital fund. DN Capital's headquarters are located in London, and the fund is looking at many projects in Europe. In Silicon Valley, the startup market is overheated, where anyone with an idea is worth $10 million. There are many good projects in Europe, and they are valued more realistically. So we are focusing on Europe. Our other venture investment partners, for example the ITech fund, are also working in this direction.

Our latest investment of $1 million is in the social network of scientists Academia.edu. I have a lot of hopes for this project. I think that the scientific field will face the same revolution that happened in other fields. Music and video content is now available via subscription. This is good for content creators and good for consumers too. But the market for scientific publications is still controlled by large publishers. I think that if changes come in this area, it will be better for both scientists and consumers.

How art helps business

What do I see as the main difference between SDVentures and other international Internet holdings? Firstly, we help Internet projects in the field of social discovery, that is, resources that connect people with common interests for joint travel, language learning, and dating. Secondly, I am convinced that creativity inspires innovation, which is why innovative technology and contemporary art are at the core of SDVentures' corporate values. We are actively involved in supporting and implementing cultural initiatives at the intersection of art, science and technology.

Why do I think art helps IT business? When we began to invest in art, we became more interesting to our employees, and an additional level of communication appeared with our partners. To invest in the arts, we have the SDV Arts & Science Foundation, whose projects can be classified more as philanthropy than profit-making. Although, for example, we are gradually forming an impressive collection of contemporary art, which can bring profit in the future. The collection was recently replenished with the technological installation Silk by the famous Russian artist Dmitry Morozov. This is an automatic musical instrument, similar to a harp, whose strings are stretched depending on the exchange rate of Bitcoin in relation to different currencies.

In our office center in Riga, which we named OraculeTangPlaza after the name of the art object created by artist Oleg Kulik to participate in the Burning Man festival, there is a coworking space for technology companies. There is also a space where artists can work. By immersing programmers and artists in the same environment, we create a creative space. Its first guests from the field of art should be the artists who received a grant from the Garage Museum this year in the field of “technological art”. The SDV Arts & Science Foundation initiated this special grant as part of the museum's 2016-2017 annual Emerging Artist Fellowship program.

We still have many projects. One of them is to collect a collection of first editions of treatises that influenced the formation of modern analytical philosophy. Finds have already emerged: the first edition of Kant's 1787 Critique of Pure Reason and Hume's 1748 Essay Concerning Human Knowledge. These works are the foundation of modern philosophy. I think art, philosophy and business will always be parts of my life.

Cover photo: Social Discovery Ventures

As of 2018, Social Discovery Ventures, co-founded by Dmitry Volkov, is engaged in supporting and investing in Internet projects, of which there are more than 50 in the company’s portfolio. Among them are Shazam, the site for finding travel companions TripTogether, an application for learning languages ​​(LinguaLeo) and many other. SDVentures representative offices are open in (New York), Hong Kong, Latvia (Riga), Russia (Moscow), Belarus (Minsk) and other countries.

Biography

1998-2012

In 1998 he graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University. Lomonosov, then postgraduate studies at IMEIMO with a degree in International Relations. In 2003, together with foreign partners, he created the Social Discovery Ventures holding. In 2006 he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. Lomonosov, in 2008 he defended his PhD thesis in philosophy. In 2010, he became one of the founders of the Moscow Center for Consciousness Research at Moscow State University. In 2012 he published the book “Boston Zombies: D. Dennett and His Theory of Consciousness.”

2019: Entry into Forbes 200

In December 2019, Dmitry Volkov was among the 200 richest businessmen in Russia according to Forbes. The magazine estimated the wealth of the co-founder of one of the world's largest dating services, Dating.com, at $750 million.

The publication does not specify what place Volkov occupies in the Forbes 200 ranking. The 2019 list itself includes nine businessmen with a fortune of $750 million, they are in 137th–145th places.

In October 2019, Volkov and his business partner Alla Gubenko combined assets and created the Dating.com Group, which included dating services such as Dating.com, DateMyAge, Cherish, Tubit, AnastasiaDate, ChinaLove, AsianDate and Amolatina. At that time, the total audience of all applications and sites reached 73 million registered users.

Dating.com Group plans to expand: at the end of November 2019, the company bought 100% of the American service Dil Mil for expats from India for $50 million, part of the deal was paid for in shares.

Dmitry Volkov is actively involved in investing. He was an early investor in the music recognition app Shazam, and also invested in the popular Patreon service, which allows you to donate money to content creators. The entrepreneur’s total investments in venture funds by December 2019 are estimated at $50 million.

In the most current Forbes ranking as of December 2019, among the richest businessmen in Russia, the leader of the board of the largest private gas production company in Russia, Novatek, is Leonid Mikhelson with a fortune of $24 billion. In total, there are 100 dollar billionaires and 100 multimillionaires in the ranking. The total wealth of the 200 richest Russians is $496 billion.

Social and scientific activities

As part of his philosophical activities, in 2014, Dmitry Volkov organized a philosophical expedition to the shores of Greenland, which was attended by world-famous philosophers Daniel Dennett, Nick Humphrey, Andy Clark, Jesse Prinz, Derk Pereboom and David Chalmers, as well as students and graduate students of Moscow State University. In addition, Dmitry Volkov is actively interested in contemporary Russian art. With the support of Social Discovery Ventures, “Contemporary Art” albums are published, introducing the public to the work of contemporary artists from