I am the co-founder of BizBlog, a popular blog for corporate executives. In my spare time, I design and create, learn a new language, and enjoy traveling.
At the beginning of his career, vadim was a successful serial entrepreneur and founded numerous company including PayPal, Google, and Twitter. He also worked for the government, as a consultant, and as a security guard. He passed away in 2006 at the age of 37.
I first heard about vadim on this blog, and I’m sure many of you know him personally. He was an amazing man, highly dedicated to innovation, and one of the pioneers of the online world.
I know vadim personally so I have great respect for him. He was my great-grandfather.
I think vadim started out trying to make his life as difficult as possible and then went very deep and became an entrepreneur, and is one of the most intelligent, creative, and talented people I have ever met. I remember once when I took a class with him I asked him if he ever had to take classes to learn how to make his life easier.
He replied that he was already so good at what he did that he wasn’t good at anything else and that he never had to study. “I’m much better at my job than any of the others I worked with,” he said. And that was that.
Vadim is an interesting study. He was a graduate student at the University of Arizona before changing majors to entrepreneur. After leaving academia, he went on to start several businesses, including the famous Russian social network VK. On his time off, Vadim founded a start-up which he sold to a private equity firm in 2004.
Vadim got all the startup capital he needed from the sale of his company, and went on to form a new company called Yandex. It was a very successful company which was sold in 2009 for $2.5 billion. One of Yandex’s early projects was Google+, the now wildly popular social network that you probably use at least a little bit (or even a lot) on a daily basis.
Yandex was really a good company, but its business model of selling a social network to businesses was really really bad. The company was incredibly profitable for a while but was so badly run that eventually their stock price crashed to a million dollar price. In 2013, it was back to the original price of 2.5 billion. The Yandex founder Vadim started up another company called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was founded in January 2011.
The company name was taken from a Russian word meaning “assigned name.” In other words, ICANN is a not-so-secret network for assigning names to other people. The only company that ICANN would have an interest in is the one that actually owns the name.