Biography of Arkady Volozh
Childhood
Arkady Volozh was born on February 11, 1964 in the unofficial oil capital of Kazakhstan – the city of Guryev. His mother, Sofia Lvovna, worked at the local music school named after A. D. Nurpeisova, instilling in students a love of musical theoretical disciplines. Her brother, the famous violinist Wolf Lvovich Usminsky, also devoted his life to music.
Pope Arkady, Yuri Abramovich, after graduating from Alma-Ata Kazakh University. S. Kirov was an engineer, petroleum geologist, later received his doctorate. He was lucky to become one of the discoverers of a large oil and gas field in the west of the republic.
When the son was one year old, the family moved to Belarus for some time. In 1968 they returned to Kazakhstan again. Arkady’s father, upon his return, got a job as the head of the field seismic survey party of the Republican Geophysical Trust, and then went to work at the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR. Mom began to teach at the Alma-Ata Conservatory.
As a child, Arkady could always stand up for himself, he was a lively, stubborn and persistent child with a very tenacious and pragmatic mind. The father quickly noticed his son’s analytical mindset and in 1977, after the 7th grade, he assigned Arkady to the Physics and Mathematics Boarding School. O. Zhautykova. Together with the boy, the son of his father’s friend Ilya Segalovich, the future business partner of Volozh, also moved to this educational institution for gifted children.
After graduating from school in 1981 with a gold medal, the young man, in the company of Ilya, with whom they became friends for 4 years of study, went to enter the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. But according to the results of the entrance exams, none of them went to this university – there is a version that the guys were not admitted on the basis of their ethnicity.
Be that as it may, as a result, Arkady became a student of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics of the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas named after V.I. I. Gubkin, where the medalists were admitted on preferential terms, without exams.
Career start
In 1986, the young specialist graduated from the institute with honors and was assigned to the Moscow Research Institute of Pipeline Construction. Later he worked at the Academic Institute for Management Problems. V. Trapeznikova on technologies for working with data arrays.
In the late 1980s, Arkady began to take his first steps in the only nascent business in the USSR and became the general director of the computer cooperative “Magistr”, which was engaged in sending seeds to Austria in exchange for PCs and software and later grew into the CompTek enterprise.
An aspiring businessman, who until recently supported his family on an engineer’s salary of 115 rubles, then managed to acquire two PCs for himself, sell them and immediately buy an apartment for the proceeds.
At the same time, Volozh was engaged in programming and, together with a specialist in computer linguistics, Arkady Borovsky, opened the Arcadia company, which in 1997 led to the creation of Yandex.
Arkady Volozh: “When you run for a long time, you want to take a break”
Creation of “Yandex”
It all started with the cooperation of “Arcadia” with the Research Institute of Patent Information, which ordered a search program for the classifier of copyright certificates for inventions. At the same time, Arkady accidentally met his childhood friend Ilya Segalovich, who joined the development of information retrieval tasks. With the spread of the Internet in Russia, resourceful programmers set about developing a search engine. Mikhail Maslov, Leonid Brovkin joined Volozh and Segalovich, renowned professor Yuri Apresyan provided linguistic assistance.
The search using indexing in the system they created was organized according to a completely new principle, with morphology, and after the creation of the next software product, the phrase “yet another indexer” or its short version “yandex” was used. Hence, the name of the main search engine of the Runet, which has become a brand, arose. At the suggestion of Volozh, they replaced the initial English letters with our “I”, having received an exclusive “Yandex”. After 2 years, the search site was included in the Top 7 popular domestic resources.
In the same period, the already eminent IT specialist was the head of the Committee for Wireless Networks for Access to Information Resources, where he was involved in the implementation of IP telephony in the Russian Federation. In 2000 Volozh became the general director of Yandex. Under his leadership, in addition to the search service, the resource appeared many Internet portals, popular services and services, including such as “Money”, “News”, “Goods”, “Afisha”, “Market” and “Mail”.
In 2007, the head of Yandex was promoted to head. Department of “Data Analysis” in the famous Moscow Phystech. In 2010, Kommersant magazine named Volozh the leader in the rating of the country’s top executives in the Media Business category.
In 2014, the innovator, who successfully promoted both his project and domestic IT science in general, left the post of head of the Russian Yandex, while remaining one of the leaders of a global company.
In 2015, he became an investor in Getir (Turkey), a service for prompt delivery of goods, and Neurosteer (Israel), a startup that creates technologies for analyzing brain biocurrents. In 2016, under the Citizenship for Investment program, Arkady Volozh acquired a Maltese passport for himself, his parents and children, investing about € 900,000 in the economy of this island state.
Personal life of Arkady Volozh
The head of Yandex is married. He started a family while still at the institute, where, together with his wife Irina, he mastered the basics of a future profession. She later received her second degree as a family psychologist.
Once in an interview, Arkady noted that there were three most pleasant moments in his life – the birth of his children. The firstborn Leo was born in 1988. After graduating from the eminent Higher School of Economics, he worked at Investbank, but soon moved to his father’s company, where he was developing the Yandex.Taxi project and launching the Yandex.Master service. Then he decided on his own, outside Yandex, to develop a service for express delivery of fresh products.
Volozh’s youngest children – Anna-Esther, born in 1991, and Timofey, born in 1995 – also chose the path of economists. In addition, the girl, who was one of the best students in her course at the HSE, showed a strong desire for creativity. In 2012, she became the winner of the ArtVyshka interuniversity competition in the Video and Animation category.
Arkady Volozh now
According to Arkady, he is pleased with the results of his Internet company at the end of 2017 – their consolidated revenue increased by 24% in comparison with the previous period and reached more than 94 billion rubles.
In the same year, the US Treasury Department included Arkady Yuryevich in the so-called “Kremlin list” of persons against whom restrictive sanctions could subsequently be imposed. It is worth noting that the list includes all billionaires from the top hundred Russian Forbes, regardless of their proximity to the Kremlin.