How I Turned Economic Chaos Into My Biggest Advantage | Andrey Doronichev (2/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: Welcome to the Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee. In our last episode, Andrey Doronichev shared how growing up in the Soviet Union shaped his grit, curiosity, and drive to build. If you missed it, check out part one. In part two, he talks about launching his first startup in post-Soviet Russia, bootstrapping through economic instability, and eventually landing a role at Google after sending a cold email. He also shares why he took a risk on mobile YouTube before smartphones were mainstream, how that bet paid off, and what being an outsider taught him about building products at a global scale.

Jon Chee - 00:01:09: And so now you've chosen this path?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:01:11: Yeah, I've chosen this path. By the end of high school, I had a job. I was making more money than most of my teachers. I was working nights, and that all came from the fact that my family was struggling financially, so I was using this money. I was still trying to get into a good school, and the best school in Russia at that time was Moscow State University. I knew that I needed tutoring, and I needed to improve my knowledge to get in. So, basically, I was working nights. I was making $200 a month, which was a ridiculous amount of money. My job was as a sysadmin at one of the car dealerships where I would take care of the entire network, all the servers, all the computers and printers, and everything. And I used that $200 to pay for four sessions of tutoring—$50 a pop—exactly what I needed for a month. So I would go to a tutor once a week and work on preparing for my entry exams for Moscow State. By the time it was time to pass those exams, I was exhausted. I was studying during the day and then working all night, sleeping for maybe three or four hours, and then trying to prepare. Things you do when you're a teenager—you actually can do those things. I just didn't have time to party and all that; instead, I had a job. But by the time I needed to pass those exams, I was so exhausted and borderline depressed. And, basically, I just failed. It was the biggest failure at that time for me that really, really shook me. I thought of myself as a very smart person. I was always one of the top students at my high school, which was one of the top high schools. Suddenly, there was this splash of reality. And once again, the earth shatters underneath your feet, and you find out that maybe you're not that future great mind. Maybe you're just a confused kid who is exhausted and who thought too much of themselves, with an overblown ego because you suddenly were making a few bucks early in your life.

Jon Chee - 00:03:03: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:03:04: That was a rude awakening for me in a way. And so I went to a decent school still, a decent technical school, which to me felt like a failure at that time, but in a way, it was a blessing in disguise. Because number one, I met my wife in the very first year of that college, and that was all worth it. But second, unlike with Moscow State where I was committed to going deep into academia and dropping all of my business and work activities to just focus on academic studies, instead, because I had way less respect for the institution I got into and I felt almost like this was not a really serious college, I kept working. I kept my night job, and I actually found a new job, which really, really changed my life because that was exactly when I got into the early days of the Internet in Russia. I joined an ISP, one of the very few ISPs in Moscow. And, you know, that was a dream come true because, first of all, it was paying a lot. And second of all, I got into this group of, like, 30 people who were actually running T1 cables to international exchanges. They had access to the real Internet with, like, 10 megabits or whatever—some crazy amount of bandwidth at that time when everyone was dialing up. And all this complicated equipment and servers and routers and all the cool stuff. And that was a dream come true because I would spend nights and weekends and all the time I could outside of school at this job just learning the very forefront of programming and telco equipment setup and, you know, just really hardcore Internet stuff at that time.

Jon Chee - 00:05:02: That's wild.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:05:03: That was only possible because I didn't get into the school I wanted to go to, and I actually had this extra resource, extra time, and mind space to put into it.

Jon Chee - 00:05:13: How did you get that job? Did it just fall in your lap?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:05:17: Funny story. Like many things in life, all the best things, they happen from an angle you didn't expect. I met this girl. We were hanging out with my mom, actually, in this resort over the summer. And I met this girl I really liked, and she was there also. When I was a teenager, she was a teenager. She was hanging out with her dad. And we met. We were dancing, trying to get some romantic friendship going as young kids. And our parents were right there; we were in the same resort altogether. So they were hanging out, and we were all hanging out. And I learned that her father is a really cool scientist from one of those secret research institutions in the Soviet Union who was really deep into software and telecommunications early on, and now he's working for this super cool company that is providing Internet. And the Internet was very new, but I had access to the Internet a few years before that. I spent all this money on buying a modem and actually finding a way to connect. And there were very, very few people who even knew what the Internet was. And I could set up a modem, and I knew how things worked. And as we started chatting with her dad, very, very quickly, I lost interest in the girl but gained so much interest in her father. We just kept talking about things. I was asking how things are set up with his work. I was so curious about everything because for me, it was almost like getting access to this magical world of the insides of the Internet. And as we were chatting, we kept being friends for years and actually, until now, we're still in touch. So a couple of years later—we met when I was 15—by the age of 17, as I went to college, at some point, he was like, "Hey, we have a gig. Do you wanna come and help us set up an evening Internet customer support service?" Basically, people would call, and you would help them fix their problems. I'm like, "Hell, yeah."

Jon Chee - 00:07:25: Of course.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:07:26: I didn't care how much they would pay. I just wanted to be part of that club, and so that's how I ended up there.

Jon Chee - 00:07:32: That's very cool. And it sounds like it's the wild, wild west of the Internet.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:07:41: Yes.

Jon Chee - 00:07:42: Like, were you guys just all figuring it out on the fly, or did he provide the guidance?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:07:44: Well, everyone was figuring things out on the fly at that time. Right? So it's 1999. I mean, in the US, you had the Internet by that time in a more consumer-adopted way. In Russia, it was like 1989 in the US, where the Internet was a very special thing for a very select few. Basically, research universities and some businesses, and maybe not even the government. Right? Nobody knew what that was. Consumer Internet didn't exist. And so that group of people who were setting up this ISP were mostly really hardcore academics from all sorts of secret establishments in the Soviet Union who came together and got some foreign investment to set up one of the first Internet service providers in Russia. And so they were learning. Like, one guy on our team, for example, he studied in the US and worked for NASA for some time. And then he came to Russia to help set those things up. Right? So it was a very, very special group of people with very, very special knowledge. And I was their little kid who they adopted.

Jon Chee - 00:08:50: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:08:51: And at first, they didn't take me seriously at all, but because I was curious and I was really eager to listen and do whatever they told me to do, over time, they all were super nice to me and gave me different, more interesting jobs. Like, "Okay, let's let you set up this server," or, "Go run a sniffer on this machine and figure out what's wrong with the network interface." And over time, in my four years there, I went from being this guy who picks up the phone and goes, "Hello, what's wrong? Okay, let me help you set up your Internet connection," to setting up equipment, to actually becoming the first software engineer of this team. And then over time, running the software engineering group that was building automation for all the billing and network traffic mediation stuff.

Jon Chee - 00:09:40: That's amazing. And it goes to show that if you show genuine curiosity and a willingness to do anything and everything, people will feed that curiosity.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:09:50: Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:09:51: And that's the thing. Sometimes people ask, "How do you get your start in XYZ?" or "How do you get your start in science?" or whatever it might be, whatever industry you're in. It's just, like, take some initiative, be curious, and be ready to just do whatever. Take the garbage out. Wash the dishes. Do the laundry. You do it, and then people will be like, "Alright, cool. Come do this thing now. We'll show you the ropes. It seems that you're genuinely passionate about this."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:10:18: And I think this is such an important point you're making, Jon, because when it comes to—and I'll leap forward quite a bit—but when it comes to raising money from investors, I got this incredible advice when I was deciding whether or not we wanted to pivot to bio automation, like AI for bio. Our partner at Greylock, who is one of our investors, he looked through my presentation. I presented a bunch of hypotheses we are running after, and some of them had traction. And then there was this crazy one, which was AI to find cancer drugs. And he looked at me, and he went like, "You should do that." And I was like, "Why? It has no traction. We have no founder-problem fit. I have no background in life sciences. I threw it into this deck as a crazy one." He was like, "Because this is the one which makes your eyes light up. I can see real curiosity and passion about the problem space here, and that is what it takes for you to actually sustain an entrepreneurship journey." And so, it's just a little episode that I will talk about later. But I think, you know, for everyone in the context of being passionate and curious about things and how it impacts your chances of succeeding, do not underestimate that. And, yes, as you said, taking notes in a meeting, taking out garbage cans, and buying pizza for your team, and all that stuff that CEOs do.

Jon Chee - 00:11:35: Yeah, the very glamorous things that CEOs do.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:11:38: They matter because these are the things that highlight to your team, to your investors, to your partners, whether or not you're serious about it.

Jon Chee - 00:11:47: Yep. And people can smell it from a mile away when you're not—when you're trying to pretend.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:11:52: When you're trying to pretend, yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:11:53: You can't pretend that you're interested. You can't fake it. So now you've gotten an amazing experience on the frontier of the Internet, setting that up. And you're still in school at this time, it sounds like.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:12:09: Yeah, I continued to work and study, and, surprisingly, I was able to do both quite successfully. So my career was developing, and everyone got used to the fact that I'd come to work at 4 PM and work till midnight. And, of course, when you're 18 or 20, you can work double shifts and you're not tired. You're excited. I'd go study at college, and then I'd go—and it was in the same city, right? So it was very easy. I just took two metro stops away, went to the office at 4 PM, and I'd stay there for a full shift. Basically, a full workday, eight hours, till midnight, sometimes till 1 AM. Then I'd go home, fall asleep, wake up at seven, and go back to school. Easy peasy.

Jon Chee - 00:12:56: Thinking about that right now, I'm just like, oh my god. Like, how?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:13:00: Yeah. How? Different age, different hormone level. Like, everything's different.

Jon Chee - 00:13:05: Yeah. Absolutely. So were you still at the telecom or the Internet company, or were there other gigs that were formative during that time for you?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:13:15: No, it was the telco company. It got acquired by a bigger telco company, and I kept growing. I was a very promising and unique talent at that time. I learned how to program in Java and set up and work with Oracle databases. So I acquired all those special skills. And back then, I feel like there was an era in the world where specialists were very important. If you go all the way back, you know, like Michelangelo and all those old Greek scientists, they all were generalists. They would draw, and they would solve equations. And, you know, Newton would do physics and then invent calculus in his twenties on the side.

Jon Chee - 00:13:55: Yeah. Like Renaissance people.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:13:57: Yeah. They were doing all sorts of things and somehow combining all those skills in one person, and those generalists were the ones driving science forward. And then the further we went and the frontier of knowledge was pushed out, you couldn't go wide. You had to specialize more and more in order to be successful. And so it was in computer science in a way. At first, even when I started programming, people were doing everything. You just understood the fundamentals of algorithms. You read Knuth's five books. You understood all those sorting algorithms and complexities. And then you didn't care which language or which particular CPU you were working on. You understood the fundamentals. But the more the industry developed, the more successful you became by knowing that specific piece of equipment or that specific language or that specific database or framework. And I also started playing this game and getting a bunch of certificates and becoming kind of successful in this way. And that's when, luckily, I got introduced to entrepreneurship. Because as I said, I realized that I wanted to be successful, and I wanted to have the freedom to do the things I wanted to do. And so at some point, in 2004, I got exposed to the first mobile phones that could run apps. It was one of those old Nokia phones that my now wife, back then girlfriend, got as a birthday gift. And she showed me, she's like, "Hey, look. It says Java apps. Aren't you a Java developer?" And when I found that out, it blew my mind. I was like, "Wait a minute. So I now possess the knowledge of how to write in this language, and I can build software for those little phones that everyone will have in their pocket sooner or later." And to be clear, it wasn't obvious at all at that time that phones were becoming computers. It was a completely wild bet, like now betting on the fact that everyone will have Neuralink sooner or later.

Jon Chee - 00:15:54: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:15:55: Yes. It could be. Would you bet your career on it? No, probably not.

Jon Chee - 00:15:59: Yeah. Maybe not.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:16:01: But again, things you do in your twenties, I was like, "Okay. This is it. Those phones are gonna become computers."

Jon Chee - 00:16:06: The future is now. The future is now.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:16:09: Exactly. Now is the time to start a company in this. I had a great career with a good salary, an unthinkable salary at that time for my age. In Moscow, I was set. I could buy a car. I could buy a snowboard. Rent an apartment. I was good. And suddenly, I decided to drop it all and start a company that would be developing mobile apps in 2004. And that was borderline insane, and everyone told me so. And, yeah, that's what you do as a kid. You do insane things. Right? And so I was graduating from college. I had half a year left to write my diploma, my thesis. I had a few friends working with me at the same ISP, and basically, because I was excited about the vision, we were like, "Okay. So, you know, we all make roughly $2,000 a month. If we put them all together, it's roughly $10,000. It should be enough to start the company, right? We'll buy a server, and we'll write all the code, and we're good."

Jon Chee - 00:17:11: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:17:12: And that's what we did. And it was insanity. And if we weren't so naive, we, of course, wouldn't have done it. But we were naive, and that was great because we started it, and we built a rudimentary app store or play store—basically, a content distribution store. You remember the days when you would buy ringtones or apps from Verizon by sending a premium text message?

Jon Chee - 00:17:37: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:17:38: We built that. We built that in Russia. And it turned out, because nobody was doing those things, if you had a phone that could run apps or play video and you had, back then, GPRS or EDGE connection to the Internet, there were very few places you could go to get anything meaningful. Like, what do you do with this phone and this connection? And suddenly, a company like ours became one of the very few islands of content distribution in an otherwise completely empty sea of mobile Internet. And this is where we got really lucky by being ignorant. So we started this thing. And if you told me right now, "Hey, I'm a college student, I'm about to graduate, I have this job, but I wanna drop it, and I wanna start a company that would build Neuralink apps," literally, if you told me that right now, I'd tell you, "Dude, extremely risky. Your chances of survival are zero. Don't do this. Bad idea." Nobody was there to tell me that. But then imagine, like, two years later, suddenly, you're one of a couple of app providers for Neuralink.

Jon Chee - 00:18:42: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:18:42: It blows up and becomes a huge thing. So that's what happened to us. Suddenly, because Russia didn't have money and didn't have cable infrastructure for real Internet, and people didn't have money to buy computers, the market developed differently. For the vast majority of people, computers were a luxury only available to a select few, and computers with access to the Internet were even more luxurious. But a phone that you could use to connect to the Internet and download a video of Crazy Frog... that's crazy.

Jon Chee - 00:19:13: Yes. I remember.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:19:17: So many people could get a phone that could play this video, and suddenly, a provider like us could sell this video for $5 a pop. You send a $5 premium text message, you get a link to download the video. You download the video, and you're happy, not only because you can see the Crazy Frog playing on your phone, but also because you can show it to all your buddies around you. That became a thing. Suddenly, people with a phone became those enlightened ones who have access to the Internet. And we were providers feeding this insane, underground revolution. And I call it underground because for a long time, big companies did not realize this was happening. Googles of this world would look at the Russian market, and they were like, "Okay, so there's a million people with access to the Internet. It's a very small market." What we knew was that there were 50 million more with access to mobile Internet, and nobody cared about them.

Jon Chee - 00:20:14: Oh my god.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:20:16: So we got really lucky. The company broke even at the end of the first month. It returned all the investments by month one. We made our first million dollars in revenue, which was at a 50% margin, by the end of the first year. We were 22. Every salary in Russia was like $300 a month. A good salary was a thousand dollars a month. By the end of the first year, I took home $10,000 in a month, which positioned me in the world of ultimate oligarchs.

Jon Chee - 00:20:50: In my head. Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:20:53: Yeah. And best of all, we did it all by ourselves without any investments, without having to do anything unethical. Those things I was worried about as a kid, that in order to make money, you have to be a crook. No. We were doing a good thing with our own ideas and hands, just coding this stuff, and actually making tons of money. It felt amazing.

Jon Chee - 00:21:15: That's wild.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:21:16: And it's a huge luck when you have a taste of it. That's what success feels like: when you feel proud of your work, at the same time you're being compensated for it, and then everything's growing. And you're in the right place at the right time. The only thing I can compare it to is catching a great wave when you're surfing. Right? It's like you were there, other surfers did not expect it to pop up. You did everything right. You worked real hard, you paddled real hard, you timed your pop-up correctly, and now you're gliding. It feels like flying. It's that feeling. It's incredible. And that was like 2005, 2006, as I was running this company with my co-founders. And that was around the same time when Putin came to power. He came to power in, I think, 2004 were his first elections. That's when he started turning the young democracy of Russia back into a Soviet-style dictatorship. And I had very strong sensors attuned to that kind of thing from my childhood. The moment it started smelling like it's going back to what it was, me and my, at that time, wife—that same girlfriend of mine who I met in college—we were like, "Okay, we're out of here." It doesn't matter how good—and the early 2000s were an extremely lucrative time to be an entrepreneur in Moscow. The money was free. Right? Everyone was making so much money. And we were successful at this business, and everything looked so good. But we made the extremely hard decision that we were gonna exit. I was gonna sell my share in this business even though it was growing, and we would move out. We would immigrate. We were 23, 24. My wife got pregnant, and we're like, "This is not a place to raise a kid. We want to be in a different environment." And so that's when we left.

Jon Chee - 00:23:08: Where were you thinking of going? Was it like, anywhere but here?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:23:12: Yeah, more or less. Funny enough, as an American, you think of the world as this open book. You can go anywhere. Okay, not everyone in America, but in general, you know that you can travel very easily. If you grew up in the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union required exit visas. They wouldn't let you out. Never mind entry visas to come to the United States.

Jon Chee - 00:23:34: First step is, you gotta get out.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:23:36: Exactly. So then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, you had a Russian passport. You had to apply for a visa anywhere, even if you were going for a weekend trip. And so moving somewhere is extremely hard. And so I didn't have much understanding. For me, everything was "the West." You know? Anything outside of Russia was "the West." And so to me, going to Europe or going to the US was the same thing, essentially. It's just basically getting out into the West. And so my first plan was to move to London, and then I calculated how much it would be and how much money I would need. And I realized that—I didn't make millions of dollars. I made a couple hundred thousand dollars from this business. And for me, it was an extreme amount of money back then, but that wasn't enough to fund the family somewhere. And so we actually moved to the Czech Republic, to Prague, which was still an up-and-coming Eastern European country at that time. It's a great country, it's a great place. And that's where we moved for the first year, just to understand what it feels like to live somewhere else. And I tried to start a business there. Me and another co-founder of this original Russian company, two of us moved out, and we started a new business—think Redfin, like an online real estate agency in the Czech Republic. But we realized that it's a smaller market. It's way slower. And even though we started this thing, it would take years for it to actually become profitable. It was nowhere near like starting a mobile business.

Jon Chee - 00:25:08: Yeah, the first one.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:25:10: Yeah, a fast-growth kind of Internet thing. Right? This was different. And around the same time, I was reading a lot about companies to get inspired from, to learn from, and I read about Google and their story and their mission. And I just realized that this is the place I wanted to be. This is where I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn from these guys because their mission is so aligned with the things I care about: liberating information and organizing the chaos, the complexity of the world's information. It was literally my mission before I read that it was the mission of Google. And the way they set up the company and the way they ran the company—I read this book that told the story, and I was like, "Jesus, this is the company I wanna build."

Jon Chee - 00:25:53: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:25:54: I always wanted to build this company, and I never knew these guys did it so much better. And so I literally just sent an email to jobs@google.com.

Jon Chee - 00:26:04: I was going to say, now I know that this is a weird path.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:26:07: Again, this is where being naive helps. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:26:10: Yeah. You just do it.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:26:12: And I wrote an email saying, "Hey, I'm fascinated by the mission. I love everything you do, but I think you're missing out on mobile. I think you don't get it, but I started this company. It grew so much. There's this whole hidden layer of the Internet that you guys are not thinking about." And that was the year when the iPhone appeared, 2007. And I was like, "Okay, this thing is coming. It's gonna change the Internet. Someone has to do it for you. I know what to do. Please hire me. I'm gonna fix that." And, of course, in response to this email, there were crickets. Nobody responded.

Jon Chee - 00:26:45: I was so surprised. I was like, "This is just rude. Why have they not responded? This was a good email. This was an excellent email. This is so strange."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:26:52: I mean, you can say no, but why would you not respond? And then I kept waiting, and two months later, they did respond.

Jon Chee - 00:27:01: Wow.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:27:02: They called me for interviews. I went through interviews, and they were like, "Hell, yeah. You can come in as a product manager." And I applied for a job in Prague, but it turned out Google didn't have an office in Prague. That was just an ad suggesting that there was a job. And they're like, "We don't actually have a mobile team yet, and we definitely don't have a team in Prague. But you can join as a product manager in one of the other offices, and then we'll figure something out. We're a young company. We're changing very fast. We think this mobile thing is interesting." And so I moved to Dublin at first and then to London, and started at Google, for the first year working on some random stuff. And in 2008, I actually started as a mobile team PM, one of the very few people who were working on very early-stage Google mobile products.

Jon Chee - 00:27:53: That's so crazy.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:27:55: Yeah, that was the very beginning of it. Right? That was the time when just talking about how many people had access to 3G was a very important conversation because it was like 2% of 1% in some countries and 0% in most. And we were at the very beginning of it, where you already had devices that could theoretically run a browser, but nobody knew what to do with them. The best use case was BlackBerry and sending emails. And I was there with several years of experience running this thing from scratch, really deeply understanding this industry, and with a very, very strong vision for how it should be. And, you know, that was another moment, right place, right time. I knew what to do. And when I showed up on this team, my boss, Hugo Barra, who is a well-known person in the industry and has done a bunch of cool things, I remember this meeting where we had 20 or so mobile product managers working on all the important projects, and basically, all the important ones were taken. Right? This is the PM for mobile search, and this is the PM for mobile Gmail, and so on. "We have a couple of products left. And there's a good one that is Picasa, the photo-managing app that Google used to have. You could take that and be the mobile PM for this and build a mobile app for Picasa. Or there's this horrible one that we just acquired called YouTube."

Jon Chee - 00:29:15: They thought it was horrible?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:29:17: "It's a money drain. It's likely to be shut down. It's this horrible website with tons of pirated content. I don't know why we did this. This is stupid. But yeah, obviously, this is not a good idea because who will ever watch videos on the phone? The connection is too slow, the screen is too small. It's just a no-go." I was like, "Hell, yeah. I'm taking that."

Jon Chee - 00:29:40: Yeah. That one. I'll take that one, please.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:29:42: I'll take that one. Because I had this experience of selling videos for $5 a piece. Right? And I was just like, "Okay, this is the biggest body of content, potentially. Right now, it's entertainment, but potentially, it's everything." And it played so well to the two things that shaped me as a kid that we discussed. One, it's complete chaos. It's this insane complexity of really random kind of information that you have to organize one way or another to make sense out of it. And it's an extremely hard problem. Back then, it was before computer vision. Right? We didn't know how to deal with video, and it's so heavy in terms of how many megabytes each piece of content takes. It's not text or email. And second, it's the liberation of information. This idea that the Rambos of this world can be just out there for everyone to stream. And more importantly, the fact that anyone can upload a video and share their story with the world. So if you've been oppressed in a country like where I grew up, suddenly, if anyone is offending you somewhere in a dark alley, you can record it on your phone, and immediately, the whole world will see it. And that just blew my mind. I was so fascinated by this idea. So I gambled my whole career on this dying product. And it was a dying product. In 2009, half a year after I took this job—so the recession hit in 2008. Early 2009, Eric Schmidt gave this interview, and I'm watching this interview with my wife and my one- or two-year-old kid at that time. And he's saying, "Yes, recession, we have to tighten the belts. We're gonna adjust a bunch of things and cut a bunch of expenses, and silly experiments like buying YouTube will not happen again. We spent a billion dollars on this thing." So YouTube itself was put under very strong pressure by Google, saying, "Hey, either you figure out how to make money or we shut you down." And the whole team basically just focused on figuring out monetization and ads. And so I joined with the promise that I'd have a few engineers to work on mobile apps for YouTube. The first app we launched was the app for Nokia phones, and then for BlackBerry, and then Android, and then iPhone. And so those apps were built by a few engineers that I was promised as a budget, as my team to work on. And so, half a year into my job, I learned that we got deprioritized, and all my engineers were being taken back.

Jon Chee - 00:32:09: Oh, no.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:32:11: Yeah. And so, basically, my boss was like, "Okay, drop this project. YouTube clearly doesn't want it. It's not the priority. Building those apps is not a thing for them. Don't do this." And I just managed—I just refused to stop, and I managed to find someone who thought the same way, an engineering manager in the Tokyo office. Because in Japan, mobile Internet adoption was way earlier. She was so excited about our mobile apps. And when she learned that we were shutting them down, she just wouldn't take it. And she said, "Hey, I will dedicate some local engineers for you, but you would have to fly from"—I was based in London—"fly from London to Tokyo to manage this team remotely. But yeah, I can give you some budget." And that's how we salvaged the whole thing. I believe that YouTube was successful because it had a mobile app, unlike Picasa, for which we didn't build one.

Jon Chee - 00:33:07: Yeah. By the way.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:33:09: Right? So at a certain moment in 2010, the world changed. And, basically, if you were a website with no mobile, you were done. And Facebook was taking over mobile real fast. They did a really good job. And so, Picasa died, you know, for that reason.

Jon Chee - 00:33:24: Was that during the Instagram... Like, when Facebook was like, "Alright, we're doing it. We're in."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:33:29: Mobile first. Yeah. They really committed to it. Google was slower, and I was one of those people at Google who were really pushing for, "We have to invest in mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile." And so yeah, anyway, we saved this project. We launched the mobile website, and then we launched all these apps. And then it started growing. And then, at some point, it was 1% of total YouTube views came from our apps, and then 5%, and then 10%. And once I told my team, I was like, "Hey, at some point, it's gonna be over 50%. So at some point, YouTube will stop being a website, and it will become an app." And we all laughed because it sounded so unrealistic. And my tech lead said, "Well, when it happens, you take us all to Hawaii." I'm like, "Sure."

Jon Chee - 00:34:15: In 2014, he came to me and he was like, "So, how are we going to Hawaii?"

Andrey Doronichev - 00:34:18: Yeah. Exactly.

Jon Chee - 00:34:20: That's amazing.

Outro - 00:34:26: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Andrey Doronichev, Founder and CEO at OPTIC. Join us next time for part three of our four-part series, where we'll hear what Andrey's experience was like leading YouTube's mobile expansion. He'll also share what that experience taught him about leadership, product culture, and the power of individual conviction inside massive organizations. If you're enjoying the series, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support the path to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or its sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.