The University is a Place for Startups

    
- A startup is two or three people, they move fast, make decisions fast, they try things, and often fail. A university is tradition; it is about very long time frames; it is based on academic research and very strong academic tradition. In a way, they are opposites. But your question is exactly the right question. Is it possible to combine them? Is it possible to do both, these polar opposites, in one thing? I think it is. It must be. The university is free thinking. That is very start-up. It has academic freedom, the ability to have big ideas and big dreams. Branding is important, but the real important thing is spinning the results of scientific research into startups and receiving patents for inventions. In that case, academic research will bring all the money and all this fame to faculties. It takes a little bit of time, but it is not about going to the moon. It is about little things here and there. There are very specific moves and they can be done. It is sin not to do it. Because other countries would do anything to have the brains that you have here.

 
   - When students go, it is fine in some ways. When professors go, it is scary. Sometimes they go and they do not even teach there. They drive taxis, for example. All the knowledge they have is not effectively used. Of course, sometimes they come back. We just had a startup we helped to get into Silicon Valley. There are two people, they spent three months there, they raised about 1.7 million dollars, and they came back. They are hiring engineers in Russia, because good specialists are usually cheaper and better here. The intellectual property is more transitional. When people come back, they bring back their skills. For people here it is a story of great success. It means that those guys know how to package themselves, how to sell themselves, and how to interact. Obviously, we can close the borders and say: “Enough! No brain drain!” Or we can say: “It is going to happen anyway. These 22-year-olds are going to end up there. What can we do to capture them here, to have them come back, and to have value here?” It is more likely that education is the greatest value possible.
  
  - In one of your interviews, you mentioned Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, who does not want to come to Russia even to look for startups to invest in.
   
  - He is an exception. That was different immigration, second or third wave, in the 70s and 80s. Those waves were not very patriotic. Young guys who leave the country today do not flee Russia for any political reasons. It is more about the economy. For them the world is borderless, they can get a visa, go anywhere, and easily come back. It is not as fixed as it used to be. The political wave of immigration still has very little knowledge of what Russia is at present. Their minds are like Brighton Beach syndrome.  They are fixed in the 70s and they have not realized that Russia is a new world right now. A lot of people dream of coming to Moscow.
The most important thing is to make people want to say that they are from Russia. Somebody leaves, they form Google, they create something amazing, why not package that? Why not say that these guys are from Tomsk. Not like “I want to leave Russia forever and I do not even want to teach my kids Russian”. If they say: “I am from Tomsk! I am proud of Tomsk. I got to where I am much because of Tomsk”, that will become advertising. People will say: “Where is that?”
  
  - So our “pitch” might be “Come to Tomsk and get your education here. Even if you leave, you will still be from Tomsk”?
   
   - Yes. It is not a one-way thinking. The world is becoming smaller. Indians or Chinese come to Silicon Valley, they learn things and go back to India and China because they think their countries are cool. That is a natural flow. They apply at home what they learn in other places. Why cannot that happen here?
  
  - In other words, we should not worry that people leave.
   
  - Of course, you have to worry because it is not good in general. But I think that the young generation is oriented globally. How do you stop them? Would you want to have the Iron Curtain again? You could do that but at this point, we are getting into politics. And that is one way to do it. The other way is to take that the water finds its way and you just take that flow and say: “Ok. That is the reality. How can we make that something extraordinary? Should we take it as an opportunity to promote Tomsk?” I just met a professor on a train. He is a brilliant physics guy, he is from Tomsk, but he is teaching in South Korea. Professors are the core and when they leave, that is really hard. They are roots for students. When you lose one professor, you lose a thousand potential students. The next generations will be effected by that person. You want to make professors proud and make them decent living. If you paid that professor who teaches in South Korea a million dollars, he would live here. Young people going back and forth is not a bad thing. They have their families and friends here, hopefully, someday it will be like with those guys from China and India. They have their foot in both places.
  
  - You came to Tomsk yesterday and you are going to leave tomorrow. Have you seen anything here that might make you come back?
 
  - I have a very romantic notion about Siberia. I spend much time in Moscow but it is different there. They are much like New Yorkers. You say “Hi” and they look the other way, at best. Here, you still retain the level of civility and grace, hospitality and beauty. You are a world leader in applied and theoretical math and physics. You need to spend money on details, for example, to think how the faculties should be structured. Is it the head who holds all the patents or can you allow the students to retain intellectual property of their own inventions? They probably have to share it with the University, but they will have a certain motivation. They will have their names behind the inventions. They might launch startups. It is not a complicated training and a big culture shift. We do a five-week  programme in Moscow. It is very doable.
  
  - There is an opinion that is very popular among technocrats today: developing technologies is the most important thing for the country now, so the money should be spent on training engineers and computer specialists, not on training philosophers and other experts in humanities. Do you agree with that?
 
  - That is one of the hardest questions for universities everywhere. Stanford is dealing with it. I read newsletters from Stanford, I go on campus, I teach… They really wrestle with this. Because if you go to computer science you know you are going to get your salary and you are going to be in huge demand. How to balance engineering and humanities? It is not a directly economic issue. In a startup world, if you are very focused on one deep thing, the great ideas do not come. The great ideas come when you have different viewpoints and you talk to someone you usually do not talk to. Like a philosophy student or an art student. It may dramatically change the way you see things.
  
  - One of three students in Stanford is involved in a startup while still being a student. Students in startups are not just from computer and engineering majors. What are the characteristics of those people that bring them together?
   
  - There are some parts of the ecosystem that are very hard to effect. One thing in Silicon Valley is trust. There is always a fight between protection - the need to protect ideas, and trust - the need to share them. The people of the West Coast may be still naïve because the history has not crushed them yet that much. They are more willing to trust. This is one of the secret ingredients. They think: “Here is my idea, if you take it, well, I am going to come up with a better one”. They assume that you will not take it and steal it in the first place.  Getting students excited about entrepreneurship is very doable. Stanford is an extreme case study because they are surrounded by Silicon Valley. A lot of students come there because it is an integral part of Silicon Valley. Young people think: “There are a lot of startups here, so I will try to make one”. They have friends who are in startups and know people who can invest. When you do not have that culture around you, it is much more difficult. But where else could it start rather than in a university?
 
Most of the Russian universities I know have incubators, accelerators, or entrepreneurship programmes. They are not very different from what we have out there. The people here are as much enthusiastic. Probably, even more. They are very intelligent, so what is it missing? Maybe just a little bit of structure, content, and contact with international ideas, which we have here, at the forum, today. The world is growing very tiny. You can find anything anywhere on the Internet. People may have many ideas but they do not have the guts to do that. There is actually more money in Russia than there is sometimes in other parts of the world. The problem is the money here is not educated. Businesspersons do not know how to do venture. They know the construction business or car wash business, but they do not know what to do with startups. The startups desperately need that money and a person would love to do startups. There is a gap between them; the good news is that the gap is bridgeable. There are several basic moves. First, you cannot take more than 50 percent equity in a startup, or you will kill it. It happens all the time. Second, you do not want to take a controlling interest. You want to take a minority interest to keep ownership in them. Third, you do not give them all the money right away. You do it bit by bit. Fourth, they do not get their equity right away. If I am a co-founder, I get only one forty-eighth of my equity because I have divided it per month for four years. There are these simple things; you do not have to invent anything new.
 
Changing the culture with all those trust issues is difficult. Building entrepreneurial culture is doable. You do not have to be in the middle of Silicon Valley to do that. If you have a lot of money, you have to think what to do with it. Put it in a bank account? You might lose it. Invest in your own construction business? The situation with real estate is not very good. We advise putting 5-10 percent into startups, but do it in an intelligent way. There is a guy in Kazakhstan. Two years ago, he invested 10 million dollars to a group of two guys. He just gave them a check for ten million. They of course had a great year! They went to the Bahamas, they smoked cigars, and they bought fancy cars. He came a year later and asked about the product. They said that they needed another ten million! He was shocked, he realized he should have given them a hundred thousand maximum and called them every week. You have to be an educated investor, you cannot just throw money. If you do it three times, you will say: “I hate startups.” But it is not their fault, it is your fault. You did not learn how to do it.
The university is the exact place to build an entrepreneur culture. I believe it is a very important condition to make the city and the country attractive for people to live and to work; to make young people want to stay or, maybe, come back in the future!

The interview was conducted by Snezhana Nosova, Senior Lecturer at the TSU Department of Social Communication.