It took 20 years for Arkady Volozh to build Yandex into Russia’s Google, Uber, Spotify, and Amazon combined. It took 20 days for everything to crumble.
seemed to be in good spirits. It was February 11, his birthday, and the 58-year-old billionaire CEO and cofounder of Yandex, the Russian tech behemoth, was in the sort of open, engaging mood that could be calledfor hello. He was speaking from his car in Tel Aviv, bragging about his father—an oil geologist in his eighties who had “discovered” oil in Israel, Volozh said—as we chatted about my upcoming trip to Tel Aviv to interview him for this story.
On our call, Volozh asked whether there was anything in particular I wanted to see during my visit—the old city of Jerusalem perhaps? I have seen that, I told him. My goal was to spend as much time as possible with the reigning baron of Russia’s tech sector, and to try out Yandex’s new products firsthand. Yandex had recentlyin Israel. How about a scooter ride? I asked. Of course, he said.
Gershenzon told me the day after his post that Volozh “is responsible for this news page.” He continued, “It’s the seventh day of the war, and we haven’t seen any statement from him.” The “great entrepreneur, excellent family guy doesn’t understand his responsibility, and the awful thing is that Yandex is participating with—is cooperating with—the Russian army ... It makes me sick.”
Starting around 1993, the duo set out to build a digital search program for scientific patents, the Bible, and Russian classical literature. The name, according to the company’s official history, came from Volozh and Segalovich “brainstorming around the words ‘search’ and ‘index.’” They arrived at Яndex, an abbreviation of “yet another indexer,” and soon expanded the software to be able to search the entirety of the Russian internet,.
By 2009, Yandex had a 56 percent share of the Russian-language search market, more than double Google’s. The Russian economy had stabilized, and ad revenues poured into the company’s coffers. Yandex quickly expanded into email, maps, online shopping, and the spam blocker Spamooborona. There was a good deal of truth in Volozh’s boast that no other company in the world has competed with Google “and survived and beat it.
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