Hacker News Reader

Comment by hastur | Hacker News Reader

Now, compare that to Putin's pipe dreams of creating his own version of Silicon Valley in Russia. Obviously, even he can't be that stupid. So it's all PR, Putin doesn't want Russia to go anywhere, he just loves presiding over the vast criminal empire of intelligence services, organized crime and oligarchs.

View on HN

What ever happened to that, by the way? So far the only big companies to come out of Russia were basically local language counterparts of Yahoo, Facebook and Norton.

There are nice exceptions, nginx is the most prominent one in the open source space. Nonetheless, the SV dream is just a PR.

Kaspersky would be another one. There's also Paragraph (creators of Newton's handrwriting recognition module), but they are from the earlier times.

Please, define "big"?

What's about Parascript (acquired for $50M in 2008)? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/parascript

Abbyy? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/abbyy

Evernote? Badoo? Parallels?

Evernote/Badoo were not founded / grown in Russia as far as I can tell. It would be like saying that Google is a Russian company because Sergey was born there.

Also, the fact that a 50m company even needs to be mentioned among the "top" should be sufficient proof of the country's impact on the rest of the world (again, I'm not counting Russia-specific Yandex/Rambler/Odnoklassniki/[...] here)

With the number of amazing engineers from Russia and the rest of fUSSR, they'd basically need to have 20-30% of all successful technology companies to be keeping up. That's clearly not the case, so somehow the Russian business environment is underperforming for tech companies and startups.

Your own link says that Parascript is now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Parascript was a Russian company, but they moved en masse to Boulder in 1994 (IIRC). They are (were?) a group of very smart engineers, very strong in DSP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com