No excuses: "I have always been freedom-loving" - an interview with IT-entrepreneur Alexander Crowe

Book lover

- Hi, Nastya!

- I was born in Magnitogorsk in an ordinary working-class family. Mother has changed many fields of activity, but for the last 15-20 years she has been working in the meat industry, buys and sells meat - she is a butcher.:) My father worked all his life as an electrician at the plant.

- My answer will probably be boring. I didn't have any special dreams. I didn't want to become an astronaut or anything like that.

The only thing I was fond of was books. My father instilled in me an interest in literature.

By the age of 12, I had read as much as most of my peers had not "mastered" and by the age of 25.

At the same time, I was interested in literature that was quite serious for children: Pikul, Jules Verne and others. However, having matured, I began to read much less often. Unfortunately.

- Yes, at about 6 years old there were difficulties with movement. It turned out that I have a disease associated with muscle weakness. But as a child, I was not particularly loaded with questions, how serious it is and whether it will progress.

- Enough to go to university.

Physics and Lyrics

- By education I am a mathematician-computer scientist. Already in my youth, I connected my future with computers, so I chose a faculty that, as it seemed to me, correlated with information technology. But as a result, five years spent at the university did not bring any practical skills. The only thing that was useful was the learning process itself.

- With regard to informatics, knowledge was given that was absolutely divorced from reality.

If you want to learn how to make money on the Internet and go to university for this, then most likely you are wasting your time. Nobody will teach you or even tell you.

Although there are a number of disciplines where academic education, in my opinion, is almost the only possible one. For example, the same math.

Therefore, the only thing that the years spent at the university gave me was the learning process. I learned self-discipline and self-control, acquired new acquaintances, etc.

- I have a fairly well developed left and right hemispheres of the brain, both logical and creative components. Until the age of 15, I played chess well, participated in city tournaments.

Initially, I was doing more creative things. For example, web design. But at the university I also “pumped” the part of the brain that is responsible for logic.

Interview with Alexander Crowe - special project "No excuses"

In the first year there was such a case. There was a subject "Algebra and Number Theory", many things in which I did not understand. But the end of the semester was approaching, I had to pass the test. We studied according to the textbook of Yu. N. Smolin, he also taught with us. Therefore, in order to pass the discipline, I just took and studied 150 pages of this textbook. Without much understanding, just memorized. When Yuri Nikolayevich took my credit, I told everything from memory, substituting synonyms on the go so as not to get overwhelmed. I got a credit and began to devote more time to exact disciplines. This allowed the development of the "logical" hemisphere.

Money and freedom

- In the year 1995. At that time, there was a good model: 486 dx2 66 MHz. True, without the Internet. I got the Internet much later - in 1999.

- I don’t remember a specific case, but I remember the period when it happened.

As I said, I was engaged in web design, as well as web programming (taught Pascal, PHP, etc.). Around the same time, I was introduced to a rather influential person. He lived in Chicago and from time to time he dropped orders for me on web development and web design.

As a result, somewhere in the early 2000s, I started earning my first money. I can't say that they were big, but for that time they were quite decent.

- Probably not. First, what is freedom? This is a rather complex philosophical topic. Freedom is not only when you are not limited in making decisions and are responsible for them, but also some kind of inner feeling. It is important not to confuse freedom with will, that is, with the concept of "what I want, I turn it over."

Secondly, I have always been freedom-loving. For me, this is one of the main motivating things that makes me move forward.

If I was in something not free, I always tried to remove this limitation and get what I need.

Therefore, money as such does not give freedom, but a lot of money helps to become freer. For example, having received $ 15,000 for one of the orders, I removed the travel restriction, I was able to go abroad for the first time - to the island of Bali.

- For the last nine months I have been living in Thailand.

I cannot call myself an avid traveler, since travel, in my opinion, involves a fairly active movement around the planet with frequent changes of locations. I stay in one place long enough. For example, I have been to Bali five times.

He also visited Laos, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Emirates. Someday I want to drive from the East to the West of the USA, from New York to California. I am thinking of visiting Rio, walking through the favelas to feel their atmosphere. I hope they won't understand me there on wheels.:-)

Without dreams, but with tasks

- The idea came after the first return from Bali. Then I thought that orders for web development are, of course, good. But this work is tied up with tough deadlines. To deliver the product on time, sometimes I had to work at night, through "I can not". And this is not good for my health, especially considering my illness. I decided that I needed to do something that would work autonomously and generate passive income without my active participation.

This is how the meta-search engine Flytourist was created. At that time, he had a clear competitive advantage - he knew how to determine the minimum ticket price for each of the payment methods. Since there were often situations when a search engine found a lucrative offer from a travel agency, and then it turned out that payment had to be made, for example, with YandexMoney, which a person did not have.

Now Flytourist is developing, but without my active participation.

Interview with webmaster Alexander Crowe

- Two weeks ago, I delegated the management to a special person, but I am still in charge of technical issues. The fact is that initially Flytourist was created by me from scratch, then two partners joined who invested money in the project by buying out minority shares. A year ago, a new investor came. He wanted to invest a million dollars in the project, but on condition that one of the previous partners leaves him. Unfortunately, we could not agree on the amount of cash out - the investor left. But I got some demotivation, and I focused on a new project - Avilita.

- This is a niche service for renting villas and other private residences around the world. This project, already at the zero stage, that is, at the development stage, was estimated by a syndicate of investors at $ 1,000,000. This allowed me to attract appropriate investments. Now the service has already been launched, the first orders are coming, mainly from the West. We conclude direct contracts with management companies and owners of these villas, now we have started to connect consolidators.

- I still have no dreams.

A dream is something unrealizable. I have tasks that I can achieve.

In particular, now all forces are thrown at Avilita. The project needs to be taken out of the “valley of death” into the “profitability zone”.

- Any person should treat himself without any excuses, otherwise he will not achieve anything. What excuses can one have to oneself?

At the same time, I think that laziness is absolutely normal. The question is in its quantity. Here, as with poison - in small doses, it can be a medicine.