A cautionary tale of a Russian billionaire who made his fortune by creating websites and applications for computers.
The future billionaire was born in Moscow on February 3, 1974 in a family with a technical bias. Father is a scientist, whose activities are related to the intensification of production, and my mother was a technical worker. Apparently this influenced his passion for information technology. At the age of ten, Andrei assembled his first radio transmitter to communicate with his friends without using phones.
After leaving school, Andrei moved to live in Spain, in the city of Valencia. There he entered to study at a local institute, but dropped out of his studies and, taking the documents, returned to Russia.
Andreev created the very first commercial project in 1995. The Virus online store was selling computers and components for them. The store was quite successful and in just a couple of years it was sold for several hundred thousand dollars.
The next project was the SpyLOG service. It turned out to be a useful tool for webmasters to track traffic on Internet pages.
Not stopping at what has been achieved, three years later Andreev created the Begun service, which works with content advertising. In 2004, 80% of this company was bought for 900 thousand dollars by a Russian investment company. And already in 2008, the same resource tried to buy out Google, offering 140 million dollars for it.
The next step on the road to becoming a billion was the creation of the social network Mamba. The dating site quickly became popular in its segment. A part of the shares of this company was bought by Mail.ru in 2006.
The second such site was the Badoo resource. Both of these resources in 2017 entered the top ten sites where Russians spent the most money.
Initially, the Badoo website spread in Spain, then spread to Europe and America. Its distinctive feature was the ability not only to get acquainted for the sake of love relationships, but also to communicate, exchange photos and videos for free. Today this service is one of the largest in the world and has up to 400 million users in 190 countries.
At the moment, Andrey Andreev's fortune is estimated at $ 2.3 billion. To billionaires in the field of It-technologies, he is second only to Pavel Durov and Alisher Usmanov.
A distinctive feature of Andreev is the secrecy of everything that concerns his personal life. He explains this by the interests of security.
As a place of residence and work, Andreev chose London, and practically does not come to Russia. From London, a successful billionaire with Russian citizenship, most often flies to Spanish Valencia, where his parents live.
By the example of his life and success in it, Andreev proved that you can achieve wealth and recognition using your mind and knowledge.
