Peter and I had the privilege of visiting a new startup incubator in Kazan while we were visiting our office in Russia this week.  They invited us to do a presentation and we did a talk called “How to compete with Silicon Valley from Russia” with a focus on early stage startups and perspective from the incubator/accelerator ecosystem in the US.  We started by answering the red herring title of the talk… don’t try to be Silicon Valley, build a great startup culture in Kazan.  And we drew a lot of parallels to what we’ve been focused on building in New Orleans.  Here’s my favorite “quote” from the talk:

«Мы любим стартапы! У вас, в России, есть прекрасные инженеры, прекрасные программисты, и мы рады тренировать начинающих бизнесменов, рады им помогать», – считает  Крис Шульц.

” We love startups! Do you, in Russia, there are excellent engineers, excellent programmers, and we are happy to train novice businessmen are happy to help them “- says Chris Schultz.

It has been fascinating to watch the startup ecosystem emerge in Kazan.  The IT Park is a beautiful facility that has opened with a lot of government support.  Of course, the energy is in the grass roots, and the collaboration thats emerging on the ground between Flatstack and the many spinoffs created by former employees is really exciting.

Slides and video of our talk below. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Dave McClure, Paul Graham, and Brad Feld, so thanks to them.

I just got back from visiting my partners in Flatsourcing in Kazan, Russia. This was my third trip to Kazan, and by far the most exciting. This stems from both the growth we are experiencing with Flatsourcing, but even more importantly the changes that are taking place right before my eyes in the city.

On arrival in Kazan, one of the first things you notice is that the whole city is under construction. Since last year a major road repair program has taken place and pot-hole lines streets have been replaced with paved, widened highways. Soviet-era block houses are being replaced by new apartment buildings. I was fortunate enough to stay in a new apartment that Oleg’s family has purchased. In the last three years mortgages have become commonplace in Russia, and cars and apartments are fast becoming part of the middle-class lifestyle. Speaking of cars, as we drove to work each morning, we passed dealerships for Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai as well as Mercedes and BMW. Word is that the Chinese auto manufacturers will be invading next year. They already have their fleets on the road in the form of big beautiful city busses. Just last year the city bus fleet was ragged, its been upgraded by Chinese manufacturers like Golden Dragon.

Shopping malls are all over the place. Kazan actually has more shopping malls per capita than Paris. We ate lunch at a shopping mall food court at a Russian fast food chain ironically named CCCP (translated as USSR). I asked the guys if this was offensive or threatening to anyone. Nope, they said, they Soviet era has been relegated to nostalgia by modern capitalism that is fueling the country’s growth. CCCP now is simply a fast food joint serving the world’s biggest brand, Coca-Cola.

You can’t help but notice how IT oriented the city is. One of the things I trumpet about Kazan is that there are more than 20 universities, most of them technical. This is a university town graduating the next generation of computer programmers annually. Kazan, and Russia as a whole has a culture of IT. The coolest job you can have is a computer programmer. Being high tech opens the doors of opportunity, including working at Google in St. Petersburg, or eventually working in the US if you are good enough.

Billboards around the city advertise HP desktops and laptops. The government has just invested in a beautiful IT startup “IDEA Park” to provide office space to startups complete with furnished desks and computers. The rent is discounted 50% for winners of an annual business plan competition.

Two years ago Fujitsu moved an entire office from the UK to Kazan through a partnership with a Russian based IT company, ICL. Since then, IBM has moved in and is partnering with Kazan State University and there were rumors when I was there that Microsoft is next and that top talent is starting to be recruited by Microsoft.

I can’t wait to see what Kazan looks like next year. One thing is for sure, the Flatsourcing office will have quadrupled in size and we’ll be hiring more!

Finally, the hottest gadget in Russia by far is the iPhone. I brought three of them over for Oleg, Alex, and Timur and they were promptly unlocked and filled with some of the most amazing software that we’ll learn about over here in the near future. I ended up leaving my personal one behind as well. Even though carriers don’t sell them yet, and they go for upwards of $800 on the black market, our last night there we were surprised to see the women at the two tables on either side of us to be taking pictures of each other with their iPhones. An apt metaphor for falling borders in this ever-flattening world!

I went to lunch today with Oleg and Alex here in Kazan, Russia. The whole experience reminded me of how flat this world has become. Oleg drove us to lunch in is Toyota, he said that Japanese cars are really considered to be much higher quality then the Russian Ladas. We went to a mall that is the first branded mall I have ever seen, called Mega Mall, a Russian company. It was right next to IKEA, a Swedish company. On the other side was the a do-it-youself megastore OBI, a German company.

Inside the mall, we went straight to the food court for lunch. Alex chose his favorite restaurant, McDonalds, and got his usual order of a Fresh Mac meal (a Big Mac modified with tomato’s and lettuce). Oleg got a chicken sandwich meal from KFC. I was the only one to actually have a meal from a Russian company, and it was a Greek gyro at that.

The world truly is flat.

Dobraye ootro from Kazan, Russia, home of Tatsoft.ru and Flatsourcing.com. It been a long trip over here, but I arrived Tuesday night after several flight delays and about 60 hrs of travel.

Its great to be over here with our entire development team and to be spending time with Oleg, Alex, & Timur, my partners in Flatsourcing.com. We all are getting a tremendous amount out of working together face-to-face. Even though we talk can daily via Skype, email, and phone, nothing supplants seeing each other in person.

We’ve laid out aggressive plans for ourselves for the next few days, and started today with hashing through the details of the siteMighty Advanced Analytics module. This is an incredibly sophisticated tool that will enable us to fully optimize PPC campaigns by pulling in cost & conversion data. It’s quite a task, but 6 hrs today enabled us to finalize the specs and really move forward on it.

We are all really looking forward to Russia’s inaugural BarCamp this weekend. We’ve got a lot of excited attendees, and many software development firms in the region will be in attendance. I’ll be blogging about the event and the rest of our adventures together, so stay tuned.

We are very pleased to announce the very first BarCamp to be held in Russia. BarCamp Kazan (Russian here) will be held on August 4th, 2007, in Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan.

This BarCamp conference will coincide with my trip to Russia to visit my colleagues at Flatsourcing, Inc. we are all very excited to bring the “unconference“-style conference to Russia.

Kazan is a city with multiple excellent technical University programs. There are many highly qualified computer scientists and web programmers, and we look forward to this opportunity to bring them together, and share some of our experiences through our last six years of developing our global partnership.

I’m personally excited to host a conference session with my colleague Oleg Kurnosov in which we will share concepts from Thomas Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. This book has had a tremendous impact on us both personally, and provided a blueprint (and name inspiration) for our current joint venture, Flatsourcing Inc.

We want to extend the invitation to anyone and everyone to join us in Kazan August 4 for this BarCamp. The airfare might be a little steep, but we will make sure the conference is free. Thanks to everyone who is helping to put this on. Be sure to read the announcement on the Tatsoft Blog too, (English version here.)