Tag "alumni"

In the pursuit of digital projects, interesting business niches sometimes go unfilled. Higher School of Economics graduate Mikhail Pakhomov, founder and CEO of Cosmodrome Games, turned an analog project into a profitable venture. He told Success Builder how board games are created, how to turn a hobby into a source of income, and how to buck the trend towards all things digital.

When a new direction is being formed in the market, it’s possible to recognize the hype, create the rules yourself, and get rich on your own creativity. In the latest edition of Success Builder, the director of media product development at Russian social networking site VKontakte, Arseniy Ashomko, discusses what the advertising industry looks like from the inside, how the law is useful in any field, and what makes the company VKontakte special besides the juice bar and gym.

Last year, HSE launched its new joint course with Mail.ru called Communications in IT, where the head of RBC Group’s press centre, Egor Timofeev, was an invited speaker. In the latest edition of Success Builder, Egor talks about how the roles of a journalist and a PR specialist differ, why media is hard work, how to fight fake news, and how to be part of a brand on social media.

Ekaterina Kolchina, a graduate of ICEF and London Business School, is currently the deputy CEO of Papa John’s Russia. An education in economics certainly came in handy for this. In the latest edition of Success Builder, Ekaterina talks about the human side of consulting, stereotypes about the restaurant business, and taste-related aspects of working at a pizzeria.

The profession of a trader has an aura of mystery around it. These are people with a wonderful salary who have the privilege of being part of a small community of professionals. In the latest edition of Success Builder, Denis Gribov, a trader for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, talks about how to use your own savings to break into trading, as well as how to keep your emotions at bay, trade during lunchtime, and compete with artificial intelligence.

In order to manage a company successfully, one has to truly love what the company does. In the latest edition of Success Builder, Victoria Rydina, the head of the communications division at AgroTerra Group and a graduate of HSE’s MBA programme, talks about the charm of agriculture, the secrets of ‘non-GMO’ labels, a healthy corporate lifestyle, unmanned combine harvesters, and agronomists with tablets.

Despite the fact that written texts are losing to visual imagery in today’s media, people who have a way with words are still in high demand. In the latest edition of Success Builder, Pavel Sokolov, a graduate of the HSE Faculty of Communications, Media, and Design and the editor-in-chief of the Eksmo publishing house website, discusses what is currently happening in the world of books, what comprises the duty of a Russian intellectual, and how to be both a manager and a playwright.

As Russia’s digital economy gains momentum, participants of the sporadic market of digital services need to pave a path for success using their experience, professional instincts, and basic knowledge. In the latest edition of Success Builder, CreativePeople Director Sergei Prokofiev discusses what it’s like to build a business alongside other HSE alumni, how to protect designers and monetise creativity, and what one should learn in order to find a job in the digital sphere.

The world is digitising. This is not a simple process for the media, as ‘ordinary’ reality and digital reality are two different worlds, themselves separate from a magazine. Trifon Bebutov, Esquire Russia’s Digital Editorial Director and a graduate of HSE’s continuing education programme in graphic design, met with Success Builder to talk about what responsibilities his job entails, what exactly ‘paper aesthetics’ means, and how bad packaging can kill amazing content.

This spring we found out that it takes 56,000 LEGO bricks to build an eight-meter-high model of the Titanic and that after more than half a decade, people still aren’t sick of putting together simple pieces of plastic. Sergey Kozlov, a graduate of ICEF and currently LEGO’s operations director in Seoul, told Success Builder why he likes moving, why the Christiansens’ family business doesn’t fire people, and whether or not he gets to play with LEGO bricks at his desk.