🚅 🚵🏻 🚳 Will Porsche appear at the hackspace? Interview with Pasha Zhovner: praying mantis and creator of Flipper Zero 🍦 🧜🏼 🍠

On August 21, we talked live with Pavel Zhovner. Last monthzhovnerand his team launched the Flipper Zero Tamagotchi for hackers on the kickstarter .

The goal was $ 60,000, but in less than a day, the flipper raised a million dollars, and by the end the collected money approached the $ 5 million mark.

Like many Habrovites, I have been watching the project for almost a year. Most of all I admired how Pasha recruited a strong team for a project without funding and led her with a firm hand to the finished product and payback: this is what we talked about. And also about where the money will go, how to motivate yourself and how exactly the flipper team got together.

I am a simple guy from the village who came to conquer the capital. It is difficult to accurately measure success; A couple of weeks ago, people suddenly started listening to what I was saying and saying what cool things I do, even though no one had said that before. I am a little offended by the fact that people's attention depends on the number of zeros in the account. Although our project would be cool even if we didn't earn anything on it. I know a lot of people who do cool things, but they are so difficult to understand that no one can appreciate them, understand what the beauty of these things is. And the fact that the steepness of your actions is measured only by zeros in the account, upsets me.

And now people who for a long time did not pay attention to what I was telling them, at some point began to call me and talk about how cool everything is and how they believed in me.

In general, I get something, judging by external sources. I try to clock, calibrate for other people. If they like it, it means something good.

And for whom exactly?

I have my own authorities. I will not name them by name, but I always refer to their feedback. If there is a critical number of negative reviews, then I am doing some kind of garbage. Naturally, I don't read all the comments, there is a lot of rubbish, but I have some authorities.

I had a model friend. She has always been the "ugly duckling"

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I will try to explain again what we are talking about - I have been talking so much about my project lately that I’m already ashamed to pronounce this phrase. It seems to me that people will soon shy away from me, and I will shout after them: wait, let's talk about Flipper Zero! Therefore, I try not to bring this up unless I am directly asked. The announcement says that there will be a "sermon" of Flipper Zero, in fact, no; I was hoping that it would be possible to do without it.

What have I experienced? It's hard to answer that way. At that immediate moment, when almost a million dollars suddenly dripped in a day, I felt very bad: I did not sleep for two days, we did API and integrations. I thought this was nonsense.

Of course, later it was nice that someone would appreciate our work. Although, even if we had not had an overwhelming success, I would still think that the project is cool. We already did a great job then, and even if we collected ten times less, I would not think that we did it badly. My inner censor said we did well anyway.

In general, I do many things that few people can appreciate: I raise praying mantises, feed them cockroaches, shoot them in close-up, for example. People say - ugh, what the hell, but somehow I don't care. If I like it, no one will convince me that this is cool.

And the "impostor syndrome" after you saw three million dollars on your account has already passed?

And how much did it go?

Well, he hasn't gone anywhere. I was preparing answers for a closed conference of security workers, where I am often invited, and I felt that the people around me and everyone is much smarter than me. When I see how people take Ida Pro, decompile some other programs, remove packers, protections, obfuscation from viruses and do other incredible things, I understand that there is a whole gap between us in terms of the level of abstractions that these people are able to build on themselves in the heads that my brain is not physically available. Therefore, I never considered myself a cool expert, and still do not. I have already said that I consider myself the dumbest in our team. If you take each person individually, it turns out that everyone knows much better in their field of activity than I do. Therefore, the "syndrome" is always with me, but I try to do so that it does not interfere.

, softskills

And now you say that you have "impostor syndrome" due to the fact that someone is smarter than you. But you organized a team that worked for 7 months on a pure idea, became the frontman; then he brought it to Kickstarter, and people could hardly wait for the moment when the fundraising began and immediately started throwing money at you. In my opinion, you are lying somewhere: either about the importance of softskills, or about the fact that it seems to you that you are not smart enough.

I meant that human qualities will always be decisive in the case of a specialist. There is a category of people with a strangled ego who, in order to say “I told you so!”, Are ready to sabotage the project. Active assholes are immediately visible, but passive ones will not tell something, they will adjust something so that everything breaks down and a solemn statement can be made.

I spoke in this vein. If a person simply does not know something, then he can turn to someone, look for information, honestly say that he is not coping. But there is a type who begins to flaunt his competence: I am so cool, you are all morons, but this thing will not work at all, you don't even need to start.

Imposter Syndrome is not quite that. I believe that I can communicate normally, negotiate, discuss something. Although I am not even such a cool organizer - if it were not for Sasha Kulagin, who manages the entire project, I would have abandoned everything long ago. When something doesn't work out for me, I start to turn into that same asshole, I start saying: "Yes, I don't care, do whatever you want." In these moments, it is important that there is a person who can return me to my normal state.

I take any failure close to my heart. If I got fucked up somewhere, if something doesn't work out, if everything is closed due to a pandemic, if the customs detain goods, if the tax authorities in America do not work due to unrest, if it becomes obvious that we have chosen the "best" year in order to start something, if everything in the world is destroyed, if everything is broken, if we fail, in general, because of each of these reasons, I begin to feel very bad. I start to miss messages, merge, feel sad, become very depressed and can infect others with my depression.

What role do you play? Sasha Kulagin is a super organizer, but what are you doing?

The whole concept of the device is my own desire; this is what I personally lacked. The concept, the appearance are my fantasies, it was realized with my words.

I know a little bit of programming, a little bit about hardware, I have an idea of visual aesthetics, how to use it - that is, I know all the details a little bit, and key decisions are made with my participation. I cannot route electronics and render enclosures - I can look at the code a little, I know about the work of all the nodes in the team, I communicate with everyone directly.

My role is to steer this ship in a pre-planned direction. The whole audience, all the people who liked it - these are the people who feel about the same as I do. I try to make it so that both me and them like the result.

Sounds like you're a dreamer

I am constantly fantasizing, dreaming. I catch crows. All ideas come to me in my soul, for some reason. Probably because the blood circulates more actively under hot water. I usually twist it hard.

Is it possible for praying mantises under hot water?

They cannot be wetted, but the moisture level must be maintained so that the chitin does not dry out. I only sometimes zap with a spray bottle when they climb on a flower.

I mean you are a praying mantis

Tell us what you have learned this year

Or what you liked the most about what you learned.

I never could have imagined before that I would seriously talk about such things as leads, conversions, marketing in the format of a complex formalized system with graphs. I have always despised those people who pour these words - ROI, traffic went, flooded, loads, leads - I thought that this was some kind of caste of Internet homeless people.

But I had to figure out all this, in fact, it was necessary for the success of the project. I began to look at the charts, to see how things come. To do something, it was necessary to understand the metrics, to understand whether our economy is converging - well, I started digging. I have never really done this in my life, and I still think that I figured it out superficially.

When I see the Facebook interface for advertising, for example, I realize that it will take half my life to figure out this spaceship. But simple things became available to me; I can customize goals, labels, see how much has been converted, for example.

From practical skills, for example, in Altium I can twist boards. But it's not that interesting.

I can wag my tongue a lot. Previously, no one wanted to listen to me, but now everyone is very happy to me, they call me everywhere, even Forbes calls to listen to me.

Well, you did it before. Otherwise, how are you pouring everything into everyone now? In podcasts, in interviews ...

It happened.

What do you think about Habr?

This is a provocative question.

Well, we need sharp topics

I love Habr. Technically speaking, this is the best venue that exists today. You can look at different foreign platforms. Slashdot is something heavy, overloaded, I don't understand how anyone is sitting there. Medium is bullshit, there are not even comments, one picture fits into one screen of text, an application above and below - who is this made for, for brutal swiborgs? Reddit is just links to other resources, there are no longreads, there are no normal comments where you could insert a picture. That is, for some inexplicable reason, no other zadrot collective blogs of such a level as Habr have been created.

A tech blog should be able to create longreads with complex formatting, pictures, code markup, spoilers and everything else. And comments with the same set of features.

And about the filling of Habr; all the “grandfathers” who are sitting there cannot fail to note that there is a certain “blurring” of the agenda and format of the resource, through your efforts, among other things. Probably not bad. Everything that becomes popular becomes available to the masses, lowers the entry threshold; it is an inevitable process.

By the way, I think that Habr is simply obliged to revise the concept a little at some point and become something like GitHub, no matter how strange it sounds. Often there are good articles that are out of date, and should have added something to them, but the author has long since disappeared, although the article still hangs in the first place for important queries.

That is, if there was a function to offer a pull request to the article, everyone would benefit from this. Of course, the author must be alive to receive him. They often write to me that I have irrelevant information in an article from some 201X, but I do not even go there, I cannot constantly shovel old articles and keep them up to date. But the community could do it. If they could send me a pull request for old articles so that I can accept them, it would be cool. It would be something in between with wiki engines.

Now everyone is gradually spreading to standalone-chicks, starting their own social networks, Telegram channels. But I still appreciate Habr, I love it, if I need to shout something loudly, first of all I go there.

Still, I went around all the sharp corners :) How do you like the audience of Habr? Do you like to chat there in the comments?

How do you feel about those who write to you on various occasions? In general, there are a number of people who do not like you. How do you feel about this?

Well, I'm kind of not $ 100 to please everyone.

You are like peanut butter, you are either adored or hated. How can this be achieved?

I don't know if this is good or bad, even. I like to read the comments of Ekaterina Shulman, where everyone adores and adores her, and I myself am also in love with her. I understand that this does not shine for me - I say too much of anything provocative, I am not a very modest person, it annoys many.

People constantly write to me that I work for the Kremlin, Israel and for some reason MI-6. This is flattering. They wrote to me on Twitter that “you are now reformatting pop culture with your Flipper and everything will be the same” - I replied that I was very flattered that someone considered my crafts so influential. Well ... Haters, smacking :)

Another question about money. You didn't have money when you started, but now you have a lot

Has your attitude to money changed somehow? And in general, how to start with no money at all? Are you just lucky, or was there a cool team, or can you take more or less any team and make everything work?

Let's go in reverse order, from my attitude to money. It has changed a lot over the past year; All my life I lived in a poor family, and my parents were very shy about them. All my life it was difficult for me even to come up with the amount for which I would do something. It's unpleasant.

But over time, I realized that money is just a resource, like rubble, sand or steel beams. If you want to build a beautiful building like a skyscraper, you need to pour so many tons of sand concrete there, bring so many tons of beams and sprinkle it all with millions of money. Otherwise, there will be no beautiful building. Without all this, you can also build a building, but it will be some kind of hut.

This can be seen in so many things. For example, there are guys whose culture is close enough to me: various GNU's red-eyed comrades, open source fans who believe that money kills everything - you only need a swabian!

But, unfortunately, those things that come out of their pen cannot be used normally. For example, you can take Desktop Linux, look at KDE, GNOME; more recently, there was an "open source laptop" on Crowd Supply - because of such a thick canoe with protruding wires. Or the Jabber XMPP messenger is shit! You write to one place, messages come to the computer, but do not come to the phone, you have to put the package on the phone. And so with any open source hand-made article, which the community seems to be doing without money - compare with how Pavel Durov with his millions of money in a couple of years issued a product that was decades ahead of everyone else.

Since then, I realized that in order to make something beautiful, initiative and thoughts alone are not enough. You have to pay a lot of money; we need the work of serious professionals, who usually have families, children, mortgages, and who require normal compensation for their life time.

So now I'm not particularly shy about money. They say to me: now, you have earned millions, now everything will spoil, but in fact it is not. We have not even received these millions, they have not even been withdrawn from the cards. It is foolish to think that we will stupidly put them in our pocket. Most will go to manufacturing and development; there is already a huge budget for software, we want to do features for some time after the release of the device, this also costs a lot of money. So don't be shy about the money. This is the norm.

As for the team: we initially had a professional team, the guys worked with HTC and other serious companies. What they do is a serious commercial company doing serious business. What we did for the first six months, I said that we did it without attracting external investment. We only had internal resources, literally money saved from breakfast. We spent very little back then, mainly on prototyping and the time of the people who worked on it.

Well, you got the professionals from somewhere who invested their time in this idea? How it's done?

I cannot say that it can be simply taken and repeated. If I now began to think in advance about how to find professionals in order, for example, to build a rocket, it is unlikely that I would have succeeded. We were all in the same environment, in our hackspace, where I am now; we called this room our lecture hall (now everyone is sitting in the next room). We cooked in this environment for several years. We are told: now, cool, you made a device in six months, but we must take into account that these people, like me (well, I’m somehow on the sidelines), had been continuously plowing in their industry for 10 years before doing what something interesting. This is not a momentary success, it is a long and selfless work.

The question was more about how to take cool selfless people and ignite them with an idea.

You motivated them, Flipper Zero is your dream. You gathered them around you in a hackspace.

No, I came to this hackspace in which they were already. I did not organize it and did not assemble a team. I came when everything was working here, and people were there. I run various events here, throw out the trash and repair shelves made of timber and leroy merlin pipes, this is how my administration of this hackspace looks like.

Before me, there was already a company here that is still working, called Design Heroes. We were just all friends and worked together sometimes, and then I proposed my idea; we tried to discuss it, estimate it, and decided to work on it. Before me, they were engaged in contract development: customers came to them with requirements, they said "pack me the board in this case." And they carried out the order, the customer left with ready-made developments and sold them. This was the first experience when the idea went all the way from scratch to implementation right here. People liked it, I convinced them that the idea can shoot, although I myself did not fully believe in it then; even on the day when it was launched, I thought: maybe it will work, maybe not.

Yes, I remember those conversations in the spring. "If we collect a total of 60K dollars, it will be very cool" and Kickstarter is launched, after 10 minutes 60K is typed, an incredible moment was

After 8 minutes.

It was amazing. I was happy, as if my child flew into space

I was so worried as if I was launching a project myself. From the very beginning, absolutely honestly, without any connections, we hammered into this closed door. It was all suffered through suffering along with everyone who followed our project.

We have already discussed how you started without money, but here's another important point. In a normal situation, a person at work may become discouraged.

he needs to pay a mortgage, for example; but his salary should come, and it is quite comfortable here. He can lose his faith in the project, find it again, work more or less on average. But you had to constantly, without stopping, work hard into this project. What did you do when someone lost faith in the project, and when you yourself lost faith in the project?

I figured out the question. This is a difficult point that cannot be easily explained. In all projects it happens that there is an upsurge, when everyone drives, you all get high, and then something doesn't work out, it doesn't grow together, there is no money, everyone starts to feel sad, to score, think about whether they should do something else , especially people attracted from outside and not on the payroll.

For me, this is also an emotionally difficult moment. At such a moment, when you are at the very bottom of the emotional state, the firmness of the team and its prospects of getting somewhere is determined. I realized that at such a moment you need to try to find small victories. So we managed to do something, here we were shown on TV, there were 10K pre-orders - I already talked about this in the podcast. Everything is fine, we eat buckwheat for another month.

Small victories are very important, and they don't always work out. You have to create artificially.

How is it? If everyone knew how to generate small victories from nothing, then everyone would have no problems.

Of course, you can't create them out of nothing at all, then it's just self-deception. They must be justified in some way. At least small results of efforts are needed. Often, designers and other people who create something do not see the results of their actions for a long time, and suffer from this, for example, if the designer works “on the table” for six months and does not see any fruits of his labor. It's depressing.

I am also one of those people - I once did a strange job, when after a couple of years it was impossible to see what happened. You twist routing, insert servers, nothing special happens; looking back - what did I do, actually? It is important for creative people that the cycle from idea creation to release, demonstration of the result passes as quickly as possible. The shorter it is, the more comfortable they feel. Even if they are not paid so well; of course, they still have to pay.

Therefore, when you are sawing sites, drawing pictures, shooting videos, making installations, developing hardware - whatever - try to make releases as often as possible. If you get an error somewhere, you can fix it, but the main thing is not to hold back. There is a big misconception: sometimes people say - now we will work for 2 years, we will not release anything, we will not show anything to anyone until everything is perfect. This is wrong in my opinion.

Last question. You haven't held that same money in your hands yet, but do you already feel like a millionaire?

It is nonsense. Well, really. No, I don’t feel, and I don’t know what would change if I did. Let's say I now have the opportunity to go to different places where I could not go before; I like it.

Now people listen carefully when I talk about something, it's also nice. I now trust my hypotheses more. I used to think: am I not a fool, and am I not invented garbage? But now I trust myself more.

Money alone doesn't really motivate me. Vanity - yes, it motivates. All sorts of cool things that now turn out, which you can look at and say - this is it, something that has never been and is now, it's cool. And the money ... well, I don't even have a driver's license, I ride a bike. If my question with money is closed, and I no longer need to think about “should I pay for the Internet at the end of the month or buy delicious food?”, I will be more comfortable, but life will not change too much.

So you won't even buy a Porsche for yourself?

Our economy involves reinvestment. We are making Flipper ONE, which will be many times more difficult than Flipper Zero. We also have unpredictable expenses in case of failures, in order to fix it in the event that, for example, we screw up with the first batch of devices and they turn out to be defective, or after a while a fatal bug is discovered.

Plus, a lot of money will be spent on software. There is a high probability that I will not even become a ruble millionaire, so I am in no hurry to share the skin of an unkilled bear. We drew ourselves rather modest salaries on the market, and in the next six months nothing will fundamentally change for me. For most of my life, I had a salary of less than 100K rubles a month, and at the same time I felt like a happy person.

I will keep an eye on the presence of a Porsche in the hackspace :)

Well, I'll definitely get my teeth done to correct this jackal's grin. And everything else, well, maybe I’ll buy a new one, better. I just don't understand why I need, for example, a car. In general, I am afraid of problems associated with the prostate gland, therefore, when I sit on a bicycle, I constantly wind it up so that the blood does not stagnate; if I was driving, walking between one chair and another, that's bad. If you have a sedentary job, you should at least screw your bike.

We remind you of two things:

The Turbo tariff has a 54% discount
Pasha and his team are looking for new developers to make the flipper together.

Will Porsche appear at the hackspace? Interview with Pasha Zhovner: praying mantis and creator of Flipper Zero