Yandex co-founder dies of cancer in London hospital
Russia's largest search engine Yandex has announced the death of co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Segalovich. The technical creator behind one of the world’s leading IT companies died of cancer at the age of 48.
Ilya Segalovich died on Saturday afternoon in one of London’s
hospitals after his artificial breathing machine was switched off
by doctors who on Thursday diagnosed their patient with brain
death.
On Sunday, the news was confirmed by Yandex’s spokesman. The
company’s co-founder and CEO Arkady Volozh explained in a blog
post that Segalovich was diagnosed with stomach cancer metastases
in September last year, but miraculously recovered from the
disease, having undergone chemotherapy. However, just last
week Segalovich’s doctors found a tumor in his brain, which,
complicated by meningitis, proved fatal.
“I was friends with Ilya since school; we sat behind the same
desk for four years. And then we created Yandex together. Last
night he died. Everything happened too quickly and
unexpectedly,” one of Volozh’s posts reads.
Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh founded Yandex in 1997. After
15 years of development the company became the leader of the
Russian internet search market, beating American rival Google
locally.
It was Segalovich who thought up the name Yandex, which stands
for ‘Yet Another iNDEX’ and also contains Russian letter Я which
means ‘I’ the company’s website informs.
According to Alexa.com, Yandex is the most popular Russian
website and 20th most-popular internet portal in the world,
providing over 50 services including internet search, news, mail,
weather forecasts, maps, traffic information, etc.
An oversubscribed Yandex IPO in New York in 2011 raised $1.4
billion, more than any other internet company IPO since Google’s
in 2004. Today company market value is estimated at $10 billion.
Member of the Yandex board of directors, where his voice
‘weighted’ 6.87 percent of the shareholder voting rights,
Segalovich owned 2.5 percent of the Yandex shares worth $250
million.
Criticism of Google and Apple
In 2012 Ilya Segalovich lashed at Google, maintaining that the
American company is anticompetitive.
In April interview to The Guardian chief technology officer at
Yandex accused Google of overindulgent use of its dominant
position on the market to shut out rival companies in cyber
space.
Google’s primary weapons to hinder competitors are its Chrome
browser and Android platform, Segalovich said last year.
The California giant's mobile platform Android is a "strange
combination of openness and not openness," Segalovich added.
"You cannot contribute to [Android], it's semi-open source…If
you download an application it does not work if it's not Android
marketplace. So that's an interesting question," Segalovich
pointed out.
In the same interview Russian IT specialist shared he did not
believe in the Apple business model because it creates a "closed
ecosystem".
“I myself don't like the closed platforms; I think it is
important that you have choice.”
Philanthropist and opposition sponsor
Born in the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1964,
Segalovich went to school in the then-USSR’s Kazakhstan, but
finally graduated from Moscow Geological Exploration Institute
where, he studied geophysics.
Segalovich and his wife Maria Yeliseeva, with whom he had several
children, founded Maria’s Children charity helping Russian
orphans to adapt to society. The family had six children, three
from Yeliseeva’s previous marriage, one child of their own and
three foster girls.
In an interview to Forbes he revealed that worked as a volunteer
election observer during the 2012 presidential elections in
Russia. Segalovich was also sponsoring opposition Coordination
Council, announced opposition blogger Aleksey Navalny on
Thursday.
“I don’t know what can replace his encyclopedic knowledge of
technology, and his pure vision of the product," Yandex
co-founder Arkady Volozh wrote in a statement. "But he has
left behind a whole new generation of programmers, a whole
school. And his ethical standards are a benchmark for us
all.”