Valery Stromov: from intern to CEO Alice for 9 years (Category Management)

Interesting. interview Valeria Stromova, 29-year-old CEO of Alice and smart devices of Yandex, who came to Yandex 2016 Developer intern at the age of 20 years, and 2025 For the past year, a team of more than 700 man. The interviews are conducted by two leading podcasts “This is My Work”: Daria Zolotukhin, HR Director of Yandex, one of the hosts of the podcast, and Nikita Tolstoy, who is responsible for user experience and logistics technologies in the I Market team. I found the interview interesting both in terms of the guest and his fast-paced career and some of the ideas he shared on the podcast.

1. The path from intern to CEO valery He spoke about his unusual career path, which began with a passion for programming in the fourth grade. The key point was to become familiar with Olympiad programming through the Codeforces website in seventh grade. Interestingly, he got into Yandex by accident - he saw an advertising banner on Yandex. Weather and applied for an internship, attaching a simple text file with the words “I am an Olympian” instead of a resume. 2. The vision of a universal AI assistant Valery presented an ambitious vision for the future of Alice - the creation of universal artificial intelligence that will go beyond chat interfaces and become a full-fledged assistant in the physical world. This assistant will be able to perform complex analytical tasks in minutes, which now require days of work. 3. Emotional synthesis and empathy One of the main technical challenges of Valeria’s team is the development of emotional synthesis technologies. Alice must learn to understand the emotions of the user on acoustic tokens and adapt to his mood. This means that the virtual assistant will not only be able to process text, but also perceive intonation, emotional state and react accordingly. This, by the way, was an interesting thought for me - before I did not take into account the adaptation of the assistant to the mood of a person in my thoughts. 4. Management philosophy Valery spoke about his leadership philosophy, stressing the importance of setting ambitious goals with time constraints. He believes that teams need to abandon excessive caution and learn to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. The key principle is to create an atmosphere where even within a company, technology looks like magic. I can say that I do not have enough appetite for risk and this often slows me down :( 5. Employment of staff Valery shared two criteria for hiring Sincere interest in work - the ability of the candidate to get carried away with the project so much that he is ready to work overtime not because of coercion, but because of internal motivation. Curiosity is the constant desire to learn new things, the ability to give examples of what a person has mastered in recent weeks or months. 6. The role of the manager According to Valery, the thesis that good managers simply “assemble a team of the best and do not interfere with their work” is a myth. He stressed that the manager should define goals, strategy, motivate the team and create effective processes. 7. Culture of innovation Here Valery spoke about the concept of “working backwards”, which was popularized by Amazon and about which you can read the book “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon”. told.
8. About Alice and her future Valery believes that Alice should become not just a voice assistant, but a full-fledged universal assistant with empathy, able to understand context, emotions and solve complex problems in various spheres of life. This is in line with Alice’s recent updates, including reasoning mode, file management and free communication in English.

So, this episode of the podcast turned out to be interesting, we’ll see what happens next.

#AI #Leadership #Management #Engineering #ML #Agents #Software