1) Arkady Yurievich Volozh is best known for founding the Russian search engine, Yandex and playing the role of Chief Executive Officer as well as director ever since 2000. Since the inception of Yandex in 1997, the company has managed to capture 60 percent of the national search market.

2) Volozh was born on 11 February 1964 in Guriev (Atyrau), Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and currently resides in Moscow, Russia. He enrolled in Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas for studying applied mathematics and successfully graduated from there in 1986.

3) Yolozh has a background in computer science and he has combined his academic success to become a serial entrepreneur.

4) Volozh’s parents were geologists who were working in Kazakhstan at the time of his birth. It was also during his school years in the same region when he met Ilya Segalovich who would later become the co-founder and CTO of Yandex. Initially, both of them chose separate professional fields but they later came together in achieving the goals of Yandex.

5) After graduating, Volozh spent some time working at a state pipeline research institute called the Institute of Control Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and there he conducted a significant amount of research in the field of data analysis. However, Volozh was hardly happy with this line of work and his opportunity came when the Soviet bloc started breaking up and small private businesses in Russia became legalized. Volozh laid the foundation of a relatively small business that imported personal computers from Austria and exported pumpkin seeds.

6) Known to his colleagues and professional acquaintances as shy, Volozh currently operates the Yandex Towers located on Leo Tolstoy Street. One of his earliest achievements includes developing algorithms for Russian Bible and classical literature search, which makes the location of Yandex’s headquarters quite appropriate.

7) In the same year as founding of CompTek International in 1989, Volozh started working on search, which led him to establish a search software developing company known as Arkadia Company. It was at this time when Volozh recalled his friend Ilya and they got together to develop an application that would allow the search for ‘non-structured information with Russian morphology.’ In 1987, he was head of the Wireless Data Committee of Russian Association of Networks and Services (RANS)

8) It was Volozh’s partner Ilya who came up with the name Yandex for their search engine that basically stands for ‘Yet Another Index’.

9) As CEO of Yandex, Arkady Volozh has 23 senior colleagues while in the internet industry itself, Volozh works with colleagues in 229 companies located and operating in 24 different countries.

10) Volozh is known for founding and co-founding a number of successful IT enterprises. One of them is CompTek International, which was founded in 1989 and is currently one of the largest distributors of telecom and network equipment in Russia. Another of his ventures includes InfiNet Wireless, which is a Russian company providing wireless networking technology.

11) Before 2000, Volozh was working as Chief Executive Officer at CompTek International but after 2000, he left this job to become CEO of Yandex instead. For many people who have visited these headquarters, the office that uses wood, cork and carpet only tends to reflect the personality of Volozh himself who is not a typical extravagant rich Russian. Rather Volozh has rejected the idea of driving around in limousines and is happy using his old Volvo.

12) While Volozh’s personal life and office interior may be modest, the success of Yandex that has made him rich is definitely not. Yandex is globally, the fifth largest search engine and has beaten Google to become Russia’s most popular search engine, which means that it is one of the four national search engines to have done so. The white and sparingly simple homepage of Yandex serves the true purpose of surfing through the internet for most Russians.

13) One of Volozh’s professional strategies and acumen that need to be lauded include knowing exactly which of Google’s tactics to employ and which of them to avoid entirely. This means that one of the sources of revenue for Yandex is advertisements and the company offers a relaxed atmosphere at work to its employees. However, unlike Google, Volozh has helped provide Yandex with a grip over local content and in understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet, which is the source of the Russian language.

14) Volozh has steadily increased the services portfolio of Yandex as well offering an online payments system called Yandex Money and traffic related information genius called Yandex Traffic.

15) Volozh is often called as the ‘giant killer’ as well because of his contribution in Yandex’s acquisition of the business social networking site called Moikrug.ru and of SPB Software which is a mobile developer that makes it easier for people to employ various services on their smart phones.

16) In 2012, Volozh starred on the cover of GQ Russia as the Businessman of the Year as well as the Man of the Year.

17) Also in 2012, Yandex decided to build on its success and came out with its very own web browser. It was also working on iOS6 maps with Apple later in the year and is reported to replace Google in the future as mobile Safari default search engine.

18) Today Volozh enjoys the fact that investors have tremendous confidence in the company owing to Russia’s growing consumer economy, strong internet programming atmosphere, a large number of internet users and numerous potentially skilled technology personnel.

19) According to Volozh, the future holds countless possibilities for Yandex and he told Russia Today that the main focus of Yandex in the future will be to target markets and economics that are underdeveloped or developing. Specifically Yandex entered Turkey last September and established the Turkish version of Yandex accompanied by a myriad of other services for Turkish internet users.

20) The father of Russian search engine Yandex, Volozh is happily married, has three children, and enjoys spending time with his family.