The Story of Kirill
Today is Kirill Popov's 5 year anniversary with the company.
Today is Kirill Popov's 5 year anniversary with the company.
Kirill is an Uptilt legend and I thought with all the new people we have that his story, at least from my perspective, is one that should be know.
When I first interviewed Kirill he was begging for a job, he had called me a number of times to come in for an interview and he was looking for something to keep him out of the Army. After our interview, I thought he was obviously very smart and since he wanted a job quite badly I thought $10 and hour would get him on board.
So, at the end of the interview, I said... "Great, so we'll get you an offer letter that will pay you $10 per hour"
No sooner than the "our" in hour came out of my mouth, Kirill shot back with $14. I remember thinking what courage he had for doing that... I knew he'd take $10, he had after all taken the bus to the interview, but he shot back IMMEDIATELY with $14.
He didn't get $14 :-) But he did get $12.
For the first 6 months he worked for us, Kirill took multiple busses from SF to our Woodside Rd office. It was 3 hours each way and Kirill was in each morning by 9.
Kirill first job with us was to take the Uptilt tools (polls, message boards, calendars, opt-in forms) and put them into copies of website that we would sell them to. In those days, we didn't have leads yet, so Kirill was given a list of website that we thought would be good targets for us, he would make a copy of the website onto our demo.uptilt.com server and then implement all 8 tools into the copied version of that website. We made him do 20 of those per day.
Other items you might not know (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some myself)
Kirill developed the first version of the EmailLabs website (http://web.archive.org/web/20010411002633/http://www.emaillabs.com/)
Kirill handled customer support for a number of years
Kirill used to develop templates when sales people would sell that offering
Kirill has gone on countless sales calls as a sales engineer
Kirill has worked as a developer for us, he build a data-feed driven price comparison shopping engine for Milesource
(5k per month for us)
Kirill is still the account manager for some accounts.
Kirill has spoken at trade shows on our behalf, represented us on committees, authored papers
Kirill was our IT department from 2000-2004
People often ask me, how do you start a business, get it going and make it all work. There is no simple answer to that question, but there is one needed ingredient, you need people who SOLVE PROBLEMS. Kirill Popov is a master problem solver and we're incredibly lucky to have someone with his talent, drive and brains working with us. We wouldn't be in the position we are today without him.
Kirill Popov - Smart.... and gets things done!
And drives his second BMW at 23 :-)
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