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It Really Is a 120-million-member social network which is including in excess of 300,000 customers a day, with much more than 4.3 million everyday picture and video clip uploads, and seven billion month to month web page views. It has Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570,000 new everyday users, producing it the third-biggest app of all soon after FarmVille and CityVille. Massively profitable, it really is forecast to generate hundreds of millions of dollars this year, and is currently being aggressively courted by venture-capital companies valuing it in the billions. And it really is operate from London by a secretive Russian serial entrepreneur who has steadfastly refused to be interviewed or photographed. Until now.

The world's biggest social network

Badoo is the world's biggest social network that you almost certainly have not nevertheless heard of. Run from 800-square-metre loft-style offices in Soho, it is brilliantly powerful at offering one particular simple and universally persuasive service: hooking up members in accordance to their profile pictures and location. "Chat, flirt, socialise and have fun!," implores the residence page, alongside images of future buddies these kinds of as Terri, 21 ("Wants a candlelit dinner"), and Christopher, 25 ("Wants wake up with a girl" [sic]). Sign in, and a message declares that "204,516 ladies [or guys] close to you are hunting to meet a guy your age!". Explain your intentions (the pull-down menu's suggestions contain "to chat about sex", "to get a massage", "to flirt") and Tatyana, Oshrit or Gary might just give you access to their stash of non-public photos.

Still barely registering in Britain or the US, the free-to-use network -- on the net and through smartphones -- is a mass phenomenon in Brazil (14.1 million members), Mexico (nine million), France (8.2 million), Spain (6.5 million) and Italy (six million). Relying on word-of-mouth rather than any marketing spend, it has cracked the internet's eternal conundrum: how to persuade consumers to shell out challenging hard cash in a environment drowning in totally free digital companies and content, by charging members every time they want to boost their visibility to other people browsing for a date.

A year after Badoo's 2006 launch, when it had 12 million members, Russia's Finam Engineering Fund purchased a ten for each cent stake for $30 million, valuing it at $300 million (this year Finam will realise an selection for a additional 10 for each cent at a larger valuation). Today, A-list traders these kinds of as Sequoia and Accel are courting the business and there is speak of an initial public share offering. "Cracking the Anglo-Saxon market will most likely give us ambigu to triple modern reach," states Bart Swanson, recruited as CEO previous September, having expanded Amazon into Europe and run EMI in France. "The chance for folks discovery [through Badoo] is a horrendously large market -- it can be a confluence of social, proximity, mobile, and it can be incredibly local. The basic mechanism of what Andrey has formulated is genius -- just like Google with its AdWords, it can be folks having to pay for self-promotion. And it works."

Mysterious Andrey Andrey is Andrey Andreev, at first from Moscow but centered in London for the previous six years, who started Badoo on a string of other extremely profitable Russian internet businesses: Mamba, SpyLog, Begun. Andreev, a youthful 37 with a cherubic smile below a floppy fringe, has so much eluded media attention: Russian Forbes last year known as him "one of the most mysterious businessmen in the West" (it also documented his original name as Andrey Ogandzhanyants, underneath which the SpyLog.net domain was registered). We had been introduced in January by Israeli investor Yossi Vardi at Burda's DLD convention in Munich, which Vardi co-chairs, and later on met in London. (Vardi has no stake in Badoo.) And then in mid-February, alone in an office environment belonging to Freud Communications, Andreev agreed to share his story. It has been a occupied couple of days. Andreev explains that Michael Moritz, the legendary Sequoia investor who took early stakes in Google and Apple, has just flown in from Palo Alto to meet him; he has also been meeting Kevin Comolli of Accel's London office. Moritz declined to converse to Wired, but Comolli -- whose investments contain Playfish, Kayak and Getjar -- calls Andreev a "genius" with whom he would like to work. "Badoo is a social phenomenon," Comolli says. "It's explosive growth, viral, it's playful, it appears consistent with offline social interaction but in this hypervirality mode that only the web has enabled. The top secret sauces in firms like this are so nuanced, and the big difference between finding it incorrect and correct lies only with these particular individuals like Andrey. He's created some thing extremely powerful." So why has Andreev remained silent? "I love to emphasis on making points fairly than exploring myself," he states quietly and precisely, his 5' 8" body consistently heading in agitated pain at currently being quoted on the report for the first time. "I do not really feel that it aids to make dollars or make business." And now? "I come to feel Badoo is all set for me to establish with. Due To The Fact it works, it grows like crazy. And folks adore it."

There is another unspoken reason: with an IPO being considered, the business needs to elevate consciousness to maximise the valuation becoming floated by investors and bankers (currently getting mentioned at "around $2 billion", in accordance to Andreev). The enterprise is printing money: revenues and gain are increasing by "double-digit percentages" every month, he says. "We see bankers everywhere. We are like celebrities."

Badoo explodes Badoo launched in late 2006 in Spain, exactly where Andreev was then living, as a traditional photo-sharing website. "We assumed that the 'meet new people' thought wouldn't perform there -- Spanish girls are like princesses, you couldn't touch them, you had to meet their dad and mom first ahead of inviting them to the cinema," he says. The site wasn't creating revenue, but figures had been growing sharply: the 2007 Google Zeitgeist listing of fastest-rising lookup phrases detailed "Badoo" second, just beneath "iPhone". In 2008, Andreev decided to test his assumptions of Spanish ladies and as an experiment refocused the internet site on meeting new people. "And the girls didn't leave. At that time, France was expanding fast, Italy was. Then a single day we learned we had 30,000 registrations in Turkey [that day]. What happened? Was it a hacker assault or scammers? No, a person wrote an post about us. It Is as if all the users jumped on the bus and went there. Bang -- in two months, quickly we have a Turkish marketplace with a million members." Nowadays the total gender ratio is 45 % female, 55 per cent male (in Brazil and Poland ladies outnumber men); 86 % of users are aged 18 to 34.

Andreev released some simple top quality services. You could spend a dollar or a euro to "rise up" the search results, and so entice larger attention. You could spend yet again to have your profile photograph much more extensively noticeable throughout the site. He introduced virtual presents to buy for your possible date. "No one's pushing you to spend money, but if you want to appeal to a lot more users, you have to pay," he explains. "You pay to promote yourself. If you want one thing to go faster, you pay. And some folks pay tens of instances every single day to rise up." By the stop of 2009, the website had 48 million registered end users -- a fifth of whom, then CEO Neil Bryant mentioned at the time, were spending to boost their profile.

Badoo in Smartphones "Then we had the idea of mobile -- how to meet folks nearby," Andreev says. "We understood that men and women could meet every other in a huge town, but how significantly much more fascinating to see who's sitting following to you in a café? Or you can just stroll prior a nightclub and see who you can choose up ahead of you get in. It Can Be yet another possibility to hook up random individuals for adventure. We're talking about actual life, genuine time. We know this lady is 500 metres from right here now."

Badoo Cell introduced final summer on the iPhone, and in March on Android. In weeks, with hardly any marketing, the iPhone app was the number-one social-networking app in France; soon after 8 months, it had been downloaded 1.5 million times. Andreev sees proximity as important to the business's future. Even desktop laptop or computer consumers can share their spot by downloading an app that accesses Wi-Fi networks, IP addresses and other knowledge points. "If you happen to be sitting at home and someone's walking with an iPhone nearby, we know the length in between you. We can also show the iPhone user that you might be nearby. So it works for everyone."

Mamba Before Badoo there was Mamba, a Russian online-dating company that Andreev released in 2004 as "an interface for offline relationships, for all form of adventures". It was, he says, profitable in month two. He provided it as a white-label services to existing dating sites, letting them maintain their ad profits and deepening their subscribers' pool of possible dates. When it had a million members, a related product emerged: a free site, it allow end users pay by means of premium SMS to be more simply discovered. "You register, upload a profile picture, and we set you at the best of the research list," Andreev explains. "Then you slowly transfer down the hill -- if we have 50,000 new clients a day, you can rapidly realize how a lot of minutes of consideration you have. When you drop attention, like a Google lookup result, no a single finds you.

"The first day [of this compensated service] we made $5,000, the second $6,000, the 3rd much more -- I wasn't expecting this. But individuals adore advertising themselves. A Lot of individuals use this perform a number of situations a day. They turn into addicted."

A handful of weeks later, the web site extra the possibility to be briefly visible on every single page, for a fee. "This was even much more successful. Some individuals put in hundred of bucks every single day. People complained they could not compose SMS messages rapidly enough, and a lot on pay-as-you-go had to maintain going to kiosks to purchase new scratchcards to cost another $50." So Mamba started taking credit score cards, online currencies, Yandex money. Revenues climbed ever before a lot more steeply.

"We just sat back, relaxed, and additional more companies every day," Andreev says. "There were virtual presents -- just before Zynga. You could send a gift, make a virtual phone get in touch with at 50 cents for each minute. It was Mamba time. You can not envision how calme it is to operate points that are growing fast, obtaining revenue, viewing the charts as the cash grows -- it really is a sport." He grins.

Finam invested a reported $20 million in 2005 for a bulk stake; Mail.ru took a minority stake. After 18 months, Andreev had sold a fast-growing and highly profitable business, retaining no equity for himself. "I leap from task to undertaking when I have new inspiration," he says. "I wanted the independence to do no matter what I wanted."

And he knew that the limited Russian marketplace would not keep him thrilled for long. It was time to go global.

Meeting Andrey It's 8.55pm on the previous Saturday in February and, at the open ground-floor kitchen of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Covent Garden, Andreev is searching for reactions to the soup he created. L'oignon doux -- "Sweet onion soup 'Andreï style'", in accordance to the two-Michelin-starred menu -- is some thing he devised when functioning in the kitchen area as a weekend passion alongside head chef Olivier Limousin. "I'm not sure if it was a joke, but when they received their second Michelin star," he says matter-of-factly, "Olivier stated it was since of my soup."

Andreev slips unobtrusively into chefs' whites in this and other London kitchens as "sometimes you require a different type of adventure". He adds with a grin: "And I'm not talking about employing Badoo." He discovered cookery in Spain, wherever he lived prior to coming to London in 2005. "Street education. If you check out to discover something, you just get it." Why did he move to London? "Badoo is not only in London -- we have offices in Prague, Miami, Malta, Cyprus and Moscow too," he states rapidly and a small anxiously. But with around 65 of its 120 staff, such as its conduite and govt teams, centered in Soho, this is successfully a British business. "London's the international hub, in which you can discover anything at all you want," he says. "Crazy town. I really feel at house here." He owns a property in central London -- but winces at the suggestion of naming the neighbourhood -- and spends weekends selecting luxurious cars to examine England's countryside. "I've been everywhere, stayed in manors, castles, really cool." His social circle is a mix of locals and Russians, and he is single. "I will not know why. No time." Marriage could happen one particular day, he says, "but I'm scared to create a family members now. I'm not confident I am capable to give adequate time." Does he use Badoo? "I use any alternative to meet new people, not only Badoo. But I do perform with Badoo, yeah." And...he has appreciated pleasant experiences? He pauses, then smiles. "Yeah. I feel most of the men and ladies in the office are employing it, they all have good experiences. And it aids them improve the features." Considering That selecting Swanson as CEO, Andreev has stepped back again from day-to-day administration to focus on item development. And, yes, he is considering about his next project. "Always -- I have a black box of points to do, but it really is not easy to jump from one to another." What sort of business? "Look at my encounter -- it will not likely essentially be a dating or hook-up service. But it will be internet. The mobile net is the largest chance in the world. Smartphones outsold PCs last quarter. The chances will contain meeting new people. Hook-up on mobile is a multibillion business. And on tablets."

Childhood Andreev grew up in Moscow. He exhibits his identity card: born in February 1974. "You see my problem? I Am old," he says. "Normal family, dad and mom in education, younger sister, mother teaching, father a professor of mathematics. They encouraged me to learn." But he became distracted by an before world wide communications network: beginner radio. "I was 14, and with a group of buddies built a bunch of huge black boxes and place a massive antenna on the rooftop. It was not possible in Russia at that time to buy something from Europe, so it was a whole lot of exciting to create a thing that could send 1kW of electricity to the antenna on the roof. I spent years on this."

At 18 he started learning conduite at college in Moscow although keeping down a job, but dropped out after 18 months and moved to Spain, where his mother and father had relocated. He had saved cash through the job and had time to think about what to do next.

A businessman was born In 1999, he and some Russian buddies -- "technical men quite into the internet" -- set up a web-tracking business, SpyLog, based mostly in Moscow. It aided webmasters track not only visits to their sites, but users' habits on the broader internet. "It was big entertaining to make much more and a lot more statistics," Andreev says in his occasionally hesitant English. "We supplied data about how considerably time they put in on other sites, what time they woke up and went to sleep, research requests. Most webmasters were very joyful to spend for this information." The info let SpyLog serve focused ads. The business grew rapidly -- the principal Russian portals utilised it -- but 18 months later, he became restless. "I had the idea for my following project. I was dreaming about advertising money. I knew you could make a lot from adverts -- and if the industry wants one thing that no a single provides, you move."

The ad enterprise was Begun -- again, based mostly in Moscow -- which introduced in 2002 offering contextual advertising and marketing by auctioning keywords. "It's like Google AdWords, but we started out a bit earlier," Andreev says. (Google released AdWords in 2000 but started keyword auctions in 2002.) "The advertising and marketing message was that for a single cent you could get 1 client. Soon, most search phrases commenced to be really expensive." Andreev personally negotiated with the huge lookup engines. Arkady Volozh of Yandex "never considered me about the opportunities"; rival site Rambler "proved extremely difficult". But he convinced Aport, then Mail.ru, and did a offer with Google. "We launched in April 2002, and ten weeks afterwards were at breakeven. In month three, we returned almost everything that had been invested. We had a massive success, so it was straightforward to communicate to Rambler again. With money, you can communicate with the huge guys. It grew like crazy."

As for SpyLog, "I just left. I stored some men operating it. It was growing, it was good." He retains no ownership. Why not market his stake? "I just gave it to people," he says detachedly. "I was concerned with my new venture, and I didn't feel I could be helpful to SpyLog any more." So he wasn't inspired by making money? He smiles. "No. I just walked away."

First date Begun, meanwhile, had run its 18-month cycle for Andreev. By mid-2003, he commenced "playing" with dating as "it just felt there was money". At the end of 2003, Finam acquired 80 % of Begun. "I cannot speak about the price," Andreev says when pressed. "I can tell you that final yr Finam experimented with to offer it to Google for $140 million, but the Russian authorities stopped the deal." He no more time has a stake.

So he is not one particular to appear back. "No, I just swim to what is next." He is effortlessly bored then? "Maybe." And has he ever failed? "In phrases of the huge projects, never. In terms of modest experiments, of course -- some work, some don't. I spoke with Andrey [Ternovskiy], the creator of Chatroulette, to see if he needed to join Badoo so we could develop an fascinating feature. He refused, so we produced our very own [webcam] section. A week later we just taken out it. Big companies commit months on marketing research. We go much faster -- prototype, build, see if it works, kill."

The 2003 transaction produced him a millionaire, but his lifestyle barely altered -- apart from developing a liking for German cars. In London, he does not own a car, but prefers to hire Jaguars or Aston Martins. "New experience, new fun, new feeling," he says. And however he has two passports, he options to stay in the UK. "I really like this country. I Would enjoy to remain here."

The Badoo impact Some be part of Badoo to locate a relationship. Lucy, 19, told Wired she designed an account soon after shifting from Liverpool to London for university. "I had split up with my boyfriend due to distance," she says. "But it is tough to meet up with boys my sort on my uni course. My pal Josh mentioned he makes use of Badoo to search for men and that I really should try out it, so he arrived more than armed with some alcohol and I signed up."

A amount of consumers sent Lucy "weird and inappropriate messages" (an offer you to star in a porn movie; queries about her feet), but there were two adult males with whom she liked chatting regularly. "Then the third one, I satisfied up with. He's 20. I felt comfortable meeting up with him as it was in public, and he told me just about everywhere he was taking me. We've been on 4 dates and it is heading well."

Others are open up to more casual encounters. Edita, 35, from Madrid, states she makes friends, but "you can locate a weekend roll" too. Rafe, also from Madrid, has carried out just that. "After 9 months I started out chatting with a guy. We talked for a month and one particular day he gave me his number. The subsequent day he came to my house in the morning. I was alone. Within an hour we ended up in my bed naked."

Hooking up The site's hook-up function -- accounting for four-fifths of usage, in accordance to Swanson -- occasionally surprises new users. Mary, 19, from London, says she joined to make new friends, and did not anticipate being approached for sex. "It's occurred really a bit and they usually inquire for much more than just a single partner, which is truly making me want to leave. They are normally late 20s, 30s, even a 47-year-old." And even though membership is restricted to over-18s, a single member Wired spoke to exposed that she was only 16.

Some members are clearly there for professional sexual purposes. We located accounts that heavily hinted at offline transactions for services rendered; customers such as Silina -- 19 and in France -- began a conversation by proposing "a striptease for just 6 SMS codes".

Swanson says prostitution "hasn't surfaced as an situation considering that I've been here". Still, he accepts that "it's a danger -- when you have millions of users on a site, plenty of things can happen. We have moderation, and when we see that happening, we delete people accounts." He provides that underage accounts are deleted when discovered.

Controversy A network with Badoo's targets and scale by natural means attracts controversy. Final July, the News of the Globe reported that a convicted intercourse offender had listed himself as "looking for adore with women aged among 18 and 25" and posted a image of himself taken in a children's park. In January, the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti ran the headline: "Beware this Facebook application", accusing Badoo of collecting profiles with out permission. And an evaluation of 45 social-networking internet sites by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch of Cambridge University gave Badoo the lowest score for privacy.

Is Andreev bothered by his website becoming accused, at the very least, of basically advertising promiscuity? "OK, which is bad?" he replies neutrally. "Badoo is not for sex, it's for adventure. If you go to a nightclub, of training course you've acquired the opportunity to discover a woman or a boy -- but it really is not essentially for sex, it could be to take pleasure in five mojitos and absolutely nothing else.

"Badoo just proceeds the offline lifestyle. Badoo is just a informal way to hook up with people, as you do in the road or nightclub. But we make the environment work faster."

Badoo's future So what's next? Today Badoo is in 24 languages, and will take payment in 100 currencies, but the organization eyes huge progress potential -- not minimum in markets such as the UK, exactly where Swanson states there are 150,000 users. And mobile: "If nowadays 90-95 % [of engagement] is by means of the web, in a yr 50 percent will be mobile," Swanson says. Badoo has hardly obtained started out on supporting folks hook up by means of their cell devices. "Meeting folks is the basis of evolution," Swanson says. "It's not like the particular person who's profitable leaves, as with a dating site."

Does Andreev have Facebook in his sights? "Badoo is a lot more of a social network than Facebook, as on Facebook you interact with your current buddies in an completely virtual life," he says. "Badoo is much more social: it provokes you to go down on the street and meet these people."

As for Andreev's following move, in Swanson's words, "he's created up the mousetrap, he is involved in the strategic issues, but he's not that involved on the facts and he's phasing himself out. My challenge is to maintain him here as prolonged as possible."

Andreev interrupts. "You want to hold me? I want freedom, so I can construct more things." He then notices an e mail on his iPhone and jumps up excitedly. "Forbes Russia just sent me an invitation," he says. "They've set me in the top rated 30 successful businessmen in Russia and they're inviting me to their party. I will not believe I really should be leading 30, but leading ten." He laughs. "Bart, what really should I do with this?"

"Say thank you," states Swanson. "You are not flying to Moscow."

Andreev smiles. "But it is cocktails for free…before they catch me, just take photo shoots. I do not want that."

Does he fear turning into more public? "For now, it really is not a big problem," Andreev replies, "as now we have a organization that is successful." He pauses. "It's a human thing. You have a thing cool. This is mine -- I manufactured it. It's like a kid. Before you have this, what is there to discuss about? That I'm cool?"