Natalya Kasperskaya is one of the most influential women in the IT world

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

The country's most influential and authoritative woman in the field of information technology was the co-founder of the famous global company Kaspersky Lab. Natalya Kasperskaya is one of the richest women in Russia and the mother of five children. Now she works as CEO of the InfoWatch group of companies, which she founded after leaving the IT giant (Kaspersky Lab).

Early years

Natalya Ivanovna Kasperskaya (née Shtutser) was born on February 5, 1966 in Moscow. Parents are engineers by profession, they worked at one of the closed defense institutes. Father, Ivan Mikhailovich, was in charge of the laboratory. One of her ancestors, great-grandfather Ivan Ivanovich Shtutser, is the author of a popular geography textbook of the 19th century.

In her school years, she was distinguished by increased social activity and was respected by her classmates. She was a member of the council of the school pioneer squad, then went on to be promoted to the regional pioneer headquarters. ATsenior classes was elected by the Komsomol.

An active member of the Komsomol has been playing basketball for five years at a children's and youth sports school. The girl quite seriously wanted to become a veterinarian, but soon she had to give up this dream. Natalya was not very good at studying chemistry. In the eighth grade, her parents decided to transfer her from an ordinary secondary school to a school with a physical and mathematical bias at the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Career start

After graduating from school, she entered Moscow State University. But according to the results of the entrance exams, she did not pass the competition, missing half a point. I translated the documents to the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering (MIEM), where these grades were enough for admission. Natalya Kasperskaya studied at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics from 1984 to 1989. The thesis work was devoted to mathematical modeling of the cooling process of a nuclear reactor. She later received a bachelor's degree in business from the Open University in the UK.

After graduating from the institute, Natalya was assigned as a researcher at the Moscow Central Scientific and Design Bureau. She worked for only six months, after which she went on maternity leave. Natalya Kasperskaya's career in information technology began in 1994, when she was 28. A young woman was hired as a software salesperson in a new store opened by a former teacher, Yevgeny Kaspersky, from the Higher School of the KGB of the USSR. Wages were around$50.

Business Development

Since the autumn of 1994, Natalia Ivanovna Kasperskaya has been responsible for sales of AVP (AntiViral Toolkit Pro) anti-virus as a department head. Since 1991, the program has been developed by a team of programmers led by her husband. Thanks to her activity over the next few years, we managed to create good distribution channels for the software product, organize technical support and start expanding to foreign markets.

Starting with sales of $100-$200 per month in 1994, the company reached over $130,000 a year later. Sales of the product began to grow rapidly, reaching over 600,000 in 1996 and over a million the following year. The profit was divided equally between the Kaspersky team and the parent company. By 1997, the Kaspersky couple realized the potential of the business and decided to separate into an independent business.

Creation of Kaspersky Lab

In the summer of 1997, Natalya Ivanovna Kasperskaya initiated the organization of Kaspersky Lab. It was on her initiative that the company got its name. For more than 10 years she has worked as the CEO of Kaspersky Lab. In an IT company, she owned 10% of the shares, 50% - Eugene and 20% each went to two programmers-developers. Antivirus sales continued to grow rapidly, reaching $67 million in 2006.

In 2007, she was removed from the management of the Laboratory due to a divorce and disagreements with Evgeny. Natalia stayedin the company as chairman of the established board of directors. By 2011, she finally parted ways with Kaspersky Lab., her shares were bought out by other shareholders. Under the leadership of Natalia, the once small Russian IT company has grown into a global corporation with offices around the world. Capitalization in 2011 was estimated at $1.3 billion with an annual revenue of $700 million. Natalia's personal fortune was estimated at 220-270 million USD. e.

Organizing your business

After the division of the business, as part of the payment, she got the company InfoWatch. Natalia Kasperskaya decided to start developing the company's software product, which was aimed at protecting the data of large businesses and was intended for corporations with at least 300 stations. After the arrival of new management, sales began to grow by 60-70% per year.

Today, Infowatch has grown into a group of companies dedicated to protecting businesses from internal threats and targeted external attacks. The group occupies approximately 50% of the local market for confidential data. Regular customers are large Russian state structures, private and state corporations. The company is actively developing foreign markets, developing business in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.