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It's a 120-million-member social network which is adding in excess of 300,000 end users a day, with much more than 4.3 million day-to-day image and video clip uploads, and 7 billion month to month page views. It has Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570,000 new day-to-day users, generating it the third-biggest app of all after FarmVille and CityVille. Hugely profitable, it's forecast to generate hundreds of millions of pounds this year, and is getting aggressively courted by venture-capital companies valuing it in the billions. And it can be operate from London by a secretive Russian serial entrepreneur who has steadfastly refused to be interviewed or photographed. Right Up Until now.

The world's largest social network

Badoo is the world's most significant social network that you almost certainly have not yet heard of. Operate from 800-square-metre loft-style offices in Soho, it is brilliantly successful at supplying one particular easy and universally persuasive service: hooking up members according to their profile photos and location. "Chat, flirt, socialise and have fun!," implores the home page, alongside photographs of potential buddies such as Terri, 21 ("Wants a candlelit dinner"), and Christopher, 25 ("Wants wake up with a girl" [sic]). Signal in, and a communication declares that "204,516 ladies [or guys] close to you are seeking to meet a guy your age!". Clarify your intentions (the pull-down menu's suggestions incorporate "to speak about sex", "to get a massage", "to flirt") and Tatyana, Oshrit or Gary may possibly just give you access to their stash of private photos.

Still hardly registering in Britain or the US, the free-to-use network -- on the world wide web and via 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 instead than any marketing and advertising spend, it has cracked the internet's eternal conundrum: how to persuade consumers to shell out tough hard cash in a environment drowning in totally free electronic services and content, by charging members each and every time they want to improve their visibility to other folks searching for a date.

A yr following Badoo's 2006 launch, when it had 12 million members, Russia's Finam Technology Fund acquired a ten per cent stake for $30 million, valuing it at $300 million (this 12 months Finam will realise an alternative for a further 10 for each cent at a increased valuation). Today, A-list investors such as Sequoia and Accel are courting the organization and there is discuss of an initial manifeste share offering. "Cracking the Anglo-Saxon industry will most likely give us ambigu to triple today's reach," states Bart Swanson, recruited as CEO final September, getting expanded Amazon into Europe and operate EMI in France. "The chance for folks discovery [through Badoo] is a horrendously huge industry -- it really is a confluence of social, proximity, mobile, and it is incredibly local. The standard mechanism of what Andrey has developed is genius -- just like Google with its AdWords, it is men and women paying out for self-promotion. And it works."

Mysterious Andrey Andrey is Andrey Andreev, initially from Moscow but based mostly in London for the previous 6 years, who started Badoo on a string of other highly lucrative Russian net businesses: Mamba, SpyLog, Begun. Andreev, a youthful 37 with a cherubic smile under a floppy fringe, has so much eluded media attention: Russian Forbes previous year named him "one of the most mysterious businessmen in the West" (it also documented his original title as Andrey Ogandzhanyants, below which the SpyLog.net domain was registered). We had been released in January by Israeli investor Yossi Vardi at Burda's DLD convention in Munich, which Vardi co-chairs, and later satisfied in London. (Vardi has no stake in Badoo.) And then in mid-February, by yourself in an workplace belonging to Freud Communications, Andreev agreed to share his story. It has been a busy handful 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 speak to Wired, but Comolli -- whose investments include 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 is playful, it appears consistent with offline social interaction but in this hypervirality mode that only the world wide web has enabled. The solution sauces in businesses like this are so nuanced, and the difference between finding it improper and proper lies only with these particular people like Andrey. He Is created one thing very powerful." So why has Andreev remained silent? "I adore to emphasis on creating issues rather than exploring myself," he states quietly and precisely, his 5' 8" body constantly relocating in agitated discomfort at being quoted on the record for the very first time. "I will not come to feel that it assists to make funds or make business." And now? "I really feel Badoo is all set for me to establish with. Due To The Fact it works, it grows like crazy. And individuals really like it."

There is another unspoken reason: with an IPO becoming considered, the organization wants to raise consciousness to maximise the valuation currently being floated by investors and bankers (currently being mentioned at "around $2 billion", in accordance to Andreev). The organization is printing money: revenues and revenue are increasing by "double-digit percentages" each 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 typical photo-sharing website. "We assumed that the 'meet new people' thought wouldn't operate there -- Spanish ladies are like princesses, you could not touch them, you had to meet their mothers and fathers very first ahead of inviting them to the cinema," he says. The internet site was not making revenue, but numbers have been growing sharply: the 2007 Google Zeitgeist record of fastest-rising search phrases detailed "Badoo" second, just below "iPhone". In 2008, Andreev made the decision to test his assumptions of Spanish females and as an experiment refocused the site on meeting new people. "And the ladies failed to leave. At that time, France was increasing fast, Italy was. Then one day we learned we had 30,000 registrations in Turkey [that day]. What happened? Was it a hacker attack or scammers? No, somebody wrote an write-up about us. It Is as if all the consumers jumped on the bus and went there. Bang -- in two months, quickly we have a Turkish marketplace with a million members." Today the overall gender ratio is 45 percent female, 55 per cent male (in Brazil and Poland ladies outnumber men); 86 % of consumers are aged 18 to 34.

Andreev launched some simple premium services. You could pay a greenback or a euro to "rise up" the lookup results, and so appeal to higher attention. You could spend again to have your profile picture more extensively noticeable across the site. He introduced virtual gifts to acquire for your prospective date. "No one's pushing you to invest money, but if you want to entice much more users, you have to pay," he explains. "You pay out to advertise yourself. If you want a thing to go faster, you pay. And some men and women shell out tens of situations every day to rise up." By the end of 2009, the site had 48 million registered users -- a fifth of whom, then CEO Neil Bryant mentioned at the time, have been paying out to improve their profile.

Badoo in Smartphones "Then we had the thought of mobile -- how to meet people nearby," Andreev says. "We recognized that men and women could meet every single other in a big town, but how a lot a lot more fascinating to see who's sitting subsequent to you in a café? Or you can just walk previous a nightclub and see who you can pick up prior to you get in. It Is yet another chance to hook up random men and women for adventure. We're speaking about true life, actual time. We know this lady is five hundred metres from right here now."

Badoo Mobile launched last summer time on the iPhone, and in March on Android. Inside Of weeks, with hardly any marketing, the iPhone app was the number-one social-networking app in France; after eight months, it had been downloaded 1.5 million times. Andreev sees proximity as crucial to the business's future. Even desktop personal computer customers can share their spot by downloading an app that accesses Wi-Fi networks, IP addresses and other info points. "If you are sitting at house and someone's walking with an iPhone nearby, we know the length between you. We can also show the iPhone consumer that you might be nearby. So it performs for everyone."

Mamba Before Badoo there was Mamba, a Russian online-dating organization that Andreev introduced in 2004 as "an interface for offline relationships, for all sort of adventures". It was, he says, profitable in month two. He offered it as a white-label provider to current dating sites, allowing them maintain their ad income and deepening their subscribers' pool of possible dates. Once it had a million members, a equivalent product emerged: a free site, it let users shell out by way of premium SMS to be far more simply discovered. "You register, upload a profile picture, and we place you at the top rated of the search list," Andreev explains. "Then you gradually shift down the hill -- if we have 50,000 new clients a day, you can quickly realize how many minutes of consideration you have. When you shed attention, like a Google search result, no 1 finds you.

"The very first day [of this paid service] we manufactured $5,000, the second $6,000, the 3rd far more -- I wasn't expecting this. But men and women adore promoting themselves. Plenty of folks use this perform many situations a day. They turn out to be addicted."

A few weeks later, the web site added the opportunity to be briefly noticeable on each and every page, for a fee. "This was even more successful. Some people invested hundred of bucks each and every day. Individuals complained they could not create SMS messages fast enough, and a great deal on pay-as-you-go had to hold likely to kiosks to purchase new scratchcards to cost one more $50." So Mamba began taking credit score cards, on the internet currencies, Yandex money. Revenues climbed ever more steeply.

"We just sat back, relaxed, and additional much more providers each day," Andreev says. "There have been virtual gifts -- prior to Zynga. You could deliver a gift, make a virtual telephone contact at 50 cents for each minute. It was Mamba time. You can not envision how cool it is to operate items that are growing fast, obtaining revenue, seeing the charts as the money grows -- it can be a sport." He grins.

Finam invested a noted $20 million in 2005 for a vast majority stake; Mail.ru took a minority stake. Soon After 18 months, Andreev had marketed a fast-growing and extremely profitable business, retaining no equity for himself. "I jump from project to undertaking when I have new inspiration," he says. "I wanted the flexibility to do no matter what I wanted."

And he knew that the constrained Russian industry would not maintain him energized for long. It was time to go global.

Meeting Andrey It's 8.55pm on the very last Saturday in February and, at the open up 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 something he devised when doing work in the kitchen as a weekend passion alongside head chef Olivier Limousin. "I'm not positive 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 need a various form of adventure". He adds with a grin: "And I'm not conversing about using Badoo." He learned cookery in Spain, wherever he lived ahead of coming to London in 2005. "Street education. If you check out to learn 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 says rapidly and a tiny anxiously. But with all around 65 of its 120 staff, such as its management and government teams, centered in Soho, this is efficiently a British business. "London's the international hub, in which you can find nearly anything you want," he says. "Crazy town. I experience at house here." He owns a residence in central London -- but winces at the suggestion of naming the neighbourhood -- and spends weekends hiring luxurious cars to examine England's countryside. "I've been everywhere, stayed in manors, castles, really cool." His social circle is a combine of lieu and Russians, and he is single. "I will not know why. No time." Marriage could take place 1 day, he says, "but I'm frightened to create a loved ones now. I Am not confident I am capable to give adequate time." Does he use Badoo? "I use any option to meet new people, not only Badoo. But I do perform with Badoo, yeah." And...he has enjoyed nice experiences? He pauses, then smiles. "Yeah. I feel most of the men and ladies in the office are utilizing it, they all have good experiences. And it helps them increase the features." Since hiring Swanson as CEO, Andreev has stepped again from day-to-day administration to emphasis on product development. And, yes, he is contemplating about his subsequent project. "Always -- I have a black box of points to do, but it really is not straightforward to leap from one to another." What type of business? "Look at my experience -- it will not likely necessarily be a dating or hook-up service. But it will be internet. The mobile world wide web is the most significant chance in the world. Smartphones outsold PCs last quarter. The options will incorporate meeting new people. Hook-up on cellular is a multibillion business. And on tablets."

Childhood Andreev grew up in Moscow. He displays his identity card: born in February 1974. "You see my problem? I'm old," he says. "Normal family, dad and mom in education, more youthful sister, mother teaching, father a professor of mathematics. They inspired me to learn." But he grew to become distracted by an before global communications network: amateur radio. "I was 14, and with a team of friends created a bunch of huge black bins and place a massive antenna on the rooftop. It was not feasible in Russia at that time to acquire something from Europe, so it was a lot of entertaining to develop a thing that could send 1kW of power to the antenna on the roof. I invested many years on this."

At 18 he started learning administration at college in Moscow while keeping down a job, but dropped out after 18 months and moved to Spain, in which his mothers and fathers had relocated. He had saved money via the work 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 in Moscow. It served webmasters track not only visits to their sites, but users' behavior on the broader internet. "It was large fun to make more and more statistics," Andreev states in his occasionally hesitant English. "We supplied data about how a lot time they expended on other sites, what time they woke up and went to sleep, search requests. Most webmasters had been very joyful to spend for this information." The knowledge let SpyLog serve focused ads. The company grew speedily -- the principal Russian portals used it -- but 18 months later, he grew to become restless. "I had the idea for my up coming project. I was dreaming about advertising and marketing money. I understood you could make a whole lot from ads -- and if the market wants some thing that no one particular provides, you move."

The ad enterprise was Begun -- again, based mostly in Moscow -- which introduced in 2002 selling contextual promoting by auctioning keywords. "It's like Google AdWords, but we started a little bit earlier," Andreev says. (Google introduced AdWords in 2000 but started key phrase auctions in 2002.) "The advertising and marketing concept was that for one particular cent you could buy a single client. Soon, most search phrases began to be really expensive." Andreev individually negotiated with the big lookup engines. Arkady Volozh of Yandex "never believed me about the opportunities"; rival site Rambler "proved very difficult". But he convinced Aport, then Mail.ru, and did a deal with Google. "We released in April 2002, and 10 weeks later were at breakeven. In month three, we returned every little thing that had been invested. We had a big success, so it was effortless to talk to Rambler again. With money, you can talk with the huge guys. It grew like crazy."

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

First date Begun, meanwhile, had operate its 18-month cycle for Andreev. By mid-2003, he began "playing" with dating as "it just felt there was money". At the finish of 2003, Finam acquired 80 % of Begun. "I cannot chat about the price," Andreev states when pressed. "I can tell you that very last yr Finam tried using to offer it to Google for $140 million, but the Russian govt stopped the deal." He no more time has a stake.

So he is not a single to search back. "No, I just swim to what is next." He is simply bored then? "Maybe." And has he ever failed? "In terms of the big projects, never. In phrases of small experiments, of training course -- some work, some don't. I spoke with Andrey [Ternovskiy], the creator of Chatroulette, to see if he wanted to be part of Badoo so we could produce an exciting feature. He refused, so we produced our individual [webcam] section. A week afterwards we just taken out it. Big organizations commit months on advertising and marketing research. We go considerably more rapidly -- prototype, build, see if it works, kill."

The 2003 transaction created him a millionaire, but his life style hardly altered -- aside from developing a liking for German cars. In London, he does not own a car, but prefers to rent Jaguars or Aston Martins. "New experience, new fun, new feeling," he says. And however he has two passports, he ideas to remain in the UK. "I love this country. I'd really like to keep here."

The Badoo impact Some be a part of Badoo to uncover a relationship. Lucy, 19, told Wired she designed an account following heading from Liverpool to London for university. "I had split up with my boyfriend because of to distance," she says. "But it is difficult to meet up with boys my sort on my uni course. My buddy Josh said he makes use of Badoo to seem for men and that I ought to check out it, so he arrived in excess of armed with some alcohol and I signed up."

A number of consumers sent Lucy "weird and inappropriate messages" (an offer to star in a porn movie; concerns about her feet), but there ended up two adult males with whom she enjoyed chatting regularly. "Then the 3rd one, I met up with. He Is 20. I felt at ease meeting up with him as it was in public, and he told me almost everywhere he was taking me. We Have been on four dates and it can be heading well."

Others are open up to far more casual encounters. Edita, 35, from Madrid, states she can make 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 1 day he gave me his number. The next day he came to my home in the morning. I was alone. Inside Of an hour we were in my bed naked."

Hooking up The site's hook-up function -- accounting for four-fifths of usage, in accordance to Swanson -- at times surprises new users. Mary, 19, from London, says she joined to make new friends, and didn't anticipate becoming approached for sex. "It's transpired fairly a little bit and they normally inquire for a lot more than just a single partner, which is in fact creating me want to leave. They are normally late 20s, 30s, even a 47-year-old." And despite the fact that membership is limited to over-18s, a single member Wired spoke to revealed that she was only 16.

Some members are obviously there for expert sexual purposes. We identified accounts that greatly hinted at offline transactions for providers rendered; consumers such as Silina -- 19 and in France -- started a conversation by proposing "a striptease for just 6 SMS codes".

Swanson states prostitution "hasn't surfaced as an problem because I've been here". Still, he accepts that "it's a chance -- when you have hundreds of thousands of users on a site, lots of issues can happen. We have moderation, and when we see that happening, we delete individuals accounts." He adds that underage accounts are deleted when discovered.

Controversy A network with Badoo's targets and scale by natural means draws in controversy. Last July, the News of the World documented that a convicted sex offender had detailed himself as "looking for enjoy with girls aged in between 18 and 25" and posted a photograph of himself taken in a children's park. In January, the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti ran the headline: "Beware this Facebook application", accusing Badoo of gathering profiles without permission. And an analysis of 45 social-networking internet sites by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch of Cambridge College gave Badoo the lowest score for privacy.

Is Andreev bothered by his site being accused, at the extremely least, of simply advertising promiscuity? "OK, which is bad?" he replies neutrally. "Badoo is not for sex, it can be for adventure. If you go to a nightclub, of course you've got the possibility to discover a lady or a boy -- but it really is not automatically for sex, it could be to appreciate five mojitos and absolutely nothing else.

"Badoo simply carries on the offline lifestyle. Badoo is just a casual way to hook up with people, as you do in the road or nightclub. But we make the planet work faster."

Badoo's future So what is next? Today Badoo is in 24 languages, and normally requires payment in 100 currencies, but the company eyes enormous progress likely -- not minimum in markets such as the UK, where Swanson says there are 150,000 users. And mobile: "If these days 90-95 percent [of engagement] is by way of the web, in a yr 50 % will be mobile," Swanson says. Badoo has hardly acquired commenced on helping folks hook up via their mobile devices. "Meeting folks is the basis of evolution," Swanson says. "It's not like the person who's effective leaves, as with a dating site."

Does Andreev have Facebook in his sights? "Badoo is far more of a social network than Facebook, as on Facebook you interact with your existing pals in an absolutely 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 up coming move, in Swanson's words, "he's built up the mousetrap, he's concerned in the strategic issues, but he is not that concerned on the specifics and he is phasing himself out. My problem is to maintain him here as lengthy as possible."

Andreev interrupts. "You want to hold me? I require freedom, so I can create a lot more things." He then notices an electronic mail on his iPhone and jumps up excitedly. "Forbes Russia just sent me an invitation," he says. "They've place me in the leading 30 profitable businessmen in Russia and they are inviting me to their party. I will not assume I must be best 30, but top ten." He laughs. "Bart, what really should I do with this?"

"Say thank you," says Swanson. "You're not flying to Moscow."

Andreev smiles. "But it really is cocktails for free…before they catch me, just take photo shoots. I don't want that."

Does he worry turning into much more public? "For now, it's not a big problem," Andreev replies, "as now we have a firm which is successful." He pauses. "It's a human thing. You have some thing cool. This is mine -- I produced it. It Can Be like a kid. Ahead Of you have this, what is there to speak about? That I'm cool?"