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It's a 120-million-member social network that is adding more than 300,000 consumers a day, with far more than 4.3 million every day photograph and video clip uploads, and 7 billion month-to-month web page views. It has Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570,000 new daily users, creating it the third-biggest app of all soon after FarmVille and CityVille. Hugely profitable, it really is forecast to create hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars this year, and is currently being aggressively courted by venture-capital firms valuing it in the billions. And it is 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 biggest social network

Badoo is the world's biggest social network that you most likely have not yet heard of. Operate from 800-square-metre loft-style offices in Soho, it is brilliantly effective at delivering one easy and universally compelling service: hooking up members according to their profile pictures and location. "Chat, flirt, socialise and have fun!," implores the residence page, alongside photos of potential friends this kind of as Terri, 21 ("Wants a candlelit dinner"), and Christopher, 25 ("Wants wake up with a girl" [sic]). Indicator in, and a concept declares that "204,516 ladies [or guys] near you are seeking to meet a guy your age!". Describe your intentions (the pull-down menu's tips consist of "to speak 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 web 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 instead than any marketing and advertising spend, it has cracked the internet's eternal conundrum: how to persuade consumers to pay out tough cash in a world drowning in free of charge digital solutions and content, by charging members every single time they want to boost their visibility to other folks browsing for a date.

A yr soon after Badoo's 2006 launch, when it had 12 million members, Russia's Finam Engineering Fund bought a 10 per cent stake for $30 million, valuing it at $300 million (this year Finam will realise an option for a more ten per cent at a greater valuation). Today, A-list investors these kinds of as Sequoia and Accel are courting the organization and there is chat of an first manifeste share offering. "Cracking the Anglo-Saxon marketplace will possibly give us double to triple present day reach," says Bart Swanson, recruited as CEO final September, obtaining expanded Amazon into Europe and run EMI in France. "The possibility for individuals discovery [through Badoo] is a horrendously large marketplace -- it is a confluence of social, proximity, mobile, and it really is extremely local. The simple mechanism of what Andrey has formulated is genius -- just like Google with its AdWords, it is folks paying out for self-promotion. And it works."

Mysterious Andrey Andrey is Andrey Andreev, originally from Moscow but centered in London for the previous six years, who launched Badoo on a string of other hugely worthwhile Russian web businesses: Mamba, SpyLog, Begun. Andreev, a youthful 37 with a cherubic smile under a floppy fringe, has so far eluded media attention: Russian Forbes very last year referred to as him "one of the most mysterious businessmen in the West" (it also documented his unique name as Andrey Ogandzhanyants, below which the SpyLog.net domain was registered). We ended up launched in January by Israeli investor Yossi Vardi at Burda's DLD conference in Munich, which Vardi co-chairs, and later on fulfilled in London. (Vardi has no stake in Badoo.) And then in mid-February, on your own in an office environment belonging to Freud Communications, Andreev agreed to share his story. It has been a busy 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 talk to Wired, but Comolli -- whose investments consist of 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 would seem regular with offline social interaction but in this hypervirality mode that only the web has enabled. The key sauces in companies like this are so nuanced, and the variation in between getting it wrong and proper lies only with these unique folks like Andrey. He's created some thing extremely powerful." So why has Andreev remained silent? "I really like to emphasis on creating items rather than exploring myself," he says quietly and precisely, his 5' 8" body constantly heading in agitated pain at becoming quoted on the report for the first time. "I never feel that it helps to make money or make business." And now? "I really feel Badoo is prepared for me to determine with. Because it works, it grows like crazy. And folks love it."

There is an additional unspoken reason: with an IPO being considered, the business requirements to raise consciousness to maximise the valuation becoming floated by investors and bankers (currently being mentioned at "around $2 billion", according to Andreev). The enterprise is printing money: revenues and profit are developing by "double-digit percentages" each month, he says. "We see bankers everywhere. We are like celebrities."

Badoo explodes Badoo released in late 2006 in Spain, wherever Andreev was then living, as a traditional photo-sharing website. "We assumed that the 'meet new people' idea wouldn't work there -- Spanish ladies are like princesses, you couldn't touch them, you had to meet their dad and mom first just before inviting them to the cinema," he says. The site was not making revenue, but numbers ended up increasing sharply: the 2007 Google Zeitgeist listing of fastest-rising lookup terms detailed "Badoo" second, just beneath "iPhone". In 2008, Andreev determined to check his assumptions of Spanish ladies and as an experiment refocused the site on meeting new people. "And the girls didn't leave. At that time, France was increasing fast, Italy was. Then a single day we discovered we had 30,000 registrations in Turkey [that day]. What happened? Was it a hacker assault or scammers? No, someone wrote an report about us. It Really Is as if all the consumers jumped on the bus and went there. Bang -- in two months, quickly we have a Turkish industry with a million members." Right Now the general gender ratio is 45 % female, 55 per cent douleur (in Brazil and Poland girls outnumber men); 86 percent of customers are aged 18 to 34.

Andreev launched some simple premium services. You could spend a greenback or a euro to "rise up" the lookup results, and so attract larger attention. You could shell out once more to have your profile image a lot more extensively visible throughout the site. He introduced virtual gifts to get for your prospective date. "No one's pushing you to spend money, but if you want to draw in far more users, you have to pay," he explains. "You spend to advertise yourself. If you want a thing to go faster, you pay. And some individuals shell out tens of times each and every day to rise up." By the finish of 2009, the internet site had 48 million registered consumers -- a fifth of whom, then CEO Neil Bryant mentioned at the time, were paying out to boost their profile.

Badoo in Smartphones "Then we had the thought of mobile -- how to meet folks nearby," Andreev says. "We comprehended that people could meet each other in a large town, but how considerably much more exciting to see who's sitting following to you in a café? Or you can just stroll prior a nightclub and see who you can pick up just before you get in. It Really Is one more possibility to hook up random folks for adventure. We're chatting about real life, actual time. We know this woman is five hundred metres from right here now."

Badoo Cellular released 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; right after eight months, it had been downloaded 1.5 million times. Andreev sees proximity as key to the business's future. Even desktop personal computer end users can share their area by downloading an app that accesses Wi-Fi networks, IP addresses and other info points. "If you happen to be sitting at property and someone's walking with an iPhone nearby, we know the distance among you. We can also show the iPhone user that you are nearby. So it operates for everyone."

Mamba Before Badoo there was Mamba, a Russian online-dating business that Andreev launched in 2004 as "an interface for offline relationships, for all type of adventures". It was, he says, worthwhile in month two. He supplied it as a white-label provider to current dating sites, allowing them keep their ad earnings and deepening their subscribers' pool of possible dates. When it had a million members, a equivalent product emerged: a cost-free site, it permit customers pay out via premium SMS to be a lot more simply discovered. "You register, add a profile picture, and we put you at the top of the research list," Andreev explains. "Then you little by little transfer down the hill -- if we have 50,000 new customers a day, you can speedily understand how several minutes of interest you have. When you lose attention, like a Google search result, no one finds you.

"The 1st day [of this paid service] we manufactured $5,000, the 2nd $6,000, the 3rd much more -- I was not expecting this. But men and women really like advertising themselves. Lots of people use this function several times a day. They grow to be addicted."

A few weeks later, the internet site added the possibility to be briefly visible on every single page, for a fee. "This was even much more successful. Some folks spent hundred of pounds each day. People complained they could not compose SMS messages fast enough, and a good deal on pay-as-you-go had to maintain likely to kiosks to get new scratchcards to charge yet another $50." So Mamba started using credit cards, online currencies, Yandex money. Revenues climbed ever more steeply.

"We just sat back, relaxed, and added a lot more providers each and every day," Andreev says. "There ended up virtual presents -- prior to Zynga. You could deliver a gift, make a virtual mobile phone phone at 50 cents for each minute. It was Mamba time. You can not visualize how neat it is to run points that are increasing fast, acquiring revenue, viewing the charts as the money grows -- it can be a sport." He grins.

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

And he understood that the limited Russian market would not maintain him fired up 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 ground-floor kitchen of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Covent Garden, Andreev is looking for reactions to the soup he created. L'oignon doux -- "Sweet onion soup 'Andreï style'", in accordance to the two-Michelin-starred menu -- is one thing he devised when doing work in the kitchen as a weekend hobby alongside head chef Olivier Limousin. "I'm not sure if it was a joke, but when they received their 2nd Michelin star," he states matter-of-factly, "Olivier mentioned it was due to the fact of my soup."

Andreev slips unobtrusively into chefs' whites in this and other London kitchens as "sometimes you need to have a different type of adventure". He provides with a grin: "And I'm not talking about making use of Badoo." He realized cookery in Spain, exactly where he lived before coming to London in 2005. "Street education. If you try 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 quickly and a tiny anxiously. But with around 65 of its 120 staff, including its management and govt teams, centered in Soho, this is proficiently a British business. "London's the worldwide hub, exactly where you can find nearly anything you want," he says. "Crazy town. I come to feel at home here." He owns a property in central London -- but winces at the suggestion of naming the neighbourhood -- and spends weekends choosing luxurious automobiles to explore England's countryside. "I've been everywhere, stayed in manors, castles, quite cool." His social circle is a combine of lieu and Russians, and he is single. "I don't know why. No time." Marriage could happen one day, he says, "but I'm frightened to create a household now. I'm not certain I am in a position to give adequate time." Does he use Badoo? "I use any selection to meet new people, not only Badoo. But I do perform with Badoo, yeah." And...he has loved pleasant experiences? He pauses, then smiles. "Yeah. I feel most of the guys and ladies in the office environment are employing it, they all have excellent experiences. And it allows them increase the features." Because hiring Swanson as CEO, Andreev has stepped back from day-to-day conduite to concentrate on item development. And, yes, he is pondering about his next project. "Always -- I have a black box of issues to do, but it can be not simple to leap from one to another." What type of business? "Look at my knowledge -- it will not necessarily be a dating or hook-up service. But it will be internet. The mobile web is the biggest option in the world. Smartphones outsold PCs final quarter. The chances will consist of 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, parents in education, youthful sister, mom teaching, father a professor of mathematics. They encouraged me to learn." But he became distracted by an earlier world wide communications network: amateur radio. "I was 14, and with a group of close friends developed a bunch of massive black bins and put a big antenna on the rooftop. It was not possible in Russia at that time to buy anything at all from Europe, so it was a whole lot of entertaining to produce one thing that could deliver 1kW of electricity to the antenna on the roof. I spent a long time on this."

At 18 he commenced studying management at college in Moscow whilst keeping down a job, but dropped out after 18 months and moved to Spain, where his dad and mom had relocated. He had saved cash through the task and had time to believe about what to do next.

A businessman was born In 1999, he and some Russian close friends -- "technical guys quite into the internet" -- set up a web-tracking business, SpyLog, primarily based in Moscow. It helped site owners monitor not only visits to their sites, but users' habits on the broader internet. "It was big exciting to make far more and a lot more statistics," Andreev states in his at times hesitant English. "We furnished details about how much time they expended on other sites, what time they woke up and went to sleep, search requests. Most webmasters had been quite joyful to pay for this information." The info let SpyLog serve focused ads. The organization grew rapidly -- the principal Russian portals utilised it -- but 18 months later, he grew to become restless. "I had the concept for my up coming project. I was dreaming about marketing money. I realized you could make a lot from advertisements -- and if the marketplace desires one thing that no 1 provides, you move."

The ad organization was Begun -- again, based in Moscow -- which released in 2002 offering contextual promoting by auctioning keywords. "It's like Google AdWords, but we started a bit earlier," Andreev says. (Google launched AdWords in 2000 but started keyword auctions in 2002.) "The advertising and marketing concept was that for one cent you could get 1 client. Soon, most key phrases started to be quite expensive." Andreev personally negotiated with the large lookup engines. Arkady Volozh of Yandex "never considered me about the opportunities"; rival internet site Rambler "proved extremely difficult". But he convinced Aport, then Mail.ru, and did a deal with Google. "We launched in April 2002, and ten weeks later on have been at breakeven. In month three, we returned every little thing that had been invested. We had a huge success, so it was effortless to converse to Rambler again. With money, you can speak with the large guys. It grew like crazy."

As for SpyLog, "I just left. I kept some guys operating it. It was growing, it was good." He retains no ownership. Why not offer his stake? "I just gave it to people," he states detachedly. "I was involved with my new venture, and I did not really feel I could be beneficial to SpyLog any more." So he wasn't motivated 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 commenced "playing" with dating as "it just felt there was money". At the end of 2003, Finam acquired 80 % of Begun. "I can not discuss about the price," Andreev says when pressed. "I can inform you that final year Finam tried to market it to Google for $140 million, but the Russian authorities stopped the deal." He no extended has a stake.

So he is not one particular to search back. "No, I just swim to what is next." He is very easily bored then? "Maybe." And has he ever failed? "In phrases of the big projects, never. In phrases of little experiments, of program -- 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 designed our personal [webcam] section. A week later we just removed it. Huge firms devote months on advertising and marketing research. We go a lot more rapidly -- prototype, build, see if it works, kill."

The 2003 transaction manufactured him a millionaire, but his lifestyle hardly modified -- aside from establishing 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 although he has two passports, he options to continue to be in the UK. "I really like this country. I Would really like to stay here."

The Badoo impact Some be a part of Badoo to find a relationship. Lucy, 19, told Wired she produced an account soon after heading from Liverpool to London for university. "I had split up with my boyfriend because of to distance," she says. "But it is hard to meet up with boys my form on my uni course. My pal Josh said he makes use of Badoo to seem for men and that I must attempt it, so he arrived over armed with some alcohol and I signed up."

A number of consumers sent Lucy "weird and inappropriate messages" (an offer you to star in a porn movie; issues about her feet), but there have been two guys with whom she loved chatting regularly. "Then the third one, I met up with. He Is 20. I felt cozy meeting up with him as it was in public, and he advised me everywhere he was using me. We Have been on four dates and it's likely well."

Others are open up to much more informal encounters. Edita, 35, from Madrid, states she tends to make friends, but "you can find a weekend roll" too. Rafe, also from Madrid, has accomplished just that. "After nine months I commenced chatting with a guy. We talked for a month and 1 day he gave me his number. The next day he came to my residence in the morning. I was alone. Inside Of an hour we have been in my mattress naked."

Hooking up The site's hook-up perform -- accounting for four-fifths of usage, in accordance to Swanson -- sometimes surprises new users. Mary, 19, from London, states she joined to make new friends, and did not anticipate becoming approached for sex. "It's happened very a little bit and they usually inquire for much more than just 1 partner, which is actually making me want to leave. They are generally late 20s, 30s, even a 47-year-old." And though membership is limited to over-18s, one particular member Wired spoke to uncovered that she was only 16.

Some members are plainly there for professional sexual purposes. We located accounts that greatly hinted at offline transactions for providers rendered; end users these kinds of as Silina -- 19 and in France -- began a conversation by proposing "a striptease for just six SMS codes".

Swanson says prostitution "hasn't surfaced as an situation since I've been here". Still, he accepts that "it's a chance -- when you have hundreds of thousands of customers on a site, plenty of things 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 goals and scale naturally attracts controversy. Final July, the News of the Planet noted that a convicted intercourse offender had detailed himself as "looking for love with women 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 amassing profiles without permission. And an analysis of 45 social-networking sites by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch of Cambridge University gave Badoo the lowest score for privacy.

Is Andreev bothered by his site getting accused, at the really least, of just promoting promiscuity? "OK, which is bad?" he replies neutrally. "Badoo is not for sex, it's for adventure. If you go to a nightclub, of program you've received the possibility to uncover a lady or a boy -- but it really is not automatically for sex, it could be to enjoy 5 mojitos and absolutely nothing else.

"Badoo just carries on the offline lifestyle. Badoo is just a informal way to hook up with people, as you do in the street or nightclub. But we make the world function faster."

Badoo's future So what's next? Today Badoo is in 24 languages, and normally requires payment in a hundred currencies, but the firm eyes huge development prospective -- not minimum in markets this kind of as the UK, where Swanson states there are 150,000 users. And mobile: "If right now 90-95 % [of engagement] is through the web, in a 12 months 50 percent will be mobile," Swanson says. Badoo has hardly obtained began on supporting men and women hook up by way of their cellular devices. "Meeting folks is the basis of evolution," Swanson says. "It's not like the person who's productive 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 definitely virtual life," he says. "Badoo is 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 developed up the mousetrap, he's involved in the strategic issues, but he is not that involved on the facts and he is phasing himself out. My challenge is to maintain him here as prolonged as possible."

Andreev interrupts. "You want to maintain me? I need to have freedom, so I can develop a lot 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 leading 30 profitable businessmen in Russia and they're inviting me to their party. I don't think I ought to be top 30, but leading ten." He laughs. "Bart, what should I do with this?"

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

Andreev smiles. "But it can be cocktails for free…before they catch me, get photo shoots. I will not want that."

Does he worry becoming more public? "For now, it can be not a huge problem," Andreev replies, "as now we have a business which is successful." He pauses. "It's a human thing. You have some thing cool. This is mine -- I made it. It Really Is like a kid. Just Before you have this, what's there to chat about? That I'm cool?"