The largest youth business event of the year, the Generation Forum, took place in Moscow.

On November 18, at the Vetoshny Hall site, with the support of the Roscongress Foundation and the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, the largest youth business event of the year, the Generation Forum, took place. The event, which was attended by producer and director Fyodor Bondarchuk, founder and CEO of Wildeberries Tatyana Bakalchuk, chairman of the board of Tinkoff Bank Stanislav Bliznyuk, restaurateur Anton Pinsky, deputy general director of Gazprom Media Holding Tina Kandelaki, was organized by a closed business community for young entrepreneurs and Y Club managers.

With a welcoming speech to the participants forum appealed Fedor Bondarchuk, who emphasized that at any level of development of technology and artificial intelligence, creativity and creativity remain the most important. In fact, participants had the opportunity to join the Y Club community right during the event by clicking on the QR code.

The first speaker of the forum, during which participants shared their experience of building a business, talked about key trends and gave recommendations to young entrepreneurs, was the founder and CEO of Wildeberries Tatiana Bakalchuk.

Ms. Bakalchuk’s speech was dedicated to women in business, the stereotypes they still have to fight against, and the challenges they face.

Ms. Bakalchuk criticized the recently aggravated discussions on the topic that a woman should think about getting an education and building a career only after giving birth to a child, or better yet, several. “You can’t force anything on anyone. If a woman wants to take care of her husband and children, she can do so. If she wants to study, she must study and build a career,” Ms. Bakalchuk is convinced.

Moreover, Tatyana Bakalchuk continued, the newest digital economy destroys stereotypical ideas that women have a harder time in technical professions and sciences in general: “When hiring employees, we do not look at their gender. We look at their professionalism, their willingness to lead and develop projects, and their openness to new things. And a woman going on maternity leave gets support from our team. This is the new normal for business and economics.”

Chairman of the Board of Tinkoff Bank Stanislav Bliznyuk told how he manages to maintain the spirit of a startup, being a huge digital ecosystem. The key task is to focus on young people: “The average age of our employees is 26 years old, we attract smart, daring, young people.” And so that the young and daring are ready to work in the modern economy, understand what kind of profession they want and which ones are in demand in companies today, Tinkoff launched its own university. In the fall of this year, the first master’s students enrolled in IT specialties, in particular data science. In the first stream, 43 masters are studying; there was a competition of 60 people per place. Tinkoff plan – 10 thousand students.

But even this is catastrophically insufficient on a national scale, the top manager is convinced. “There is an acute problem of personnel shortage in the market. Against this background, another classic problem arises: the price rises, and the quality falls. Therefore, Tinkoff decided to begin interaction with potential employees not in senior years, but in high school, and even at this stage to orient young people to receive a quality education. And we don’t look at Unified State Exam scores. We look at a person, how interested he is, how creative he is,” Mr. Bliznyuk gave an example.

In the second half of the forum, restaurateurs spoke to young entrepreneurs and enthusiasts Anton Pinsky and Deputy General Director of the Gazprom-Media holding Tina Kandelaki. Mr. Pinsky spoke about the features of running a restaurant business in the new conditions, as well as how and, most importantly, why to build a business using a partnership model.

“The restaurant business is not an easy ride. It is important not to make a mistake with the location, with the cost of rent, with the environment: the high cost of entering the market and the even higher cost of mistakes in it. Now the time for gastroenthusiasts has passed: investors come only to those who are involved in the restaurant business professionally,” he emphasized. And he illustrated his words with a figurative example: “Before, people used to go to a restaurant to show off. Now everything has changed. Today the creative component is important.” “Where to start if you have some savings and enthusiasm for the restaurant market? It is useful and you can start with franchises. This will allow us to understand how the market is structured and works,” Mr. Pinsky concluded.

At the end of the forum, Tina Kandelaki spoke to the participants and answered questions from the audience.

Mrs. Kandelaki, in particular, touched upon the problems of Russian education, which is not always oriented towards a market competitive economy, which requires a constant exit from the comfort zone.

That is why the most important investments are investments in people, in personnel, including managers. “A manager must be able not only to come up with ideas, but also to come up with and implement processes within the team that will allow these ideas to be implemented. A leader must be able to decompose people’s interests; this is the only way to create a strong and effective team,” she emphasized.

Concluding her speech, Tina Kandelaki expressed hope that the people gathered in the hall at the “Generation” forum will become those new entrepreneurs “who, with their hard work and determination, will create a new Russia.”

Egor Andreev