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It's a 120-million-member social network that is incorporating in excess of 300,000 end users a day, with more than 4.3 million day-to-day photo and video uploads, and seven billion regular monthly web page views. It has Facebook's fastest-growing app, with 570,000 new everyday users, creating it the third-biggest app of all right after FarmVille and CityVille. Hugely profitable, it can be forecast to create hundreds of millions of dollars this year, and is getting aggressively courted by venture-capital firms valuing it in the billions. And it's run from London by a secretive Russian serial entrepreneur who has steadfastly refused to be interviewed or photographed. Till now.

The world's greatest social network

Badoo is the world's greatest social network that you most likely haven't but heard of. Operate from 800-square-metre loft-style offices in Soho, it is brilliantly effective at offering 1 simple and universally compelling service: hooking up members in accordance to their profile photographs and location. "Chat, flirt, socialise and have fun!," implores the property page, alongside photographs of possible friends these kinds of as Terri, 21 ("Wants a candlelit dinner"), and Christopher, 25 ("Wants wake up with a girl" [sic]). Signal in, and a message declares that "204,516 ladies [or guys] in close proximity to you are hunting to meet a guy your age!". Describe your intentions (the pull-down menu's recommendations 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 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 relatively than any marketing and advertising spend, it has cracked the internet's eternal conundrum: how to persuade users to shell out tough income in a planet drowning in free of charge digital companies and content, by charging members every time they want to boost their visibility to other individuals browsing for a date.

A yr right after Badoo's 2006 launch, when it had 12 million members, Russia's Finam Engineering Fund purchased a ten per cent stake for $30 million, valuing it at $300 million (this yr Finam will realise an alternative for a more 10 for each cent at a increased valuation). Today, A-list investors these kinds of as Sequoia and Accel are courting the company and there is talk of an preliminary manifeste share offering. "Cracking the Anglo-Saxon marketplace will most likely give us ambigu to triple today's reach," says Bart Swanson, recruited as CEO final September, having expanded Amazon into Europe and run EMI in France. "The chance for individuals discovery [through Badoo] is a horrendously big marketplace -- it's a confluence of social, proximity, mobile, and it is incredibly local. The standard mechanism of what Andrey has formulated is genius -- just like Google with its AdWords, it is folks having to pay for self-promotion. And it works."

Mysterious Andrey Andrey is Andrey Andreev, at first from Moscow but primarily based in London for the past six years, who launched Badoo on a string of other highly profitable Russian net businesses: Mamba, SpyLog, Begun. Andreev, a youthful 37 with a cherubic smile beneath a floppy fringe, has so much eluded media attention: Russian Forbes final yr called him "one of the most mysterious businessmen in the West" (it also noted his unique title as Andrey Ogandzhanyants, beneath which the SpyLog.net domain was registered). We have been introduced in January by Israeli investor Yossi Vardi at Burda's DLD conference 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 office belonging to Freud Communications, Andreev agreed to share his story. It has been a active few 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 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's playful, it appears consistent with offline social interaction but in this hypervirality mode that only the net has enabled. The key sauces in firms like this are so nuanced, and the variation between getting it improper and right lies only with these unique people like Andrey. He's produced one thing quite powerful." So why has Andreev remained silent? "I love to focus on creating points rather than exploring myself," he says quietly and precisely, his 5' 8" frame continually moving in agitated pain at getting quoted on the file for the 1st time. "I never really feel that it helps to make dollars or make business." And now? "I come to feel Badoo is all set for me to determine with. Because it works, it grows like crazy. And individuals enjoy it."

There is one more unspoken reason: with an IPO becoming considered, the firm requirements to boost consciousness to maximise the valuation being floated by traders and bankers (currently becoming mentioned at "around $2 billion", according to Andreev). The business 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 launched in late 2006 in Spain, wherever Andreev was then living, as a traditional photo-sharing website. "We assumed that the 'meet new people' thought would not function there -- Spanish women are like princesses, you couldn't touch them, you had to meet their mother and father 1st before inviting them to the cinema," he says. The website was not making revenue, but numbers ended up increasing sharply: the 2007 Google Zeitgeist list of fastest-rising research phrases outlined "Badoo" second, just under "iPhone". In 2008, Andreev made the decision to check his assumptions of Spanish women and as an experiment refocused the internet site on meeting new people. "And the women did not leave. At that time, France was developing fast, Italy was. Then one particular day we discovered 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 Can Be as if all the consumers jumped on the bus and went there. Bang -- in two months, all of a sudden we have a Turkish marketplace with a million members." Today the general gender ratio is 45 percent female, 55 for each cent male (in Brazil and Poland women outnumber men); 86 % of end users are aged 18 to 34.

Andreev introduced some easy top quality services. You could spend a dollar or a euro to "rise up" the search results, and so appeal to better attention. You could shell out again to have your profile picture more commonly noticeable across the site. He launched virtual presents to acquire for your future date. "No one's pushing you to devote money, but if you want to draw in far more users, you have to pay," he explains. "You shell out to promote yourself. If you want some thing to go faster, you pay. And some folks shell out tens of occasions each day to rise up." By the stop of 2009, the web site had 48 million registered customers -- a fifth of whom, then CEO Neil Bryant explained at the time, had been paying out to improve their profile.

Badoo in Smartphones "Then we had the idea of cellular -- how to meet people nearby," Andreev says. "We recognized that people could meet each and every other in a massive town, but how significantly much more thrilling to see who's sitting subsequent to you in a caf�? Or you can just walk previous a nightclub and see who you can pick up prior to you get in. It Is another possibility to hook up random people for adventure. We're chatting about actual life, real time. We know this lady is 500 metres from here now."

Badoo Cell launched final summertime on the iPhone, and in March on Android. Within weeks, with barely any marketing, the iPhone app was the number-one social-networking app in France; soon after eight months, it had been downloaded 1.5 million times. Andreev sees proximity as essential 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 knowledge points. "If you might be sitting at home and someone's walking with an iPhone nearby, we know the length amongst you. We can also show the iPhone consumer that you're nearby. So it works for everyone."

Mamba Before Badoo there was Mamba, a Russian online-dating enterprise 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 presented it as a white-label services to existing dating sites, letting them keep their ad profits and deepening their subscribers' pool of future dates. When it had a million members, a similar design emerged: a totally free site, it allow users pay by way of premium SMS to be a lot more simply discovered. "You register, upload a profile picture, and we place you at the leading of the research list," Andreev explains. "Then you little by little transfer down the hill -- if we have 50,000 new clients a day, you can quickly realize how several minutes of attention you have. When you eliminate attention, like a Google lookup result, no one finds you.

"The 1st day [of this compensated service] we created $5,000, the second $6,000, the 3rd much more -- I was not expecting this. But folks really like advertising themselves. Plenty of folks use this operate a number of situations a day. They become addicted."

A few weeks later, the internet site additional the opportunity to be briefly visible on each page, for a fee. "This was even more successful. Some people put in hundred of pounds every single day. Men And Women complained they couldn't write SMS messages quickly enough, and a great deal on pay-as-you-go had to hold going to kiosks to acquire new scratchcards to cost an additional $50." So Mamba began taking credit cards, on the web currencies, Yandex money. Revenues climbed at any time a lot more steeply.

"We just sat back, relaxed, and added more services every single day," Andreev says. "There were virtual gifts -- prior to Zynga. You could deliver a gift, make a virtual telephone contact at 50 cents per minute. It was Mamba time. You are unable to envision how calme it is to operate points that are growing fast, obtaining revenue, observing the charts as the funds 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 offered a fast-growing and very lucrative business, retaining no equity for himself. "I leap from task to undertaking when I have new inspiration," he says. "I wanted the freedom to do no matter what I wanted."

And he knew that the minimal Russian market place would not preserve 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 area of L'Atelier de Jo�l Robuchon in Covent Garden, Andreev is looking for reactions to the soup he created. L'oignon doux -- "Sweet onion soup 'Andre� style'", according to the two-Michelin-starred menu -- is a thing he devised when functioning in the kitchen as a weekend pastime alongside head chef Olivier Limousin. "I'm not sure if it was a joke, but when they obtained their second Michelin star," he says matter-of-factly, "Olivier explained it was simply because of my soup."

Andreev slips unobtrusively into chefs' whites in this and other London kitchens as "sometimes you need to have a diverse sort of adventure". He provides with a grin: "And I'm not speaking about making use of Badoo." He learned cookery in Spain, wherever he lived just before 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 small anxiously. But with close to 65 of its 120 staff, including its management and government teams, centered in Soho, this is proficiently a British business. "London's the international hub, exactly where you can discover anything you want," he says. "Crazy town. I feel at home here." He owns a house in central London -- but winces at the suggestion of naming the neighbourhood -- and spends weekends selecting luxurious autos to discover England's countryside. "I've been everywhere, stayed in manors, castles, quite cool." His social circle is a blend of locals and Russians, and he is single. "I don't know why. No time." Marriage could happen one day, he says, "but I Am frightened to develop a loved ones now. I Am not certain I am capable to give sufficient time." Does he use Badoo? "I use any option to meet new people, not only Badoo. But I do play with Badoo, yeah." And...he has liked pleasant experiences? He pauses, then smiles. "Yeah. I think most of the guys and girls in the workplace are employing it, they all have great experiences. And it assists them enhance the features." Since employing Swanson as CEO, Andreev has stepped back from day-to-day conduite to focus on product development. And, yes, he is contemplating about his following project. "Always -- I have a black box of issues to do, but it is not easy to jump from one particular to another." What form of business? "Look at my encounter -- it won't always be a dating or hook-up service. But it will be internet. The mobile world wide web is the biggest possibility in the world. Smartphones outsold PCs very last quarter. The opportunities will include meeting new people. Hook-up on cellular is a multibillion business. And on tablets."

Childhood Andreev grew up in Moscow. He reveals his identification card: born in February 1974. "You see my problem? I Am old," he says. "Normal family, parents in education, more youthful sister, mom teaching, father a professor of mathematics. They inspired me to learn." But he grew to become distracted by an before global communications network: novice radio. "I was 14, and with a group of pals developed a bunch of huge black containers and put a massive antenna on the rooftop. It was not achievable in Russia at that time to acquire something from Europe, so it was a good deal of fun to develop something that could send 1kW of vitality to the antenna on the roof. I expended many years on this."

At 18 he started studying management at university in Moscow whilst keeping down a job, but dropped out right after 18 months and moved to Spain, exactly where his mothers and fathers had relocated. He had saved money via the task and had time to feel about what to do next.

A businessman was born In 1999, he and some Russian close friends -- "technical men very into the internet" -- set up a web-tracking business, SpyLog, based in Moscow. It aided site owners monitor not only visits to their sites, but users' routines on the broader internet. "It was big enjoyable to make much more and more statistics," Andreev states in his sometimes hesitant English. "We offered information about how a lot time they invested on other sites, what time they woke up and went to sleep, research requests. Most webmasters were quite happy to pay for this information." The data let SpyLog serve targeted ads. The organization grew rapidly -- the major Russian portals used it -- but 18 months later, he grew to become restless. "I had the notion for my up coming project. I was dreaming about marketing money. I understood you could make a whole lot from ads -- and if the market wants a thing that no a single provides, you move."

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

As for SpyLog, "I just left. I kept some men operating 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 didn't feel I could be useful to SpyLog any more." So he was not motivated by creating 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 conclude of 2003, Finam acquired 80 % of Begun. "I can not talk about the price," Andreev states when pressed. "I can notify you that final year Finam attempted to market it to Google for $140 million, but the Russian authorities stopped the deal." He no longer has a stake.

So he is not 1 to search back. "No, I just swim to what is next." He is simply bored then? "Maybe." And has he actually failed? "In phrases of the massive projects, never. In phrases of modest 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 generate an exciting feature. He refused, so we created our own [webcam] section. A week later we just eliminated it. Big companies commit months on advertising research. We go a lot more quickly -- prototype, build, see if it works, kill."

The 2003 transaction produced him a millionaire, but his life-style barely transformed -- apart from establishing a liking for German cars. In London, he does not personal 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 enjoy this country. I'd really like to stay here."

The Badoo impact Some be a part of Badoo to locate a relationship. Lucy, 19, informed Wired she designed an account after relocating 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 kind on my uni course. My good friend Josh said he uses Badoo to seem for men and that I ought to try it, so he came more than armed with some alcohol and I signed up."

A number of customers sent Lucy "weird and inappropriate messages" (an offer to star in a porn movie; questions about her feet), but there were two guys with whom she appreciated chatting regularly. "Then the third one, I satisfied up with. He's 20. I felt cozy meeting up with him as it was in public, and he advised me all over the place he was using me. We've been on four dates and it is heading well."

Others are open up to much more casual encounters. Edita, 35, from Madrid, says she tends to make friends, but "you can find a weekend roll" too. Rafe, also from Madrid, has done just that. "After nine months I commenced chatting with a guy. We talked for a month and a single day he gave me his number. The subsequent day he came to my property in the morning. I was alone. In an hour we have been in my bed naked."

Hooking up The site's hook-up perform -- accounting for four-fifths of usage, according to Swanson -- often surprises new users. Mary, 19, from London, states she joined to make new friends, and did not anticipate currently being approached for sex. "It's transpired fairly a bit and they typically request for far more than just 1 partner, which is really creating me want to leave. They are generally late 20s, 30s, even a 47-year-old." And although membership is limited to over-18s, one particular member Wired spoke to uncovered that she was only 16.

Some members are clearly there for skilled sexual purposes. We identified accounts that greatly hinted at offline transactions for services rendered; consumers this sort 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 problem considering that I've been here". Still, he accepts that "it's a chance -- when you have millions of end users on a site, a lot of issues 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 ambitions and scale normally draws in controversy. Final July, the Information of the Globe reported that a convicted intercourse offender had outlined himself as "looking for adore with ladies aged between 18 and 25" and posted a photo 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 without permission. And an evaluation of 45 social-networking web sites by Joseph Bonneau and S�ren Preibusch of Cambridge College gave Badoo the lowest score for privacy.

Is Andreev bothered by his site becoming accused, at the really least, of simply selling promiscuity? "OK, which is bad?" he replies neutrally. "Badoo is not for sex, it really is for adventure. If you go to a nightclub, of training course you've obtained the opportunity to discover a lady or a boy -- but it really is not always for sex, it could be to enjoy five mojitos and practically 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 operate faster."

Badoo's future So what's next? Today Badoo is in 24 languages, and will take payment in 100 currencies, but the company eyes large expansion likely -- not minimum in markets these kinds of as the UK, exactly where Swanson says there are 150,000 users. And mobile: "If these days 90-95 percent [of engagement] is through the web, in a yr 50 % will be mobile," Swanson says. Badoo has hardly acquired started out on helping individuals hook up by way of their cell devices. "Meeting individuals is the foundation of evolution," Swanson says. "It's not like the man or woman who's successful 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 present buddies in an totally virtual life," he says. "Badoo is a lot more social: it provokes you to go down on the road and meet these people."

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

Andreev interrupts. "You want to hold me? I need to have freedom, so I can build 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 are inviting me to their party. I don't believe I must be top rated 30, but leading ten." He laughs. "Bart, what ought to I do with this?"

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

Andreev smiles. "But it's cocktails for free�before they catch me, consider image shoots. I will not want that."

Does he dread getting to be far more public? "For now, it is not a huge problem," Andreev replies, "as now we have a firm which is successful." He pauses. "It's a human thing. You have one thing cool. This is mine -- I manufactured it. It Can Be like a kid. Before you have this, what is there to discuss about? That I'm cool?"