Consistent boy from Warsaw - Piotr Shulchevsky
He won a scholarship to a top Canadian university, an internship at Google, he could choose from job offers, but he chose his own path. He created his own startup and the largest mobile marketplace - Wish. Get to know the story of Piotr (Peter) Shulchevsky (1), who conquers the world with his app.
Avoids media and privacy issues. Therefore, little can be said about his life in the preceding period. In media reports, he is considered modest Petr Shulchevsky was born in Warsaw. Born in 1981, he managed to get acquainted with the Polish People's Republic and life in apartment buildings in Tarchomin.
He was only 11 years old when he left for Canada with his parents. There he graduated in mathematics and computer science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, recognized as the best university in Canada in the field of natural sciences. During his studies, he met Danny'ego Zhanga (2) who was first his friend and then his business partner. They were both fellows from the University of Waterloo.
2. Schulczewski with Danny Zhang
A descendant of Chinese immigrants dreamed of a football career. He preferred to play football with Peter than to code, but Schulczewski was drawn to the computer and always had a lot of great ideas. Zhang in the end, he did not receive an offer from any major football club. They joined forces and took their first professional steps in the most important companies in the IT industry.
Schulczewski started working at ATI Technologies Inc., from a Canadian manufacturer, incl. video. Another of his where he programmed for Microsoft and Google. For Google, he wrote an algorithm that selects the best and most popular queries for advertisers. The code automatically tagged the ad with popular keywords that weren't considered by the manager ordering the campaign. Thanks to the service, advertisers got more page views and chances of a transaction, and Google's revenue increased, according to Schulczewski, by about $100 million annually.
Success brought another challenge - in 2007 Schulczewski worked on optimizing Google Pages for Korean users.. And he learned a valuable lesson from the Koreans, who didn't want what the giants of Silicon Valley said they should want, like the ascetic white pages of Google. Schulczewski has created a new project, taking into account the tastes and expectations of local users. He learned to think like the clients he created for. He left the company two years later. Apparently, he was tired of the glass ceiling in the corporation, where each project had to go a long way from idea to implementation.
Right behind Amazon and Alibaba
With savings that enabled him to start his own business, he started programming. Half a year later he a mechanism that recognizes the interests of the user based on his behavior on the Internet and selection of relevant ads based on it. Thus, an innovative mobile ad network program was created that can compete with Google AdSense. It was May 2011. The innovative project raised $1,7 million in investment and attracted Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Schulczewski did not forget about his old friend and invited his university friend Zhang, who was then working at YellowPages.com, to cooperate.
There were buyers for the new product, among them, but Schulczewski backed out of his twenty million dollar offer for ContextLogic. Together with Zhang, they chose to refine the engine from which it evolved themselves. Wish mobile trading platform, Shulchevsky's most valuable work to date. The idea was simple - a self-learning program and an application in which users add their shopping wishes, such as a bicycle basket or fishing rod, perfume, etc.
The application was quickly installed on tens of thousands Cell phones. One of the most popular products turned out to be bike computers. Over time, the app searched for and showed users the best deals on the products they dreamed of. Everything happened quickly and conveniently, because on a smartphone. Wish's clients were mostly womenand the products offered came mainly from sellers in China. Asian sellers have rated the app. They didn't have to do anything - they posted their offer, and Wish showed it to potential customers.
At the beginning, the creators of the platform refused the markup from buyers, subject to the placement of an offer with a promotional price 10-20% lower. And therefore, next to such influential companies as Walmart, Amazon, Alibaba-Taobao etc., a new competitor has appeared - Wish.
Shulchevski and Zhang they knew full well that defeating the American sales giants would not be easy. So they targeted a group of users who were invisible to the rulers Silicon Valley. It was about buyers with a less stuffed wallet, for whom the price is more important than fast delivery in beautiful packaging. Schulczewski said that such clients are plentiful in the US alone: "41 percent of American households don't have more than $400 in liquidity," he told investors, adding that they have even more misconceptions about clients in Europe.
In ten years Wish has become the third player in the global e-commerce., after Amazon and Alibaba-Taobao. Statistics have shown that the largest group of users of Wish are residents of Florida, Texas and the US Midwest.
As many as 80 percent of them after the first purchase returned to make another transaction. In 2017, Wish was the most downloaded e-commerce app in the US (around 80%). I wish customers keep coming back for new purchases. Users from Greece, Finland, Denmark, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, and Canada also shop using the Wish app. Once again, Schulczewski got Wish to sell, this time from Amazon. However, the deal did not take place.
3. Lakers T-shirt with Wish app logo.
Wish is advertised by many famous athletes. He has a signed contract with the famous Los Angeles Lakers basketball club (3). Football stars Neymar, Paul Pogba, Tim Howard, Gareth Bale, Robin van Persie, Claudio Bravo and Gianluigi Buffon advertised the app during the 2018 World Cup. As a result, the number of users has increased. In 2018, Wish became the most downloaded e-commerce app in the world. This doubled the platform developers to $1,9 billion.
Wealth and life among the stars
Peter, in addition to being a talented programmer, has an extraordinary business sense. In 2020, his company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, and Investors have valued Wish at nearly $XNUMX billion. With almost a fifth of the shares, a boy from Warsaw became a billionaire with a fortune of $ 1,7 billion. In the ranking of Forbes magazine, he is in 1833rd place in the list of billionaires in 2021.
His company is based on the top floors of a skyscraper on Sunsom Street in San Francisco. The media recently reported that Petr Shulchevsky purchased a modern $15,3 million mansion in the luxurious enclave of Bel Air in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles. The residence overlooks the vineyards of Rupert Murdoch, and the neighbors of the American billionaire with Polish roots include Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
Like many billionaires, Schulczewski is involved in philanthropy - together with Zhang, they are sponsors of Wish scholarships for students at their alma mater, the University of Waterloo. On the university website, Schulczewski writes to his junior colleagues in the IT industry, including: “Consistency is the most underrated virtue in entrepreneurship.”
