Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How has your user growth been affected by the Middle East protests?

David Gorodyansky: In Egypt we had about 100,000 users before the uprisings. When they blocked Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the sites, our usage jumped to 1 million users in a single day. We did not market or advertise; that was pure word of mouth. E-mail was working and people would tell each other. We set up an auto responder so that you could e-mail that address and we would auto-respond with the install file attached. If the government blocked our website, you could still get access to the install file.

Once the government realized that users were getting access to Facebook and Twitter, they cut all access to the Internet. At that point our usage went down, but it did not go down to zero. It turns out some people still accessed us through their phones which were not blocked. They also got to us through dial-up services, the old 56K modems.

In Libya, the Internet would go down to zero every night and comes back online in the morning. We have users in 100 countries, and this does not occur everywhere else. Our hypothesis is that the government turns on the Internet for the oil companies in the morning, and then to prevent people from organizing it shuts the Internet off in the evenings. That is based on the traffic patterns that we have seen.

I am 29 years old. I have always wanted to do something that would change the world. My co-founder and I had the goal of founding AnchorFree to make a lot of money and then use that money to start a pure nonprofit.

Sramana Mitra: Why would you need to do a nonprofit to change the world?

David Gorodyansky: Exactly. That is what we have learned. Right now we have discovered that we have done both. This is the ideal way to do it. It is sustainable, which a nonprofit cannot do.

Sramana Mitra: What is happening in China? That is a highly censored country.

David Gorodyansky: China is growing and is definitely a highly censored geography. They have blocked our website. Our usage has quadrupled since they did that. We have about 1.5 million monthly users in China now. If you go to YouTube today and type in Hotspot Shield you will see dozens of videos. Only one of those videos was made by us. The rest are user generated. People are passionate about spreading the word.

Sramana Mitra: What other regions are interesting?

David Gorodyansky: The Western world users are concerned about security and we see a lot of use from travelers. The censored market is very interesting. That includes China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabi, United Arab Emirate, and countries like that.

Sramana Mitra: Indonesia has a lot of censorship? I thought that was a very moderate country.

David Gorodyansky: They do censor off and on. Most of them censor YouTube because it is user-generated content. A lot of countries in Europe censor Skype. We are a huge enabler for Skype. Telecoms in Europe hate Skype because people get to avoid paying those ridiculous fees. Telecoms are also the ones who provide the Internet in Europe. Skype should love us because of how much we do for them.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA
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