On Developing And Marketing Slack Bots While Working A Full Time Job

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Daniel Doubrovkine, and I go by “dB.” I was born in Moscow, Russia, and my family emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland in 1990. That’s where I got my first computer (a Commodore-64, from a relative who upgraded to an Amiga 2000), and started programming by copying some x86 assembly code from SVM Magazine and trying to run tasm.exe. There was no Internet, then.

By the time I enrolled in C.S. at the University of Geneva, I had been selling shareware to users in 42 countries. That business was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (I was not old enough to incorporate in Switzerland) and was called Vestris, after a sunken Spanish ship in the 1400s. I made tens of thousands of dollars selling Windows shareware between 97 and 99, including XReplace-32 and Expression Calculator (sold as Global Calculator on a CDROM in Germany). I then made hundreds of thousands with a very popular Alkaline Search Engine, which powered some of the biggest websites in the late 90s, ranging from bbc.co.uk to warez.com. If you’re old enough to remember, you may have used the aGNeS forum, too. That was ad-sponsored - ads which I may or may not have been clicking on in my sleep.