Ruslan Renatovich Fazlyev (, born March 27, 1980) is a Russian

Internet entrepreneur An Internet entrepreneur is an owner, founder or manager of an Internet-based business. This list includes Internet company founders and people brought on to companies for their general business or accounting acumen, as is the case with some CEOs ...

who has founded several companies. He is best known as a founder and developer of Ecwid and X-Cart e-commerce platforms. Ruslan is ranked number 14 in Hopes&Fears’s rating of young Russian entrepreneurs and number 56 among Russian internet millionaires according to

Kommersant (, , ''The Businessman'' or Commerce Man, often shortened to Ъ) is a nationally distributed daily newspaper published in Russia mostly devoted to politics and business. The TNS Media and NRS Russia certified July 2013 circulation of the daily ...

’s research.

Early life

Fazlyev was born in Oktyabrsky,

Republic of Bashkortostan Bashkortostan, officially the Republic of Bashkortostan, sometimes also called Bashkiria, is a Republics of Russia, republic of Russia between the Volga, Volga river and the Ural Mountains in Eastern Europe. The republic borders Perm Krai to th ...

. Ruslan has been programming since he was seven years old. At first, he used pen and paper. His first personal computer had no screen. Despite all the technical difficulties, Ruslan practised

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

of software and created simple games. From 1997 to 1999, he studied at Ulyanovsk State Technical University. Ruslan dropped out of the school, but nowadays, he is regularly invited to lecture at USTU. He is married to a woman he met before starting his own business.

Career

Ruslan claims that he became an entrepreneur only because he had no job in

Ulyanovsk Ulyanovsk,, , known as Simbirsk until 1924, is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Volga River east of Moscow. Ulyanovsk has been the only Russian UNESCO Ci ...

. His first e-commerce software, named X-Cart, was released in 2001. Fazlyev and his friends utilised the code developed for commercial websites to create the first e-commerce product written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

. X-Cart aimed small and medium businesses that could not afford far more expensive and complicated products such as

IBM WebSphere IBM WebSphere refers to a brand of proprietary computer software products in the genre of enterprise software known as "application and integration middleware". These software products are used by end-users to create and integrate applications ...

Commerce. Ecwid adopted the same approach in 2009. It is an e-commerce platform that can be built into any existing website or

social network A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

page. An award-winning product received a 1,5M round from the Runa Capital venture fund in December 2011 and a syndicated 5M round from Runa Capital and iTech Capital in May 2013. Ecwid has been the world's most popular social network trading software since 2012. Ruslan is CEO of Ecwid and Board Member of X-Cart. Long before engaging in the software business, he created the first telecommunication company in Ulyanovsk. It was sold to a larger competitor in 2002. From 2012 to 2014, Fazlyev was a member of the Expert Council for the Development of the Information Technology Industry of the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Fazlyev, Ruslan 1981 births Businesspeople in computing Russian chief executives Russian computer scientists Ulyanovsk State Technical University alumni Living people Bashkir people Russian businesspeople in the United States