Nikolay Kononov

Nikolai Viktorovich Kononov (date of birth: August 24, 1980) is a Russian journalist and writer. He is the editor-in-chief of the publication Secret Firmy.

In 2002, he graduated from the Department of Literary and Art Criticism and Journalism of the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University. In 2003–2004, he worked as a reporter for the newspapers Izvestia and Stolichnaya Vechernyaya. In 2004–2005, he was a special correspondent for Expert magazine. From 2005 to 2010, he worked as a columnist and editor at the Russian edition of Forbes. In 2010–2011, he was one of four senior editors at Slon.ru. In 2011, he returned to Forbes and took part in launching the Forbes.ru website.

From 2012 to 2015, he was editor-in-chief of Hopes & Fears, a daily online publication about the new generation of entrepreneurs. After its incorporation into The Village, he became editorial director of Look At Media.

In January 2015, Kononov moved to Secret Firmy as editor-in-chief. Four key members of the editorial team left with him, and then almost the entire Hopes&Fears team followed. According to Kononov, what prompted him to leave Look At Media was a series of decisions by the holding company’s management: first, to merge H&F with The Village and thereby shut down the business publication, which had reached a monthly audience of about 800,000 people in a year and a half, and then to use the successful name for a new English-language lifestyle publication.

In 2011, he published the book God Without a Machine: Stories of 20 madmen who built businesses from scratch in Russia (in 2012, the book was shortlisted for the NOS literary award). In 2012, his second book, The Durov Code. The Real Story of the Social Network VKontakte and Its Founder, was published. In