One name that is frequently linked to commercial success and cybersecurity innovation is Natalya Kasperskaya. Her career accomplishments are well-known, as she is a prominent figure in the tech industry and a co-founder of Kaspersky Lab. Less is known, though, about her strategy for juggling work and family, particularly in the beginning of her journey.
Kasperskaya prioritized her family. Prioritizing her children’s upbringing over her professional pursuits was her decision. Although this choice wasn’t without difficulties, it gave her the opportunity to be there for her kids during these formative years. Her experience serves as a welcome reminder that professional success can be attained while upholding personal priorities and that career paths do not always have to follow a predetermined path.
We’ll look at how Natalya Kasperskaya handled the challenges of juggling a demanding career with her family in this article. We’ll examine her decisions, the principles that shaped her, and the lessons she can impart to us about putting family first without compromising ambition.
Aspect | Details |
Background | Natalya Kasperskaya is a successful businesswoman known for prioritizing her family and children over her career early on. |
Approach | She believes in balancing family and work but emphasizes the importance of focusing on children first. |
Career | After raising her children, she pursued a successful career in the tech industry, co-founding and leading major companies. |
Philosophy | Natalya encourages others to prioritize family, believing that a strong family foundation can lead to later career success. |
The primary topic of the article "Natalya Kasperskaya: First Children, Then a Career" is how putting family first and raising kids before pursuing a career can result in both success in the workplace and personal fulfillment. Prominent tech industry figure Natalya Kasperskaya is a shining example of how career aspirations can coexist with family obligations without sacrificing either. Her journey demonstrates that it is possible to succeed in both family life and professional endeavors, highlighting the significance of setting personal priorities and choosing a path that is consistent with one’s values.
- Childhood and youth
- Personal life and children
- Kaspersky Lab
- A new family and a new company
- New rules
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Childhood and youth
Natasha was born on February 5, 1966, into an ordinary engineering family in Moscow. Worked in closed defense institutes were both parents. The 46-year-old father, Ivan Mikhailovich Shtutser, was in charge of the NIIP laboratory. In addition to his work in microbiology and epidemiology, Natasha’s grandfather also wrote a textbook on geography.
There were three of us, but Natasha is the only child in the family, so she has a lot of energy. She was an athlete (swimming, skiing, five years of basketball in the Youth Sports School), a member of the district pioneer headquarters, the agitation brigade, the squad council, an organizer for Komsomol, and a theater participant in school plays. She has always been an activist.
However, the girl did not dream of becoming a great actress or athlete. She loved animals very much and was interested in biology, so for some time she seriously thought about becoming a veterinarian. But her relationship with chemistry did not work out. And then Natasha decided to follow in the footsteps of her parents – to get a technical education. To prepare for admission, she transferred to the physics and mathematics school at MAI in the eighth grade. To enter Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov, the girl lacked only half a point, but she was accepted to the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, in the faculty of applied mathematics. Here she studied from 1984 to 1989, and after graduation, she was assigned to the Central Scientific Design Bureau (TsNKB).
Personal life and children
Natalya Kasperskaya frequently states in interviews that she believes a woman’s main concern should be having children. She considered a career to be secondary. Speaking of this wealthy and successful woman is beneficial since, as many believe, she has experienced everything. However, Natalya is knowledgeable about the subject.
At the age of 22, while still a student, she gave birth to her first child. Her second child was born three years later, and Kasperskaya didn’t return from maternity leave until she was 28 years old. She went on to have a dazzling career and three more children in spite of this. Naturally, it was not an easy task for her.
The fateful meeting of Natalya and Evgeny Kaspersky took place in January 1987 at the Rest House. The twenty-year-old girl came there with her college friend. It was not love at first sight, and the situation was not trivial – a love quadrangle. It took the young people half a year to sort out their feelings. And when, finally, the choice was made, it turned out that Evgeny, who was finishing his studies, was being sent to Chita. Natalya, who studied in Moscow, seriously thought about dropping out of college and going with him. However, this did not have to be done – the talented graduate was helped to stay in the capital. They got married. And two years later, in 1989, the couple had their first child – a son, Maxim.
When Natalia was in her fifth year at the institute, the first child was born. She didn’t take a leave of absence from school; her parents assisted with the child. The Central Scientific and Technical Clinical Hospital was her designated hospital.
It was depressing to work with technology and microcircuits. She was saved by her second maternity leave; the Kasperskys welcomed Ivan into the world in 1991.
Natalia took a three-year maternity leave and had no intention of going back to her boring job. She spent this time with her family and her sons. She has no regrets about it at all. She also regrets the fact that, in the years that followed, her expanding business frequently required her to forgo spending time with her family; after all, kids grow up so fast.
Kaspersky Lab
Evgeny was researching computer viruses and creating anti-virus software at Information Technology Center KAMI while his wife was on maternity leave. When Natalia returned from her second maternity leave in 1994, she started working part-time at this center’s store. Her pay was around fifty dollars, and she sold software and accessories.
The young mother quickly became the head of the AVP antivirus distribution department. The product was successfully sold, and international markets could be reached. Natalia was one of the co-founders and general director of "Kaspersky Lab," a company founded in 1997. She enrolled in the Open University in Great Britain because she lacked the experience and knowledge necessary to run the business.
When I was 33 years old in 1999, I achieved success in business. However, nobody in the vicinity was aware that the Kasperskys had to give up their personal lives for the company—they had already divorced a year earlier.
The business, which the ex-spouses did not split, required the information to be kept secret. Simply put, each person was focusing on their own task; Natalia was effectively promoting, while Evgeny was developing. The business owner decided against changing her last name because it would require updating a lot of paperwork.
It was a challenging moment for Natalia. However, she was able to preserve the company as well as her professional rapport with her ex-husband. Maxim and Ivan, her sons, were waiting for her at home. According to Natalia, the boys had their own little team and were friends with each other, so they were never competitive or envious. The two men’s interests only slightly differed in one area: Ivan chose the Moscow State University’s faculty of computational mathematics and cybernetics because he was interested in programming, while Maxim enjoyed geography and graduated from the university’s geography department. Both sons carried on the family business: the younger son followed in the footsteps of his parents, while the eldest son did as his great-grandfather had done.
Natalya made the decision to stop combining her personal and professional life. However, she didn’t follow through on her self-promised three-year marriage breakup from Kaspersky.
Igor Ashmanov was her first choice; the two of them started a business and had three daughters together.
A new family and a new company
Igor Ashmanov and Natalia first met in 1996 at an IT exhibition in Hanover. They reconnected there a year later and struck up a business relationship. It was evident after a while that they shared more than just interests—they also shared emotions. And Natalia concluded that she would be able to integrate partnerships in her personal life with her career, considering her past mistakes.
In 2001, at 39 years old, Igor wed Natalia, who was 35 at the time. Ashmanov was appointed executive director of Rambler at the start of the year. However, he eventually quit there to start Ashmanov and Partners (AiP), a search engine optimization-focused consulting firm. It should be noted that AiP developed the Antispam technology that Kaspersky Lab purchased.
Natalia at that time was still working in her ex-husband"s company, where in the early 2000s they were developing a system to protect corporate users from internal threats, which later became known under the brand InfoWatch Traffic Monitor Enterprise. 2003 – the year of the founding of the subsidiary InfoWatch, created to develop and promote a new product. Natalya received a controlling stake in this company in 2007, when the business with her ex-husband had to be divided. At the same time, she was removed from her positions at Kaspersky Lab, and within a few years her share in the joint business was bought out. Together with Igor Ashmanov, Kaspersky is involved in the companies Cribrum and Nanosemantics.
New rules
How can you co-manage a business without destroying your marriage to your husband? How can you balance a busy work schedule with spending quality time with your family? Natalya made the decision that her husband would now be the head of the family and have the final say after considering her previous mistakes. This keeps a lot of family arguments at bay. The spouses try to avoid discussing business at home, and they each have separate offices and responsibilities at work.
When Alexandra, the first daughter, was born in 2005, Natalia was 39 years old, and her sons were 14 and 16 at the time.
Natalia admits that she didn"t spend enough time with her older children when they were little. At the same time, you can"t leave a business, like a child, unattended. Modern means of communication came to the rescue, allowing you to stay in touch with the office while being at home with the children. Four years later, another daughter, Maria, was born into the family, and her mother simply needed a flexible schedule. And three years later, in 2012, at 46, Natalia gave birth to a third daughter, Varvara. Now the weekends of the mother of many children are dedicated to her children, she has limited the number of business trips and tries to go on vacation with her family more often.
Unexpectedly, Natalia opened the "Green Lamb" farm in the Moscow area in 2015 to breed goats and make cheeses and yogurts.
Her family gave her the idea to do this since they believe that natural products and fresh air are healthy for kids. She leaves open the possibility that she may pursue a career in agriculture if she grows weary of the IT sector.
Natalia, as a person who knows a lot about modern technologies, is very wary of gadgets and tries to minimize children"s interaction with them. Why? It"s not only the vulnerability of such technology, but also the fact that it does a lot for children, while the child needs development. According to Natalia, she would ban gadgets in elementary grades, and would not buy such technology for her children for a long time. But her husband thinks differently, and we remember who has the final say. Therefore, of course, her children have always had modern computers, tablets and smartphones. To distract the girls from them, Natalia simply increased the children"s employment. In addition to school lessons, the daughters study English, dance, music, drawing and much more.
Natalia strongly advocates for educating kids about information security at a very young age. and to exercise caution ourselves, particularly with regard to private data. An unfortunate personal experience was one of the main causes of this severe attitude toward security.
Ivan, the 20-year-old son of Natalya and Eugene Kaspersky, was abducted in 2011.
The journey of Natalya Kasperskaya demonstrates that putting family first need not equate to giving up on a prosperous career. She built a solid foundation for her personal and professional lives by prioritizing her children. Her experience shows that even though the road isn’t always clear-cut, it is possible to strike a balance between the two worlds.
Natalya illustrates that there are various paths to success via her personal experience. She reassures us that taking things one step at a time is acceptable and that parenting can teach us valuable lessons that can be applied in the professional setting. Her strategy is an excellent illustration of how fulfillment can result from pursuing your own priorities.
Ultimately, Natalya’s decisions highlight how important it is to remain true to who you are. Her story inspires us to make decisions that are consistent with our values, whether they are related to our family, career, or both. It serves as a reminder that there is no one solution that works for everyone and that everyone can find their own way to happiness and success.