According to Vice, Durov got the idea of ​​creating a social network when a friend who studied in America showed him an early version of Facebook. Thus, VK was launched as a beta in September 2006 and had an official and legal organization in 2007. Even today, the design of this social network looks like the original version of Zuckerberg’s design.

For the first few years, VK was almost a Spotify-style library of all kinds of media, including black-market movies and music. According to Katya Romanovskaya, one of the authors of the satirical Twitter account @KermlinRussia, “almost everything on VK was illegal” in those days.

Read more: Is Telegram really safe?

When Putin announced his intention to run for re-election in late 2011, opposition groups flocked to VK and organized public protests by publishing news and material against Putin. Even the leader of the opposition party, Alexei Navalny, was the administrator of a VK page with over 100,000 followers, and when the website’s algorithm automatically blocked his page for excessive activity, Durov came to his rescue and changed the website’s algorithm.

VK had the full attention of the FSB intelligence agency. The day government agents knocked on Durov’s door, his rebellious spirit flared up. Durov refused to remove the protest pages and emphasized that VK is a 100% non-political organization and that removing these pages would cause users to migrate from VK and cause a severe financial blow to his team’s business.

The Kremlin left VK alone for a while; But in early 2013, Durov’s troubles began again. In a report, Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta released several hacked emails between Durov and the Kremlin’s “main ideologist,” Vladislav Surkov, and claimed the VKontakte founder had been working with the FSB for years.

According to the editor of RuNet Echo, many VK users did not believe such a report; But this was only the beginning of the campaign against Dwarf. In April of the same year, a car belonging to Ilya Perkopsky, the chief executive of VK, ran over a police officer. The driver ran away from the scene, But the police claimed that the person behind the wheel was Durov. In response to this accusation, Durov said that he does not know how to drive.

A few days later, police officers began searching VK’s offices in Moscow, according to the Moscow Times. The reason for this inspection was announced as “part of the investigation into the accident and fleeing the scene”. The next day, the two main investors of VK, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Lviv, announced their intention to sell their 48% stake. Investors were looking to sell their shares because of the rift between them and Durov, according to multiple sources. According to Interfax, the value of this social network at that time was 2 billion dollars.

Durov fled to Buffalo, New York later that month and began work on his new project, Telegram. The police finally stopped pursuing the accident case.

At that time, 88% of VK shares were held by government supporters and 12% were still held by Durov. Durov announced that he did not intend to sell his shares and his activity on this platform continued until the end of 2013. On his VK page, Pavel wrote about the website’s growth compared to other social networks, including Facebook and WhatsApp, and published an infographic showing that in October 2013, VK was the top Android app in Moscow.

But in January 2014, Durov announced that he had sold his entire 12% stake to the mobile phone operator Megaphone for $300 million. In an interview with Motherboard magazine, he said: “It was clear that my 12% share did not give me much decision-making power, But it could be used to limit my freedom in critical situations.” With Durov selling his shares, VK was now 100% under the financial control of Kremlin allies.

Durov lost his financial investment; But for how long did he remain as the general manager of VK? On April 1, 2014, he finally announced his resignation from the board of directors of VK citing the excessive involvement of new shareholders in the management of the website. Of course, two days later, he claimed that his resignation was April’s lie and tried to withdraw the letter; But the shareholders did not allow him to do this. On April 22, Durov found out that he was officially fired from VK.

Durov was forced to sell his shares due to political pressure and had to say goodbye to the big company he founded forever, But this happened at the right time. He said in an interview with Motherboard:

The Russian Internet market fell dramatically after this incident. In a way, I am grateful to the shareholders and political forces that made me sell my shares. Now I am more satisfied that I can serve the audience on a wider scale than the world.

Pavel Valerievich Durov was born on October 10, 1984, in Saint Petersburg and grew up in an educated family. Pavel is the second child in the family and has an older brother named Nikolai, who was with him in launching the social network VK and Telegram.

As a child, Pavel had to move to Italy with his family because of his father’s job and studied first grade in the city of Turin. Two years later, the whole family returned to Russia, and after four years of secondary education, Pavel went to the Dmitri Fadeev School of Mathematics and Physics at St. Petersburg State University, where he studied all subjects, including four foreign languages, in-depth.

From the age of 11, Pavel was very interested in programming with his brother. After finishing high school with excellent grades, he studied English language translation at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg University.

According to information on Pavel’s official VK page, he speaks eight foreign languages: Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin and even Farsi. Of course, it is not possible to say how true this information is.

In university, Pavel was one of the best students with a high level of intelligence. He has repeatedly won linguistics, programming, and design olympiads, has received scholarships from the Government of the Russian Federation and the President of the Russian Federation, and is a three-time winner of the Potanin Innovation Award.

While a student, he launched the website durov.com, which housed a database of educational materials for humanities students. Then he came up with the idea of ​​another website (spbgu.ru) where St. Petersburg University students could communicate with each other through its forum.

On this site, each student had his personal account, which included information such as name, faculty, and list of friends and groups. Any user could also blog on this website. This is how the initial version of the VK social network was born. To promote his website, Powell organized beauty and design contests at the university and sometimes engaged in heated discussions with an anonymous account to create excitement on the website’s forum.

Durov spends most of his time on innovation, self-improvement, and entrepreneurship. Now everyone knows him as the founder of Telegram, which in a way embodies all his ideals in the field of user data security.

We all know Telegram with Pavel Durov; While Pavel’s brother, Nikolai, also played a big role in the formation of this popular messenger.

In fact, Nikolai’s role in the development of all the projects discussed, from the durov.com website to this Telegram, is very prominent. He showed interest in natural sciences from his childhood; While Powell’s interest was in the field of humanities. Despite this difference, these two brothers had a common interest and that was programming.

Nikolai, who was a talented programmer, wrote a few lines of code for the VKontakte platform when it was still in the early stages of development, and then, as the popularity of this social network grew, he became more involved in its development and eventually took the position of technical manager and senior developer of the company. Nikolai worked on this platform until 2014 when Pavel resigned from the VK board and took the entire team out of the country with him.

In an interview with Medium, Powell said that his brother played a big role in developing his ideas. He mentions Nikolai as a genius who solved complex mathematical equations quickly in TV competitions, read a lot of books, and came first in almost all math competitions.

Durov left Russia in April 2014 and said he would never return to his homeland. Because the internet rules in this country are not clear it is impossible to do online business there.

Pavel is now a bit of a homebody, traveling around the world with his team of programmers and usually not staying in one country for more than a few months. Since leaving Russia, he has lived in Berlin, London and Singapore.

Currently, he and the Telegram development team live in Dubai. It is written in the FAQ section of Telegram that they are satisfied with life in Dubai; But as soon as the internet laws of this country change, they are ready to change their location.

In the spring of 2013, Powell received the citizenship of this small country by donating $250,000 to the St. Kitts and Nevis island fund in the Caribbean and investing in it. With a passport to this country, he can travel without a visa to 132 countries of the world, including the European Union and England.

Of course, Pavel’s new citizenship was revealed only in 2014; That is when he had officially left Russia, and this showed that Pavel had been thinking about leaving his homeland for a long time. Pavel Durov’s fortune

According to Forbes magazine, Pavel Durov’s financial situation has been growing since 2016. In the ranking of the 200 richest Russians in 2016, he ranked 135th with 600 million dollars, and by 2020, he was promoted to the 30th position with a fortune equal to 3.4 billion dollars.

Pavel Durov’s income from Telegram

Pavel made a fortune of 500 million dollars from the sale of his 12% stake in VK and is very interested in the field of cryptocurrency. He also managed to collect about 1.7 billion dollars from investors for the development of the Telegram-based blockchain known as TON; A project that, of course, failed; But Durov does not earn any income from Telegram.

Telegram is completely free, without ads and in-app payments, and Durov pays the cost of maintaining this platform completely from his own pocket. Of course, Durov has announced in a post that if he runs out of money to run Telegram, he will probably have to turn to public donations or in-app payments; But he will never enter the world of advertising.

Paul Durov’s moral qualities

Pavel is a supporter of the school of libertarianism in the political and economic fields. This view of his is clearly evident in his unwillingness to cooperate with government organizations. He believes that no person or structure has the right to violate private property or personal information of people.

Powell supports the standardization of the educational system; Because he believes that modern schools in the West are a relic of the industrial era and educate people with stereotyped and closed views. He predicts that education in the future will be interactive and decentralized.

Powell supports high taxes on industries that are active in the extraction of raw materials and the abolition of taxes in the field of information and customs. He also believes that taxpayers should choose what projects their taxes will be spent on.

Durov also believes that the cancellation of registration, passports, entry visas, and military service is necessary, and he considers these to be the cornerstones of the feudal system. In his opinion, movement restrictions cause brains to escape.

Pavel is not interested in doing interviews and prefers to be in contact with the audience directly through his posts on the Telegram channel and website.

When Pavel was 33 years old, he stated in a post that he had not consumed sugar, meat, or fast food for a long time, did not drink energy drinks, tea, and coffee, turned away from nicotine and alcohol and does not watch TV.

Telegram is run by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. Pavel supports Telegram from the economic and ideological aspects and Nikolai from the technological aspect. To build Telegram, Nikolai created a unique custom data protocol called MTProto, which is open-source, secure, and optimized for use in multiple data centers. Details of the other people involved in the project are unknown, although Powell mentioned in a 2016 interview that his team consisted of 15 people.

Most of the Telegram developers were born in St. Petersburg, and after the tension with the Russian government, they left the country with Pavel and his brother and settled in Berlin, London, and Singapore for a while.

Telegram team members are currently in Dubai and are ready to change their place of residence again if the internet regulations of this country change.

Powell dresses distinctively. In the photos, he always wears black clothes, and this is a kind of homage to his character Neo in the movie Matrix; For this reason, he is sometimes called Neo-Russian. In a book about Durov, Nikolai Kononov wrote that “he sees himself as the engineer of his own world”, and this description is somewhat consistent with the world of The Matrix.

Pavel learned to code while in school and used this skill to change the welcome screen image of the school computers to annoy a teacher he didn’t like. Pavel has a close relationship with his brother, who is also a skilled coder.

Pavel launched the VKontakte social network at the age of 22. The VKontakte office was located on the fifth and sixth floors of the iconic Singer House building in St. Petersburg.

In 2011, when Russian authorities asked Durov to remove some anti-government posts from VK, Durov responded by posting a photo of a dog wearing a hoodie and sticking out its tongue.

In 2012, Pavel and some VK employees made paper rockets worth more than a thousand dollars and threw them out the window. The value of each rocket was about 70 dollars. This movement later inspired the Telegram icon.

According to reports, Durov spends $1 million of his own money every month to run Telegram. To date, this platform has not generated a single dollar for Durov.

The number of monthly active Telegram users reached 100 million in 2016. Durov celebrated this success by throwing a big party in Barcelona.

Durov planned to raise 2 billion dollars from investors to run his company with the initial offering of a coin called “Gram” on the Telegram Open Network blockchain, But this project was stopped by the decision of the American court.

The popularity of Telegram is increasing every year. In 2021, the number of active Telegram users reached 500 million people per month. Telegram is most popular in Iran, Russia, Malaysia, Ukraine, India, Italy, Spain and Saudi Arabia.

Pavel Durov and Telegram

Founded in 2013, Telegram uses a secure end-to-end encryption method that makes it nearly impossible to decrypt messages. This feature, along with being free without a single ad or in-app purchases, has made Telegram take a significant share of the market from Facebook Messenger and other competitors; But this platform with 500 million active users per month is far behind WhatsApp with 2 billion users and Facebook Messenger with 1.3 billion users; But Durov says that the growth of Telegram is fast and most new users enter the world of Telegram through the suggestion of other users.

Our growth depends only on our users who recommend their friends to download and use Telegram. Every day, 350 thousand new users register in Telegram, without any effort on our part.

Durf attaches great importance to the principle of simplicity in the design of Telegram. In an interview with Wired in 2016, he said:

15 billion messages are sent daily through Telegram. Telegram’s main engineering team consists of 15 people, and obviously with this number, we had to automate many tasks and hand them over to scripts and artificial intelligence.

Telegram does not generate a single dollar of revenue for Durov, it has no permanent office and consists of a very small team. Before settling in Dubai, the Telegram team moved every two to four months. Dorf has announced that his team is ready to leave Dubai for a new destination if needed.

The company is so confident in the security of its proprietary protocol, called MTProto, developed by Nikolai, that it is offering a $200,000 reward to anyone who can hack it. It’s not an uncommon move to offer rewards to users who find bugs in products, But bounties of this magnitude are usually only reserved for critical bugs in widely used programs such as Windows.

According to Durov, no one has succeeded in hacking MTProto so far; But a Russian man who managed to find a serious problem in Telegram in 2014 was rewarded with $100,000.

Telegram is open source and allows any developer to create their own Telegram even for desktop computers. Today, most new messaging services, including WhatsApp, create applications for use in all situations and do not allow disparate developers to access their code. Of course, they can’t be blamed, because it’s difficult to maintain a centralized language and a single security model across several different applications. Meanwhile, monetizing a platform requires more planning than monetizing a simple paid app.

However, the VKontakte platform has gained a lot of success by allowing developers to build their own alternatives from it. More importantly, Telegram operates as a non-profit organization and does not intend to charge users for its services or sell their information to third parties or governments.

The company wrote on its FAQ page:

Telegram is not built for monetization and never accepts advertising or external investment. We are not looking to create a “user base”, but we are looking to create messaging for people.

In a post on Telegram, Durov announced that in 2021, to manage the costs of a platform with 500 million users, he will add a monetization section to Telegram. This section includes new paid features, paid stickers, and a platform called Ad Platform for commercial channel owners to generate income.

The main difference between Telegram and WhatsApp is its highly encrypted structure, open API for access by developers and other users, and its strictly anti-commercial manifesto. In a world where Facebook simply buys its competitors (including WhatsApp for a whopping $22 billion), Durov’s refusal to sell Telegram is truly admirable; And of course, we should not forget its many, completely free and artistic stickers.

Users are becoming more aware of the importance of their privacy and looking for ways to protect their data. For this reason, Telegram has not sold a single byte of data from its users to any third party since its launch, which has significantly increased the popularity of this platform.

However strict privacy policies and strong data encryption are not enough to attract users who have depended on WhatsApp for years. In order to be able to compete with giants like WhatsApp and Facebook in the suffocating market of messengers, Telegram needs to be better in every way: faster message transmission speed, more beautiful design, more features, and attractive features in every update. It is only in this way that it is possible to provide better privacy and security than WhatsApp to users who may not be sufficiently concerned about security.

Telegram’s strict policy on privacy and its non-cooperation with the authorities of countries to provide users’ information have made some people consider this platform dangerous and a place for terrorists and criminals to operate without supervision. In fact, in a new report published in June 2021, the German magazine Spiegel described Telegram as a dark empire, the most dangerous messenger, and the “equivalent of the dark web in the pocket” of users.

In 2016, Telegram blocked 78 public channels promoting ISIS ideology. Durov told Wired that the company is building tools to deal with malicious channels more effectively.

Is this enough? Probably not, as we are a small team and trying to hire more people to review reports and requests. We are gradually building a tool to automate this process. All this takes time, but we try to consider it one of our priorities. 

In response to criticism of Telegram’s 100% protection of user data, Durov said in one of his interviews during the Mobile World Congress:

The political solutions proposed against cryptography are not supposed to be effective against terrorism. If you block a site like Telegram, terrorists won’t even notice.

– Don’t give up until you have a really exciting idea. If you’re on the fence about a decision, go get some sleep and see how you feel about it when you wake up.

– In order to accomplish something, you must have enthusiasm, curiosity, and the ability to facilitate the process. The meaning of making it easier is to remove all the additions and focus completely on the essence of the matter.

– Success means being excited about what you are doing and focusing on it.

– If your mind is busy with several projects and you can’t concentrate well, go read books unrelated to business and technology. Give your mind a break and let it think about different topics in comfort for a while.

– People value social status too much. What difference does it make if you live in London or the countryside? As long as you have internet, there is no difference between the two. Life in the village is healthier and cheaper, But people prefer to live in expensive cities and pay a lot of money for rent. The only reason they are in that city is to have a job so they can pay rent and buy expensive appliances. This is a vicious circle.

– If you want your life to be simpler, you need to get rid of other people’s voices in your head. We are too influenced by people around us; Our relatives and friends and what they think about what constitutes success or what is good or bad. We must completely get rid of these influences. We should be able to be indifferent to what others think or say about our work. After this step, we should focus only on what we need.

– Spend more time in solitude and silence and be happy about it. People get addicted to being in groups. For example, in America, when two people sit together in silence, they feel awkward. Sometimes you need to have a space that is not influenced by anyone.

– The most important personality traits for a founder are love and passion for building, curiosity, self-discipline, passion, and persistence.

– What people don’t know about Renaissance men is that these people didn’t pursue several different professions at the same time. Maybe some of them were like this, But most of them would choose one area and concentrate on building it completely and then move on to the next project. We humans can do many things, but not simultaneously.

– When something happens that I can’t change, I prefer to think about the good sides of it because every event, even the most tragic ones, has good and bad sides. You just have to see them and focus on them. It’s useless to be upset about something you can’t change. You have to adapt to the situation and think about what can be done with what you have.

– Learn foreign languages ​​to deepen your understanding of the world and to open unprecedented opportunities for learning progress, and career growth.

– The value of money is overrated, because making and creating is more attractive than consuming, and the inner state is incomparably more important than the outer world.

– Where there is no competition, there is no progress.

– The value of communication and conversation has been greatly exaggerated. An hour alone is more useful than a week of talking.

Emphasizing secure communication and libertarian ideas, Pavel Durov is a person with independent thinking who has covered these ideas comprehensively in the development of the Telegram project. What do you think about this character and his moral qualities? Is the Dwarf Telegram a dark and dangerous empire or a glimmer of light in the insecure world of the Internet?