This guy humiliated Putin's secret police with a picture of a dog in a hoodie.
His name is Pavel Durov.
The Kremlin, Apple, and France have all tried to crush the app he launched next:
In December 2011, protesters filled Moscow's streets. Durov was running VK.
The government demanded he take down the opposition groups organizing them. He refused, in public:
"I mocked the prosecutor who handed me that demand and put out a scan of it, and next to it, a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out."
"That was very funny at the moment, but then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment."
Then he thought of his brother:
"I need to tell my brother what's going on. They're probably going after him. How do I tell him without betraying him?"
WhatsApp existed. In Durov's telling, it had zero encryption.
He ran Russia's largest social network and couldn't send his brother one safe message.
He made a promise:
"If I'm going to survive this, I'm definitely launching a secure messaging app."
He survived. But his days in Russia were numbered.
Then he began designing Telegram.
Telegram started as the one message he couldn't send.
What did you build because the thing you needed didn't exist yet?
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— Pavel Durov (
@durov ), founder of Telegram, on Lex Fridman's (
@lexfridman ) podcast