Telegram is one of the fastest growing and biggest social messaging apps in the world. It s popular all around the world, including in the United States, but almost nothing or very little seems to be known about the company, headquartered in Dubai, where we are now. It is designed, written and owned by Pavel Dharov, who began it some years ago, who almost never does interviews. We learned that the other day while talking to him, and he agreed to sit down and tell us about himself and his company, and we thought it d be definitely worth hearing. In this episode, Pavel talks about how he got to where he is today, why he started Telegram, and what it s like to work at BDC, the company he cofounded with his wife, Natalia, who is also a co-founder of the company. He also talks about his childhood in the Soviet Union, and how he ended up in the Silicon Valley, working at Google, and why it s important to have a company with someone who understands how to code. We hope you enjoy the episode, and share it with your friends and family! Timestamps: 1:00 - How Pavel got into coding 4:30 - Why he started the company 6:10 - How his family moved back to Russia 8:40 - How he got into programming 9:00 What is his background in the tech industry? 11:15 - Why did he start the company? 12:40 13:30 How he became a programmer? 14:00 | What does he like to code? 15:30 | How did he feel about coding? 16:10 17:40 | What do you like to do it? 17, what does he think it s better than his job? 18:20 Can he do it better? 19:30 + 13:40 + What are you working for me? 21:00 + What is he like? + + + c? ? + #1) 15, & + + #1? #2) + 2) #3) & 2) What s his favorite piece of advice? ) And 3) What is your favorite part of the piece of the movie ? + #3] ) & A little bit more? = 3)
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00:00:13.960Telegram is one of the fastest growing and biggest social messaging apps, text apps in the world. Popular all around the world, including in the United States, but almost nothing or very little seems to be known about the company.
00:00:39.900It's headquartered in Dubai, where we are now. It is run and owned, and the software is designed, written by Pavel Dharov, who began it some years ago, who almost never does interviews.
00:00:52.820It turns out he's in a very interesting person, extremely interesting person. We learned that the other day while talking to him, and he has agreed to sit down and tell us about himself and his company, and we thought it'd be definitely worth hearing.
00:01:04.060And with that, Pavel, thank you for joining us.
00:01:24.800I was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union, so it was a fun year to be born.
00:01:30.040And back then, I could witness the deficiencies of the centralized system we had in the Soviet Union.
00:01:38.520When I was four years old, my family moved to Italy, where I could compare what I saw in Turin, Italy, with what I experienced in the Soviet Union.
00:01:46.960And I thought the capitalist system, the free market system, is definitely better, at least for me.
00:03:08.040And then, when we got back to Russia, it was a little bit chaotic.
00:03:11.980The only reason we got back is my father got an offer to run one of the departments in the St. Petersburg State University.
00:03:20.200He's one of the famous scholars and writers dealing with ancient Roman literature.
00:03:27.060And that experience was very different, and I still enjoyed it, because in Russia, in the 90s, you had these experimental schools where you were taught everything.
00:04:16.600I was just the best student at my school.
00:04:19.040Also did some victories in local competitions in several areas.
00:04:25.940But we both were very passionate about coding and designing stuff.
00:04:32.180And because we brought this IBM PC XT computer from Italy back in the early 90s, we were one of the few families in Russia who could actually teach ourselves how to program.
00:05:29.100And it eventually became the largest social network, the most popular social network in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Kazakhstan and a bunch of other post-Soviet countries.
00:05:40.660That was a significant effort on my side because I, at a certain point, was the sole employee of the company.
00:06:05.040But that was a fun time when I was 21, 22 years old.
00:06:09.920And then the company grew, like I said, to somewhere about 100 million active users, which was a lot back then.
00:06:18.140It was, I think, 2012 or 2011 when we faced our first issues in Russia.
00:06:29.360Because, you see, I was still a big believer in these values of free market, freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.
00:06:38.940So when the Russian opposition started to use VK to organize large protests in Russia, where, like, almost half a million people would go and protest on the main square or some of the main squares of the city.
00:06:53.000We were requested to ban these communities on VK by the government, and I refused.
00:07:02.540So the government asked you to shut down communications between their opponents.
00:07:08.640Well, VK is a social networking platform.
00:07:10.860So they have this large public communities that anybody can join, anybody can read what people are discussing or what the administrators are posting.
00:07:24.360So it was a tool for these protesters to organize themselves.
00:07:28.680Back then, it wasn't about us, you know, siding with one side, with one part of the political fight or the other.
00:07:36.900But it was us defending the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly, which we believed was the right thing.
00:07:43.960But that didn't go too well with the government.
00:07:48.560And they were not too happy about that, I would say.
00:07:51.920And in a few years from then, in 2013, we had a similar situation, where, you know, you had these protests in Ukraine, where people, again, would use VK to organize themselves and go to the main square of the city and show their disagreement with the government.
00:08:13.440And we received a request slash demand from the Russian side saying, you have to give us the private data of the organizers of this protest.
00:08:27.360And our response was, wait, wait a minute, this is a different country.
00:08:31.540We won't betray our Ukrainian users because you asked us to do that.
00:08:36.940We decided to refuse and that didn't go too well with the Russian government as well.
00:08:43.580So at the end of that year, I had to make a difficult decision because I was offered basically a choice between two suboptimal options.
00:08:55.000One of which was, I would start complying to whatever the leaders of the country told me to do.
00:09:03.680The other one was, I could sell my stake in the company, retire, resign as the CEO and leave the country.
00:09:36.060People who have very limited knowledge of where Telegram came from, they would make these claims.
00:09:43.940They could be encouraged by our competitors who see it as an easy way to discredit us because, you know, Telegram is spreading like forest fire.
00:09:54.040Two and a half million users sign up every day and we're sort of a threat.
00:09:58.600So I'm not surprised there's this perception because our competitors, they spend tens of billions on marketing and they're known for using PR firms to also engage in campaigns like that.
00:10:13.080So how much do you spend on marketing?
00:12:07.700And it was also, in part, the mission of my previous company, BK.
00:12:12.800We wanted to pause this interview just for a minute to point something out.
00:12:15.700When the Russian government asked Pavel Durov to use his social media company to censor its political opponents, he refused.
00:12:23.160He said he would rather resign and leave the country where he was born than participate in something like that.
00:12:29.580Such was his commitment to free speech.
00:12:32.020Now, you've got to compare that, what he did, what Pavel Durov did, to what Mark Zuckerberg did or Praag Agarwal, the guy who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought it.
00:12:40.420But both of them have collaborated with governments to censor people, and that's shameful.
00:12:47.960So we believe Pavel, when he says that his app, Telegram, will be a bastion of free speech because it has been.
00:12:54.540And we believe him because he's shown how committed to that he is.
00:12:58.120So we've decided that we're going to launch with pride our own Telegram channel to give one more avenue to reach people with our content free from censorship.
00:13:05.960So if you're on Telegram, we ask that you would subscribe to our new channel by searching for our username listed below.
00:13:21.680So the idea for Telegram came when we were still based in Russia, because at some point we had this very stressful situation where armed policemen would come to my house, try to break in, because I refused to take down this opposition groups that I mentioned earlier.
00:13:46.220And I realized there is no secure means of communication.
00:13:50.060I realized I want to tell my brother what's going on to coordinate whatever we want to do.
00:13:57.040And every tool to communicate I could use was not really secure, not encrypted.
00:14:06.920So I thought, hmm, it could be a good idea to actually come up with a decently encrypted messaging app.
00:14:14.260And my brother, being the genius that he is, he was able to create this encryption standard that we're using up until this day with minor changes.
00:15:11.360Why didn't you stay in any of those places?
00:15:14.460Oh, because the bureaucratic hurdles were just too difficult to overcome.
00:15:20.100Now, I was bringing the best in class programmers in the world to these places, and I was trying to hire them from a local company.
00:15:33.160And the response I got in places like Germany, for example, is that, no, no, no, you can't hire people from outside of the European Union,
00:15:41.700because you should first run some newspaper ad in the local magazine or whatever, and then for six months nobody responds from the engineers that are available inside the European Union and Germany.
00:15:57.500Then you're allowed kind of to hire outsiders, and I thought it was a crazy idea because...
00:16:03.540Why didn't you just say they were illiterate refugees?
00:16:08.040Well, because we didn't consider ourselves refugees.
00:16:10.100We were, you know, very successful people.
00:16:30.220In San Francisco, we really thought it would be the place for us to be in because all the tech companies are there or around San Francisco.
00:16:40.100And there were two things that happened that made us think twice.
00:19:04.240To write code for them or to break into Telegram?
00:19:07.440They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app, you know, on the client side.
00:19:16.680And they were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into the Telegram's code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors.
00:19:30.620Would allow the U.S. government to spy on people who use Telegram?
00:19:34.840The U.S. government or maybe any other government, because a backdoor is a backdoor, regardless of who is using it.
00:24:27.340So in the time that you've been here, there have been a number of wars and threats of war, precursors to war.
00:24:37.080Have you had any pressure from the government here?
00:24:39.540Honestly, any pressure from the government here to reveal a backdoor into Telegram or to ban anyone or to make any changes to your business?
00:25:35.140If there was a group of people who was promoting violence, there was terrorist activity that was spreading violence in some parts of the world, publicly posting things that any decent human being would disallow or wouldn't want to be posted, we would help them.
00:25:58.020Well, in some other cases where we thought it would be crossing the line, it wouldn't be in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people's private correspondence, we would ignore those.
00:26:15.180Can you give us an example of a request that you thought crossed into censorship and spying, violating people's privacy?
00:26:22.700Well, there's a, I would say, a very funny story related to your home country.
00:26:30.700After the events of January the 6th, we received a letter from, I believe, congressmen of the democratic side.
00:26:41.760And they requested that we would share all the data we had in relation to what they called this uprising.
00:26:53.640And we checked it with our lawyers and they said, you better ignore it.
00:26:58.820But the letter seemed very serious and the letter said, you know, if you fail to comply with this request, you will be in violation with the U.S. Constitution or something like that.
00:27:15.240So they wanted data on people who voted for the other guy in the election?
00:27:18.600Well, they wanted the data of people, yeah, who were demonstrating in Washington or wherever they were doing.
00:27:32.460What was funny about it is two years, exactly two, sorry, two weeks after that letter, we got another letter, a new letter from the Republican side of the Congress.
00:27:48.720And there we read that if we give out any data according to the previous request, we would be in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
00:28:00.440So we got two letters that said, whatever we do, we'd be violating the U.S. Constitution in a way.
00:28:10.740That was my understanding of these letters.
00:28:14.240From the same legislative body, both from the U.S. Congress?
00:28:19.360Well, the same way we respond to most such requests, we decided to ignore them because it's such a complicated matter related to internal politics in the U.S.
00:29:21.780That's what they make very clear, that if we fail to comply with their guidelines, so they call it, Telegram could be removed from the stores.
00:29:32.660Well, that would be not a small thing for you, right?
00:29:36.460Well, it won't be a small thing for us, because obviously a big chunk of the world's population will lose access to a valuable tool that they're using every day.
00:29:46.540But, you know, it will not also be a small thing for them.
00:29:52.660I believe there must be finding some compromise in such cases.
00:29:56.720But Apple and Google are not very compromising when it comes to their guidelines.
00:30:01.520If they believe some content is against their rules, they will see to it that all the apps that are distributed to their stores comply with these rules.
00:30:14.820Are any of those rules or do you interpret any of those rules?
00:30:18.400Do you believe any of them to be political in nature?
00:31:16.520And we still have to take some content down, at least in the version of Telegram that is distributed through their platforms.
00:31:23.160So there are a number of conflicts going on around the world right now, and that may accelerate.
00:31:32.140So would you expect that the number of demands and the intensity of those demands, the persistence of those demands, would increase as the wars become more intense?
00:31:49.040I think now we've reached a point where politicians and societies know what to expect from social media platforms and where the red lines are.
00:32:58.180So it's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent.
00:33:03.560But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is used in Telegram.
00:33:11.300For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides.
00:33:15.400We don't become prejudiced in this way.
00:33:19.160It's not that we are rooting for the opposition or we are rooting for the ruling party.
00:33:22.400It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone.
00:33:42.400That's in stark contrast to, say, Facebook, which has said in public, you know, we tip the scale in favor of this or that movement in this or that country.
00:33:52.860All far from the West and far from Western media attention.
00:34:01.480Well, I think that's one of the reasons why we ended up here in the UAE out of all places.
00:34:09.400So you don't want to be geopolitically aligned.
00:34:12.400You don't want to select the winners in any of these political fights.
00:34:19.340And that's why you have to be in a neutral place.
00:34:21.480But I think Facebook in particular has a lot of reasons, apart from being based in the U.S., for doing what they're doing.
00:34:33.280I think every app and platform plays its own role.
00:34:38.340And we believe that humanity does need a neutral platform like Telegram that will be respectful to people's privacy and freedoms.
00:34:48.640Maybe from a political perspective, it seems like the most provocative thing Telegram does is offer something called channels, which seem sort of ready-made for organizing groups of people.
00:35:02.020Can you explain to viewers who aren't familiar with them what a Telegram channel is?
00:35:06.120Yes, so Telegram channel is a one-to-many broadcast tool that allows people to quickly disseminate any message to millions of people.
00:35:19.560So there's a channel, people subscribe to it.
00:35:22.520It's a one-way communication, meaning a channel can be used by, say, a president or a head of state.
00:35:32.160And everybody else will not be able to send a message to the president, but the president will be able to send a message to all of the people who subscribe to his channel or her channel.
00:35:43.440So the point here is, channels are so easy to use, and they're so deeply integrated in the messaging user interface that they became extremely popular.
00:35:59.140So it's a very familiar form for a lot of people.
00:36:03.020And since we launched channels eight years ago, I believe a few other apps, popular apps, followed in our footsteps and copied that feature as well.
00:36:14.480Not nearly as advanced as it was we have, but it shows that it's a really high-quality and demanded feature that the world needs.
00:36:25.800I think it's interesting, and you don't have to answer any of these questions if you don't want it, if it's too personal, but you're the owner.
00:36:59.160The reason I tried to, you know, stay away from venture capital money, at least at the early stages of our development, is because we wanted to be independent.
00:37:11.240And we knew that our mission and our goals are not necessarily consistent with the goals of funds that could be investing into us.
00:37:24.560And also, for me, it was never about money, right?
00:37:26.960So, I have a few hundred million dollars in my bank account or in Bitcoin since 10 years ago, and I don't do anything with it.
00:37:36.600I don't own any real estate, jets, or yachts.
00:37:43.520I don't think this lifestyle is for me.
00:37:47.600I like to focus on what we are doing with Tilgrim.
00:38:04.100Well, because for me, my number one priority in life is my freedom.
00:38:08.140And once you start buying things, first, it will tie you down to a physical location.
00:38:15.580In my view, it's my personal view, I don't have nothing against people who are buying real estate, but in my personal view, it would be like this for me.
00:38:23.980And the second reason is I like to stay focused on what we do at Tilgrim.
00:38:29.200So, I know that if I buy a house, I buy a jet, something like that, I would be spending time on trying to make it nice.
00:38:48.860For me, I would rather make decisions that would influence how a billion people communicate rather than choosing the color of seats in the house that only I and my relatives or probably a bunch of my friends will see.
00:40:01.780We didn't give anyone ownership or voting control or anything like that.
00:40:05.860Because we also believe in efficiency.
00:40:09.060I think that having myself as the sole owner, director, and product manager for this extensive period of time in the company's development allowed us to move faster.
00:40:22.180How could you be the only product manager?
00:40:25.220Are you still the only product manager in the company?
00:45:49.180And they don't like to use inferior things.
00:45:53.180That's why whenever you have a person who started to use Telegram and they're there for a while and they start to discover all the features, all the speed, the security, the problems, everything that we have.
00:46:08.880They don't want to go back and they start inviting their friends, recommending them, you should really check this app out because it's so much better than everything else.
00:46:19.120And also because people realize that whatever messaging apps they're using right now, they're like five, six years behind.
00:46:27.480They're copying what we did six years ago.
00:46:30.860And that's not a very high quality copy that they make of our features.
00:46:43.380There are a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to Telegram from other apps.
00:46:48.540So one of the things we learned when Elon Musk bought Twitter is that the intel agencies, not just U.S., but a bunch of other countries, the usual suspects, were all over the company.
00:46:59.720I mean, some of them were present working at the company.
00:47:02.280They had access to the direct messages.
00:47:04.100You can just imagine, well, you know because you run one.
00:47:06.780But the wealth of data flowing through would be of great interest to governments.
00:47:13.840Does that make you paranoid that you'll be penetrated?
00:47:17.000I mean, I assume governments would like to know what's going on sort of privately on Telegram.
00:47:24.120Well, there's definitely a lot of responsibility that we have on our shoulders.
00:47:28.540And I wouldn't say we are paranoid, but I think it makes sense to stay prudent and not being too accessible, not traveling to weird places.
00:48:10.140I can go, but, you know, it's too much attention like I've described before.
00:48:15.020Yeah, because at some point if you run something like this, you're a player in world politics.
00:48:19.740I mean, whether you want to be or not, don't you think?
00:48:22.700We definitely don't want to be a player.
00:48:24.280We want to be a neutral platform that is impartial and doesn't take any side.
00:48:32.280But you're probably right that there's some role we have to play.
00:48:36.400Well, not taking a side is the one thing you're not allowed to do, right?
00:48:40.480I mean, aren't you required to take a side in the modern world?
00:48:44.660I think that's a big problem because I think that kind of attitude can result in our world becoming a more dangerous place.
00:48:54.860Because at the end of the day, we all have to try to understand each other and try to get closer to each other in terms of getting to know the positions of the other people, even though they're drastically different from our own positions.
00:49:13.220And that's how we get to some compromise and move forward.
00:49:17.000If we're strictly divided and everybody is required to take a side, we can't take a side because we are this platform that people should use to collaborate and to find common ground and hopefully to move forward.
00:49:35.520If we lose that, we can end up in a much more dangerous place.
00:49:39.880How often do you intersect with the National Security Agency, NSA?
00:49:51.720And I ask that as someone whose texts were read by them.
00:49:54.120So I know that they're very active in this world.
00:50:22.540I could read something in the newspapers about, you know, my phone being penetrated with Pegasus or something like that.
00:50:31.280I have no idea whether it's true or not, but this is the only source of information I can have about me personally being of interest to any of the secret agencies.
00:50:45.160But you've got to think, even though you haven't done an interview in seven years-ish, you know, it's widely known by people who are interested in who you are and your role in this.
00:50:55.760I mean, you've got to think you're under just crazy amounts of surveillance, wouldn't you think?
00:51:01.200So, you know, it would sound funny, but I assume by default that the devices I use are compromised.
00:51:11.240Because you will still use an iPhone or an Android phone.
00:51:14.580And, you know, after experiencing what I experienced in the U.S., I have very limited faith in platforms developed in the U.S. from a security standpoint.
00:53:02.920I think some new secure hardware communication devices will be created in a similar way that now we have hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrency.
00:53:29.540I do believe that, you know, the world develops in cycles.
00:53:36.080And if things seem to go in one direction today, doesn't mean that tomorrow they will go the same direction.
00:53:45.540I also feel that at some point people will get tired of what they experience today and they would decide to, you know, move to some other direction.
00:54:00.720So it's, I've seen it after COVID, for example.
00:54:05.160During COVID, you had a lot of restrictions.
00:54:07.940Also on social media platforms, you, on most social media platforms, you were not really allowed to express doubt in relation to lockdowns, vaccines or masks.
00:54:22.560And at some point I could feel like the sentiment changed.
00:54:29.400People started to feel very, very tired and sometimes angry with the fact that they were not allowed to express their opinions.
00:54:37.580Particularly after the end of the pandemic, a lot of people started to be even more skeptical about the restrictions in their freedoms that they experienced during the pandemic.
00:54:56.620What was your position as a business owner during COVID?
00:55:02.080Did, you must have come under pressure to censor opinions on lockdowns, vaccines, masking.
00:55:56.560During the pandemic, we, I think, were one of the few or maybe the only major social media platform that didn't take down accounts that were skeptical in relation to some of these measures.
00:56:15.160So why are you not famous and treated as a hero in the United States?
00:56:21.640Shouldn't there be a parade in your honor?
00:56:23.380If you're, if you're the only social media platform not to take down what turned out to be true or to some extent true, certainly more true than the CDC guidance, I mean, why weren't you Times Man of the Year?
00:57:40.480You could see Axe doing, trying a lot of things.
00:57:44.240Some of them will turn out to be mistakes.
00:57:47.380Some of them will work, but at least they're trying to innovate.
00:57:50.700That's something we didn't have outside of Telegram and a few other companies in this industry for the last 10 years.
00:57:57.840What you saw from the big players, they would rather copy the proven models, the features that apps like Telegram launched and just scale them on a larger audience.
00:58:13.980These features will be pale reflections of what we built, but this was the way those companies operate and still operate.
00:58:22.700What Axe is trying to do is in line with what we are building, innovation, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going.
00:58:38.860Those are all exciting things, and I think we need more companies like that.
00:58:44.260I don't know if it's good for humanity that Elon is spending so much time on Twitter making it better, but it's definitely good for the social media industry.
00:58:53.960When you see the guys who run these other companies, do you know them, and do you ever talk about freedom of speech?
00:59:04.120I mean, if you're running, you don't have to answer, of course, if you don't want, but if you're into Mark Zuckerberg.
00:59:08.820Yeah, we met with Mark more than 10 years ago.
00:59:14.720I was still running VK, and I told them, I told Mark and his colleagues about our app platform.
00:59:43.280I remember him asking me whether we were planning to start something on a global basis, on the global level, like go for international expansion.
00:59:57.540I said, no, and I asked him whether he was going to try to capture more of my domestic market, where I was working on.
01:00:09.100And he said, no, and we both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks.
01:00:15.920So I'm thinking I shouldn't go into business with Mark Zuckerberg?