Telegram founder: "Freedom of speech" is his mission and he considers Musk as his comrade-in-arms

Author: starzq ； Source: Web3Brand

When I discussed the TON ecosystem with Yan Xin last week, he recommended that I must watch the interview of Telegram founder Pavel Durov with Tucker Carlson this year (a rare 3-hour face-to-face interview). After watching it, I can deeply understand Telegram’s mission and the value of TON to Telegram, and why he wants to bullish the TON ecosystem, because TON is indeed an indispensable part of Telegram.

So I read this interview again, and indeed I had a deeper understanding of Telegram and Ton:

• Pavel Durov's growth experience made him pursue freedom all his life, and he also hoped to create a platform so that others could feel freedom;

• Telegram's mission is to create a platform that allows users to "express freedom";

• Ton's value to Telegram: Ton is almost the only way to build profitability under its values, safeguarding Telegram's mission of "freedom of speech" and helping its sustainable development.

Below is the essence of the interview I compiled, and some background information / Comments / The analysis of TON is divided into 5 parts, Enjoy

1. Pavel Durov’s growth experience (elite family, centralized → capitalism, genius boy, experimental school, computer programming, Russia-Ukraine conflict, defending freedom of speech) prompted Pavel to go out and pursue freedom

2. The birth of Telegram, based on a lean and efficient small team (the leader of various global competitions) to develop excellent functions, brought rapid tap water growth

3. Pavel Durov started a life like a digital nomad, and finally chose Dubai as Telegram’s headquarters

4. To remain neutral, Telegram There are no external shareholders, but with an operating cost of hundreds of millions of dollars each year, a profit model based on protecting user privacy must be explored. This is what TON means to Telegram.

5. Some interesting points: receiving contradictory demands from the US government, the greatest pressure comes from Apple and Google, how to deal with surveillance, and secure hardware communication equipment.

1. Pavel Durov’s growth experience (elite family, centralized → capitalism, genius teenager, experimental school, computer programming, Russia-Ukraine conflict, defending freedom of speech) prompted Pavel to go out and pursue freedom.

• Pavel Durov was born in a scholar's family in the former Soviet Union in October 1984 (a very interesting year) and witnessed the various problems of the Soviet centralized system with his own eyes;

• 4 When he moved to Italy with his family at the age of 10, he observed everything there in stark contrast to his experience in the Soviet Union, and believed that capitalism and the free market system were better than authoritarianism. The education he received in Italy also made him a part of Europe.

• The time in Italy was full of fun for him and his brother

• Nikolai Durov was a child prodigy at the age of 10, solving cubic equations live on Italian TV in real time, which was considered impossible in Italy at the time;

• When Pavel first started school, he didn't know a word of Italian, and his teachers didn't think highly of him. As a result, he became the second in the class at the end of the first school year, and won the first place in the second school year. This experience made him like the competitive environment and firmly believe that as long as he worked hard, he could achieve excellent results.

• Russia in the 1990s was relatively relaxed (after the collapse of the Soviet Union): Because his father was a famous scholar and writer who studied ancient Roman literature, he was invited to be the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics at the Faculty of Language and Literature of St. Petersburg State University. Russia is different from Italy, but Pavel enjoyed it because some experimental schools in Russia in the 1990s would educate you comprehensively. He learned six foreign languages ​​and the mathematics courses were also very professional.

• Pavel's family brought back an IBM PC XT computer from Italy in the early 1990s, and they became one of the few families in Russia that could teach themselves programming. Pavel was also very keen on programming. He launched an electronic library called Durov.com on the Internet for students majoring in humanities, and created an Internet forum of St. Petersburg University on SPBGU.RU, inviting teachers and students from different departments to discuss. Then, after graduating from university at the age of 21 (September 2006), he founded VK, a company that was called the "Russian version of Facebook". VK developed very quickly. In December 2008, it surpassed its competitor Odnoklassniki and became the most popular social networking service in Russia, with a value of $3 billion.

• VK began to encounter a series of problems in 2011. Because of its adherence to "freedom of speech", VK became a tool for Russian protesters to organize rallies, rejected the Russian government's (Putin) demand to close opposition communities, and adhered to the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly it believed in. Similar protests took place in Ukraine in 2013, and Pavel again refused the Russian government's request to provide the personal information of protesting Ukrainian users. At this time, Pavel faced a dilemma: to succumb to the Russian government or to sell his shares. Durov chose the latter and left Russia in 2014, yearning for more freedom and unwilling to be commanded by others.

• Carlson slammed Mark Zuckerberg and Prague Agarwal (former head of Twitter operations) for working with the government to censor public information.

• Additional 1: In 2011, when the government demanded the removal of opposition politicians' pages after the Duma elections, Pavel Durov tweeted a photo of a husky in a hoodie with his tongue sticking out, with the text "This is my reply" to let the world know that he would not succumb to pressure.

• Additional 2: In March 2022, Pavel said: "From my mother's side, I can trace my family tree back to Kiev. Her maiden name was a Ukrainian surname (Ivanilenko), and to this day we have many relatives in Ukraine." This may be one of the reasons why Pavel defends the personal information of Ukrainian users.

Pavel Durov's family are all elites

• Father: Valery Durov (Valery Durov), a famous scholar and writer who studies ancient Roman literature, was the secretary of the party organization of Leningrad State University during the Soviet era. In the late 1980s, he was invited to teach Russian in Italy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was invited to return to the Faculty of Language and Literature of St. Petersburg State University as the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics

• Mother: Albina Durova (Albina Durov), from Kiev, Ukraine, teaches at St. Petersburg State University.

• Brother: Nikolai Durov, a genius proficient in mathematics and computers

• In 1996, 1997 and 1998, he won gold medals in three consecutive International Mathematical Olympiads (IMO);

• From 1995 to 1998, he won three silver medals and one gold medal in four consecutive International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI);

• As a member of the ACM team of St. Petersburg State University, he won the championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) finals for two consecutive years in 2000 and 2001. Only 10 people in the world have achieved this achievement;

• In 2005 In 2000, he obtained his first doctorate from St. Petersburg State University and his second doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2007.

• Pavel Durov's right-hand man, serving as CTO of VK and Telegram

Additional:

• Pavel Durov's growth experience reminds me of CZ Zhao Changpeng. CZ's parents are both teachers, and his father is a professor, which can be regarded as a highly educated family. Shortly after CZ was born, his father was labeled as a "bourgeois senior intellectual" and was sent down for a period of time.

• In the late 1980s, 12-year-old Zhao Changpeng immigrated to Vancouver, Canada with his parents. When Zhao Changpeng went to college, he chose McGill University in Montreal to study computer science, which started his programming career.

• CZ is also a typical "world citizen". On average, he changes the city he lives in every five years. He has lived in mainland China, Canada, Japan, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, and Singapore.

• CZ’s sister Jessica Zhao is also very good. She was once the managing director of Morgan Stanley.

2. The birth of Telegram, based on a lean and efficient small team (the best in various global competitions) developed excellent functions, bringing rapid tap water growth

• During his last days in Russia, because of various experiences (armed police tried to break into his house), Pavel realized that every communication tool was not safe, but he needed to contact his brother, and came up with the idea of ​​​​developing a messaging application with good encryption function. This is the current Telegram (iOS version launched on August 14, 2013)

• Pavel was mainly responsible for the writing of the user interface. His brother designed Telegram’s encryption algorithm  MTProto protocol (still in use today), which led to the trend of "message applications with encrypted functions".

• The Telegram team is very lean and efficient

• Based on the original TON white paper, it can be found that a small half of Telegram's engineering team are former VK employees, and they are also leaders in various global competitions (International Collegiate Programming Competition ACM ICPC, International Mathematical Olympiad IMO, International Collegiate Data Competition, Top Coder Competition)

• The engineering team has only 30 people, but all of them are very capable, just like the Navy SEALs

• There is no HR department, and a platform (contest.com) was created to hold engineering competitions (monthly or bimonthly) to select the best engineers and send offers

• Pavel He is the sole owner, director and product manager of the company. He came up with most of the features and worked directly with every engineer and designer responsible for implementing them (Carlson was shocked)

• The secret to staying lean and efficient: independence

• He once told Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder) that 20 people were enough for Twitter. Jack agreed, but the problem was that once large-scale layoffs began, Wall Street would be uneasy, and these employees would be retained only to maintain the stock price.

• So Elon needs to privatize Twitter before he can lay off 80% of the employees

• So what are the benefits of going public? Pavel thought for a while and replied that it can raise funds more efficiently. So if we use tokens to raise funds, we can also achieve high efficiency and create a new evaluation system instead of the current short-term quarterly financial report system.

• Telegram has 2.5 million registered users every day, and the growth rate is very fast. There is no marketing investment, and it grows completely spontaneously, with 900 million monthly active users.

• Jobs also has a similar view. I don’t know if it has influenced Pavel: *We believe that if we continue to launch excellent products to customers, they will continue to take out their wallets. （*Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets）

• Pavel believes that the fundamental reason is that "Telegram is a good product. Users are smart and like to use good things, not inferior products. Once users have used it for a while and discovered all the features of Telegram, including speed and security, they will not leave and will invite their friends to join. These people will realize that the communication tools they used before are 5-6 years behind the times."

• The paper airplane logo comes from such an anecdote:

• Pavel gave a vice president of VK a large bonus, but the vice president replied that what was important to him was the mission, not the money, so the two of them folded the money into paper airplanes and threw them down the building