The Discreet Techie on the Radar

Everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and Elon Musk from X. But there isn’t much known about Pavel Durov, the founder and owner of messaging app Telegram. He has been an enigma, just like his creation. Of Russian birth, his first creation was a social networking site called VK, which he operated from Russia. An advocate of free speech, it was not long before the Russian authorities were at his doorstep. Leaving his country of birth, Pavel created Telegram in 2013. He remained out of the spotlight, operating from Dubai, eventually emerging from the shadows after seven years to tell his story and distance himself from the specter of his birth country.

- Jennifer Paldano Goonewardane

From the US government allegedly trying to surreptitiously hire one of his engineers to an attack on the streets of San Francisco after meeting with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to being met by FBI agents at the airport, Pavel Durov has felt the pressure of running Telegram as an independent platform. Born in Russia in 1984, Pavel was somewhat of a prodigy growing up, studying in Italy until the fall of the Soviet Union when his family returned to Russia for his father to accept an assignment at the Saint Petersburg State University. He and his brother Nikolai were passionate about coding and designing, and returning to Russia with an IBM PC XT in the early 1990s opened the door for the siblings to teach themselves programming. His older brother Nikolai is a world-renowned mathematician and programmer who helped Pavel cofound VK and Telegram.

At 21, he launched VK in Russia, his version of a social networking app similar to Facebook, which became the most popular social networking site in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and several former USSR countries. VK was his baby,both the boss and the employee who did the coding and designing and dealt with customers, a platform that grew to 100 million users.