How Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook (2024)

Nikolai was also, however, a painfully awkward young man who never quite grew up. For years he remained unusually dependent on his mother, says Rozenberg. “She controls his nearly every step,” Rozenberg would later write, “where to eat, where to go, how many steps to walk from the railway station and which taxi to take.” Pavel was close to their mother in a different way. “I was a self-willed kid that often clashed with teachers,” he has written on his public Telegram channel. “My mom always supported me—she never sided with anybody but her sons.” As Andrei Lopatin, who met the brothers in math club competitions when he was 11, recalls of Pavel, “it seemed that he was a boy who wanted everything to be as he wished.”

Both brothers attended Saint Petersburg State University, where their father was a professor of philology, an academic discipline that encompasses the study of language and literature. Nikolai studied mathematics. Pavel studied philology, wrote poetry, and seemed generally to be following in his father's footsteps—until he started building websites. He created an online library where students in his department could share notes and other study materials, which became so popular that some students started skipping lectures altogether and memorized old exam answers instead, according to Ilya Perekopsky, a fellow philology student and friend of Pavel's.

Pavel then went on to create an online forum, where he called himself “the Architect” and instigated bull sessions about subjects ranging from libertarianism—he himself was an avid enemy of “socialist dictatorships” and a devout free marketeer—to whether it was possible for girls and boys to be friends. “He intentionally provoked discussions on very different topics,” says Perekopsky. Pavel also created pseudonymous accounts to provoke arguments and draw users in, Perekopsky says. “It's kind of marketing, right?” The forum took the university by storm. And Pavel found himself devoting more and more time to his websites.

Pavel's university portals eventually caught the attention of Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, a former schoolmate. Mirilashvili, who had moved to the US, had just seen Facebook take off there and thought something similar could work in Russia. With money Mirilashvili made working for his father, a wealthy Georgian-­Israeli real estate mogul, he and Pavel reimagined the university website as a tool for finding childhood classmates and friends. Mirilashvili also brought on board a Russian-­Israeli friend named Lev Leviev. In the fall of 2006, the trio became the cofounders of VKontakte—Russian for “in touch.” Pavel Durov initially coded the site on his own. With a simple design and blue and white color scheme, VKontakte looked like one of the many Facebook clones that were popping up around the world.

VK, as the social network came to be known, quickly took off. But bugs on the site multiplied along with new users, even after Nikolai Durov started helping his brother upon returning from a PhD program in Germany. When Rozenberg voluntarily sent a bug report to the Durovs, Pavel thanked him and eventually invited him to join the company as a systems administrator, under Nikolai. Pavel was now focused on management and design. Ilya Perekopsky, Pavel's friend from the philology department, also joined as deputy CEO. Rounding out the team was Andrei Lopatin, Nikolai's old companion from childhood math competitions, who came to work on VK's technical team.

It was an exciting time, Rozenberg says. “During the first years, I worked without holidays from the morning to late evening,” he tells me. Although the team mostly worked remotely, Rozenberg recalls several meetings at the Durovs' home. The brothers still lived with their parents. Their apartment was in a typical Soviet-style building on the northern fringes of St. Petersburg, an area made up of tall, nearly identical tower blocks. Often they worked till late. When Rozenberg left to catch the last metro home, the Durovs' mother would order Pavel and Nikolai to walk him to the metro station. As Rozenberg remembers it, that was the only way for her to tear them away from their screens.

VK was soon on the radar of other would-be world-eating social networks. In 2009, a small delegation from VK paid a visit to Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto. According to Andrew Rogozov, then VK's head of development, the trip was arranged by Russian-Israeli venture capitalist Yuri Milner's investment firm, which had stakes in both companies. As Rogozov recalls, Pavel Durov did not care much for Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, or Chris Cox, its chief product officer, who both seemed uninterested in a long dialog with the VK team. But in Zuckerberg, who invited Durov to his house for dinner that evening, Durov is said to have found a kindred spirit. Both understood the “outdated nature of the state,” Durov is quoted as saying in the 2012 book Durov's Code, by Nickolay Kononov, a journalist and former editor at the Russian edition of Forbes.