Pavel Durov: belief

Transcript context

…You actually have been staying out of the public eye for the most part. You’ve done very few interviews, you’re pretty low-key, but your brother is in another level. He’s been staying out of the public eye. What’s behind that? Part of it is his natural modesty. He doesn’t need to do it. He doesn’t feel this urge to show off, brag about stuff. I tried to avoid it as well, but at a certain point I realized that me being too private, too secretive becomes a liability because it creates this void, this emptiness that people and organizations that don’t like Telegram very much are willing to fill with inaccurate information and they’re willing to spread the narratives about Telegram, which can result in strange situations, some of which we discussed earlier. For example, this French investigation. Yeah, I’ve gotten to know you more and more and there’s a deep integrity to you that I think is good to show to the world. There’s a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company, so it’s important to some degree for you to be out there to showing your true self. So we should say that also you didn’t mention, but you were a programmer from an early age. You started coding at 10. First things you built are a video game at 11, and then eventually 10 years later, 21, you programmed the initial versions of VK single-handedly. Can you talk to me about your programming journey that led to the creation of VK? What was the VK stack? Is it PHP mostly? How did you figure out how to program websites, all of that?…

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