Happy 40th Birthday to Pavel Durov, the visionary behind Telegram

Happy 40th Birthday to Pavel Durov, the visionary behind Telegram. I wish him all the best in the decades ahead. One of the smartest most focused people I know. Speaks eight languages. He has such a cool story, grew up in Italy, moved to St Petersburg for university, and started a student forum that became VK, the leading social network in Russia. When asked to send over data of Ukrainian protestor organisers in 2014, he refused, so was kicked out of VK, and started Telegram, initially as a means to communicate securely with his brother.?

We met by chance when I was 20, in East London in 2014, both leaving the Europa Tech Awards event early. Outside the venue, we shared a taxi to Mayfair(West London). Didn’t know who he was, despite being an active early user of Telegram. Impressed by the speed/sleek design, and being a mobile developer/designer myself.? Gave him my contact as my phone was out, he asked if I was attending the Founders Forum the following day, as we had a mutual friend, Badoo/Bumble Founder, Andrey Andreev who was a major sponsor of FF that year.?

Moved to London the year prior(2013) after finishing boarding school in Surrey and decided to skip university to focus on building technology.? Had read an article the year prior about Founders Forum, whilst working at Wellington Partners, a leading Venture fund, and dreamt to attend it someday.?

So I found out where the Founders Forum was held, at the Grove in Hertfordshire, an hour's train ride then taxi out of London, put on a suit, and smart shoes, and sneaked in through the golf course. Pavel was pleasantly surprised to see me there, where we spoke for hours. I was running Ratemash, one of the leading UK social networks at the time with several million users, though below the $500m threshold to be invited to the forum.

The two of us were joined briefly by Zaryn Dentzel, who started Tuenti, a popular Spanish social network(Telefonica acquired). Zaryn mentioned Ehssan Dariani, who I met months earlier through the DLD community, who started StudiVZ, the German Social Network(who turned down 7% of FB to be acquired). Recall it being the day of the opening match of the 2014 World Cup, in Brazil. 13 July 2014.

In the years preceding this, had been developing an encrypted peer-to-peer video conferencing app which grew to several million users which I had sold the year prior(2013), called Chatride. The company that bought it took the technology and turned it into a webcam site like Onlyfans, given that was most profitable.? Social networks, messaging, and communication tools were something I was deeply interested in and passionate about. He was very impressed by my work with Wikileaks and had offered a job months prior, to Edward Snowden who had recently relocated to Moscow.?

Also, had used Telegram regularly at the time, as a friend Jos who working at Ian Osbourne’s firm(Michael Bloomberg’s previous chief of staff), advising Telegram on strategy. Jos had asked me for my thoughts on the app earlier in the year(2013). So, was quite timely, had some usability/ui/ux improvements and ideas to offer to Pavel, he shared which ideas made sense or didn’t. What was super impressive is how fast the turnover and implementation of features by the team was. ?

Discussed with Pavel later in the year(2014), over dinner, about building an app together, of an idea he had. His idea was to allow event group organisers to share their group activities(soccer/picnic/party etc), which users would swipe if they wanted to be a part of. Then the activity organisers would swipe if they wanted this user to join their activity. If it was mutual, users would be added to activity group.?

Over dinner at an Italian restaurant at Berkeley Square, he gave me a pen over dinner and asked me to draw an icon for it, as well as thoughts on a potential name fo it. Despite being a good idea, I didn’t have the bandwidth at the time to build it, may build it as a mini-app on TON/Telegram, powered by Unit, in the future.

Quite funny, Andrey Andreev(founder of Badoo/Bumble) surprised us at that dinner, borrowing the waiter’s clothes as a prank. Coincidentally, Andrey’s team had offered to acquire my social network(which I turned down) just months before this. Their idea was to work together on a project, which was what became Bumble. Pavel invited Igor to that dinner, who built the newsfeed at VK, and was a lead engineer at Telegram who I played football regularly with, over the years, in London and Dubai.?

Through the course of the following year in 2014/2015, through some fortunate events, ended up working closely with the Founders Forum, as one of two tech engineers, together with Paul Egan who was CTO,? rebuilt the Founders Forum technology powering the community/event, as well as helped with a newly set up incubator/accelerator being ideated at the time called Founders Factory. Ended up building the original tech for Grip Events, a networking tool launched by Founders Factory, which has facilitated over 70m meetings and raised $14m USD.?

When I attended the Founders Forum the following year(2015), this time as someone who helped put it together. Pavel told me, as a friend, that I needed to build a world-changing service and earn to be there, not to be there as an organiser.?

The Founders Forum had a firm requirement at the time, needing to have started a $500m company to attend, and I was simply there building the technology powering the event.?

Really excited and confident for a future where Unit is powering the economy for hundreds of millions of people, similar to how Telegram does the same for communication. As well as creating the evolution of the? Founders Forum, inviting leading Web3 founders too. Just a matter of time. ?

He also told me that it wasn’t possible to work on more than a single project at a time effectively, as I was balancing working on 2 or 3 apps and businesses at the time.?

This led me to develop the fundamental framework for Unit, over a 2500km bike ride from Malaysia to Laos with my father, Paul, who I started working with as a co-founder soon after this in Dec 2015, given his strong business and engineering background.?

Really looking forward to the growth of mini-apps and the bot platform on Telegram, I got a glimpse of what was coming in 2015, inspired by Steve Jobs releasing the iPhone in 2009, a phone without buttons. It’s amazing that 10 years on, people are starting to realise the power of building on Telegram with mini-apps, and no doubt that TON will be a success.?

Invited Pavel to join for Africaburn just outside Cape Town in 2018, having talked about going to Kazantip/Burning Man before. The Africaburn camp was organised with my close friend Marek(3rd engineer at Ethereum/lead developer at Polkadot) and a group of 80 friends including many of the early crypto visionaries like Gavin Wood(cofounder/CTO Ethereum), Peter Noszek(co-founder Token 2049) and lots of other great people/friends. Unfortunately, he had to cancel the day before due to Telegram being banned in Russia that week. ?

Despite myself being in the middle of the South African wilderness, I managed to find some internet about a two hour drive outside from the africaburn camp, to help to coordinate VPN servers to set up proxys so Telegram could still be accessible in Russia. Asked over 100 friends to support in this effort.? He kindly paid me back for the server cost in Bitcoin. Connected Pavel with Werner Vogel on Telegram, CTO of Amazon/AWS, who unfortunately wasn’t so helpful.

Was in New York City the following week, and caught up with Werner asking him why he couldn’t help, he said he didn’t want to wake up with one of his engineers dead in Russia, for helping support.?

Excited for the future of Telegram and specifically TON. Connected Pavel and Vitalik Buterin in 2017, and thought some collaboration between Telegram and Ethereum would be cool. However, Ethereum likely couldn’t handle the scale that Telegram was operating at.

Ethereum had just survived a brutal bear market and grew in the bull market from $8 at the start of the year to over $1400 by year-end, and having been in touch with Liam Horne(Optimism founder/ ETH Global founder/Vitalik’s roommate at Uni of Waterloo) and Vitalik through the Peter Thiel foundation in 2014 and the first blockchain hackathon ETHWaterloo in 2017, thought crypto and blockchain functionality to Telegram would be cool.?

Telegram ended up raising $1.7B, which was amazing for their blockchain protocol in 2017/2018! However, due to over-regulation and bad government policy, they were forced to shut it down and return the funds due to pressure from the SEC. Was friends with some of the major funders of this, and participated myself. Was really sad about this ruling as it most definitely slowed down the growth and progress for the industry and societal change, that this technology will bring.?

So glad that the new version of TON is looking bright. We have built a TON bridge for the Unit Network, really looking forward to millions of businesses fundraising using TON, and accepting products/services with it, as well as using TON as a reserve asset.?

Pavel is one of the few people that I asked to be my mentor in 2015, he has been super supportive in some of the most challenging, pressing, and stressful of times.? Offering clear advice and guidance in the right direction, both professionally and personally. Started posting on Telegram stories in the past year which he was very supportive about, and encouraged me to post more, so others can learn about me, which is inspiring me to do this now.?

He said if I ever needed product or business feedback, he’ll be there.? Likely the reason that I stick away from alcohol. When living in London, everyone my age, got drunk/wasted every weekend so it gave me the confidence at 19/20 to be comfortable with being more mindful of health/well-being, over just fitting in due to social pressure.?

When I asked why he doesn’t invest in companies, he said that he prefers to have agency over being able to steer projects in a clear direction, which an investor usually, can’t do so. When I was raising capital for what became Unit Network in the years that followed, in 2015, he didn’t invest but was kind to loan capital to support.

He mentioned to me once over a late night walk in London in 2014 about how if he had $30k when he was starting VK, how things would have been so different and the challenge of leaving VK a platform he worked so hard on(with two breakdowns) and spent the past 7 years at the time building.?

Was very active anonymously on social media and forums in 2014 till this day defending Pavel/Telegram, when people criticised the platform, doubted the team’s intention, and was being confident that he would build something better after VK(similar to what Steve Jobs did with Next/Apple). ?

I’m excited for the future of Unit, as it would allow the next entrepreneur to more easily seek capital, without being exploited or having challenging terms.?

Would suggest all to read this book called Rework, from the creator of Ruby on Rails, which he recommended as the only practical business book that provides real practical insights which can be applied. He said he may write a book like that someday.?

Grateful to have the @michael handle on Telegram thanks to knowing the night before, that the feature would go live in 2014, using the web portal built by my friend Igor, one of the lead engineers. Told as many friends as I could to reserve a cool username, many didn’t care, glad that some did (usernames being sold up for millions on Fragment currently).?

This picture was taken at the Token2049 conference, organised by my friend Peter, where Pavel and Tether CEO, Paolo Ardoino announced a new partnership supporting UDST on Telegram/TON. Going to be great!

Excited for the months and years ahead! Here is to TON and UNIT both being huge successes!