Durov Pavel
Date of birth: October 10th, 1984
Place of birth: Leningrad (St. Petersburg), USSR
Company: Telegram LLC
Position: СЕО
Pavel Durov is famous for creating VKontakte social network and Telegram messaging app. However, this isn’t entirely true. Various teams of IT experts engineered both of these projects. Unquestionably, Pavel played a vital role in the creation of these projects, but he doesn’t assign all the credit to himself alone.
Durov also took part in launching Start Fellows charity fund. The fund seeks to help young IT entrepreneurs participate in scholarship programs. VKontakte currently supports the fund.
Digital Fortress is another company belonging to Pavel Durov. It was created for speed-torque startups. By the way, Digital Fortress’s first product was Telegram.
Telegram
Telegram is an instant text, photo, video, media and link exchange app. The messaging service’s fundamental feature is secure correspondence. Pavel’s brother, Nikolai, created the MTProto tech especially for the messenger. It allows for the use of several encrypting protocols simultaneously. Pavel Durov is a rather eccentric and assertive character, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that he announced a competition aimed at hacking Telegram’s personal correspondence data. No one has been able to succeed yet.
In an interview Durov said that he got the idea to create a service for secure communication when his house got raided by Russian special forces in 2011. At the time, he wasn’t able to tell if his calls or texts to his brother Nikolai were intercepted by third parties.
Today, the messaging app is available for practically every operating system and device. Moreover, Pavel recently claimed that the number of Telegram’s active monthly users has crossed the 62-million mark.