"It is strategically important not to trade the future for a short-term temptation," — Pavel Durov on the team, security, and money

Recently, Lex Fridman recorded a massive four-hour interview with Pavel Durov — the founder of Telegram. In their conversation, they discussed everything: freedom and censorship, the philosophy of minimalism, money, Bitcoin, and the future of technology. We have prepared a brief summary of the most striking moments from this podcast so you can quickly get acquainted with the key ideas and stories shared by Durov.

Discipline

I am just a human being; I experience emotions, but it is important to know how to manage them. Self-discipline prevents you from getting stuck in negativity: the solution comes through action.

Every morning: 300 push-ups and 300 squats, plus gym workouts 5–6 times a week. This is less about the body and more about discipline. Sometimes — an ice bath. The main thing is to build willpower.

I love the sauna with a cold plunge: brief discomfort yields long-term benefits. Alcohol has the opposite effect. Also swimming: my longest swim was five and a half hours. Sports cleanse the mind and increase efficiency. Without them, I immediately feel stress.

In terms of diet, I practice intermittent fasting, eat fish and vegetables, and have excluded meat for 20 years. I try to find the root causes of problems rather than suppressing them with pills. Manufacturers benefit from dependency, so I avoid them if possible.

Every day I ask myself: “Who benefits from me reading this?” Most news is manipulation. 

Strategically, it is important not to trade the future for a short-term temptation.

Programming and Video Games

I was not initially very interested in websites. When I was 10 years old, I didn’t even have access to the internet, but I loved video games. I had few of them, and this very scarcity pushed me to create my own — just so I would have something to play.

Sometimes we don’t realize it, but it is precisely scarcity that breeds creativity. Perhaps one of the reasons why so many good programmers came from the Soviet Union or from places where there was no access to modern technologies and entertainment is that we were not distracted by an abundance of entertainment. This doesn’t mean it’s bad — it’s just a fact that is rarely appreciated.

The Technical Side

I started with PHP, MySQL, and Debian Linux, later adding Memcached and NGINX. At first, my brother helped rarely — he lived in Germany. But as VK grew, he had to get involved, especially during DDoS attacks that coincided with negotiations over the sale of a stake in the company. Those were sleepless nights.

Later, my brother rewrote key modules in C and C++ — search and the advertising engine. Thanks to this, VK loaded faster than most websites in the world, even faster than Facebook. In Silicon Valley in 2009, everyone was surprised why our service worked so quickly.

Speed has always been a priority: even fractions of a second matter. If Telegram loads half a second slower, humanity will lose millions of hours. Therefore, I hire only those I am 100% confident in: one developer’s mistake can cost tens of millions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

Hiring a Great Team

When you manage to simplify a process and make it more efficient, it gives an incredible sense of satisfaction. Sometimes productivity growth is achieved not by hiring, but by firing: one “weak player” can slow down the entire team. Working alongside such a person demotivates strong specialists. Most often, the problem is not laziness, but the inability to concentrate.

My hiring philosophy is simple: competition leads to progress. The best way to select engineers is through programming contests that closely mirror real Telegram tasks. This is how we find strong candidates who are often long-time users of the product. This is much more valuable than hiring specialists from corporations like Google, where responsibility is blurred and a culture of endless meetings thrives.

Open Source

To prove security, reproducible builds are needed: the code on GitHub must match the app in the App Store and Google Play. Telegram is the only major messenger that has done this since 2013. WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage do not offer this, so it is impossible to verify their encryption algorithms.

Transparency is principled: “secret chats” in Telegram are truly secure, and there are no facts contradicting this so far. This approach requires exceptional specialists who create database engines, web servers, and even their own programming languages for the API from scratch. Yes, we use Linux, but otherwise, we strive to be as self-sufficient and protected as possible.

Money

Telegram was a loss-making project for me for a long time: I never extracted more from it than I invested. The goal is profit without sacrificing values. This led to the idea of a subscription for advanced features, while keeping the basic messenger free.

In 2022, we launched Telegram Premium. Now we have over 15 million subscribers and over half a billion dollars in annual revenue. The package includes more than 50 features, but they do not clutter the interface and remain “invisible” until needed.

There is also advertising — contextual, without using personal data. Yes, we lose up to 80% of potential revenue, but we preserve our principles.

We are experimenting with blockchain: we made it possible to own usernames via smart contracts and NFTs. We are developing the mini-app ecosystem: millions of developers create bots and services, accepting payments through Apple and Google. We take only a 5% commission to support growth and attract new users.

Bitcoin

I became a supporter of Bitcoin almost from its inception. In 2013, I bought several thousand coins for about $700 each, investing a couple of million dollars without much thought. When the price dropped to $200–300 the following year, many sympathized: “Poor Pavel, you made a mistake.” But I replied: “I don’t care. I’m not going to sell. I believe in this. This is how money should work: it cannot be confiscated or censored for political reasons.”

For me, Bitcoin is the highest form of exchange, and this applies to other cryptocurrencies as well. It was thanks to investments in Bitcoin that I could fund my life, rather than relying on Telegram, which has always been a loss-making project for me.

I am convinced that one day Bitcoin will be worth a million dollars. Governments print money endlessly, while Bitcoin is limited; its inflation is predictable and eventually stops. Bitcoin will remain, while the fate of fiat currencies is questionable.