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Read time: 2 mins 37 seconds
I went down a rabbit hole about the Telegram founder’s story this past weekend. It’s a pretty wild one.
Many of you have probably read that mega-viral news article about Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, saying he’s fathered over 100 biological children through sperm donations across 12 countries and plans to split his $6.6 billion fortune among all of them.
That's not even a top 5 craziest fact about Pavel Durov.
He once threw paper planes made out of money out of his office window and watched people fight for it in the streets below. A Russian SWAT team showed up at his apartment and he watched them through a security camera and didn't open the door. He got fired from his own company and found out from the news. He left Russia with $300 million from that business, a passport he bought from a Caribbean island, and zero property anywhere on earth. He built a billion-user app with 30 engineers and zero venture capital. He does 300 pushups every morning, doesn't drink coffee, alcohol, or tea.
Oh by the way, he's currently under criminal investigation by both France AND Russia.
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Here is the backstory.
2006. A college kid named Pavel Durov in St. Petersburg saw Facebook for the first time. He built Russia's version and called it VKontakte aka VK. It hit 1 million users in 8 months. By 2008, VK had become the biggest social network in Russia. Durov was 24.
Then the Russian government started making demands. The FSB (Russia's intelligence agency) wanted data on political protesters and opposition pages shut down.
Durov said no to everything. He even posted the FSB's demands publicly on his own platform.
In 2014, after refusing to hand over data on Ukrainian activists, VK's board fired him. He found out from the media. The company fell to Kremlin-connected oligarchs.
He left Russia with $300 million from the buyout fee and one takeaway:
If your system allows user data to be accessed, someone powerful enough will eventually force you to hand it over.
Durov built Telegram with a different approach.
His brother Nikolai (3x Math Olympiad gold medalist, two PhDs) coded the encryption from scratch. They split data across countries so no single government could compel access. Privacy was baked into the architecture.
He invested in the business with his own money and took zero outside capital. Ran the company at a loss for 11 straight years, without any monetization.
There are ~30 engineers behind Telegram and he hired them exclusively through coding competitions.
It worked. When WhatsApp went down in 2021, 70 million people switched to Telegram in 24 hours. By March 2025: 1 billion monthly users. When he finally turned on revenue (premium subscriptions, non-targeted ads, crypto), it hit $1.4 billion in 2024. $540 million profit. First profitable year in 11 years.
Then two governments showed up.
In August 2024, French police arrested Durov stepping off his private jet in Paris. 12 charges. Child exploitation. Drug trafficking. Money laundering. Not that he did these things, but that his platform made them possible and he refused to help stop them.
Telegram's privacy system had worked exactly as designed. It protected journalists in Iran and activists in Belarus. However, it also protected drug markets and child abuse networks.
Within weeks, Telegram started sharing user data with authorities. Requests fulfilled went from 5,826 in Q1 2024 to 22,777 in Q1 2025.
Then in February 2026, Russia opened its own criminal case against him. Charge: aiding terrorism. Max sentence: 15 years.
France wants him to moderate criminal content. Russia wants him to hand over encryption keys for surveillance. Both want more control and he said no to both.
Why does this matter?
Well… part of why I found Durov’s story so interesting is that it raises a question every founder should wrestle with before they are forced to answer it under pressure: what do you do when your core product principle starts enabling the exact thing you never wanted?
You build a product around a principle. That principle becomes your moat. Millions of people choose you because of it. Your brand, your edge, your reason for existing all stem from that one belief.
Then one day, you realize that same principle is enabling something terrible, precisely because the product is working as designed.
Do you compromise the principle? If you do, you risk losing the very thing that made you different, and your most loyal users may leave.
Do you hold the line? If you do, people may get hurt, and you have to live with the fact that your product is being used in ways you never intended. I have seen this tension across many consumer social and content platforms (e.g. NSFW content). At what point do you step in and moderate user behavior?
Durov held the line for a decade. Then he was arrested in France and changed course within weeks. Telegram went from fulfilling 5,826 data requests in Q1 2024 to 22,777 in Q1 2025.
I do not know what the right answer is, but I do know the worst time to figure it out is after the crisis hits. If your product is built on a principle that can cut both ways, it is worth deciding now where your line actually is.
When Lex Fridman asked Durov where he finds the strength to stand up to governments and intelligence agencies, he said: "Remind yourself that you have nothing to lose. They can threaten you with something, but what is it they really can do to you?"
Well, two governments are currently finding out.
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See you next week,
Leo
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