The Billionaire Founder Who Sacrificed Everything

Hey y’all — how much would you give up for the sake of your principles?

Pavel Durov was forced to give up his first company, his home country, and now even his ability to travel freely.

All because he’s built apps like Telegram and VK that let people talk to each other privately.

In the last few years he’s had to deal with:

• Being locked in solitary confinement for 4 days in France despite not being charged with anything

• The FBI trying to pay his engineers to install a backdoor in Telegram

• Kremlin-aligned investors forcing him out of his first company, VK and causing him to flee the country

And that’s just the beginning. He’s still not allowed to see his family outside of France without adhering to strict conditions.

If it all seems too wild to be true, it’s because it should be. But, through it all, Pavel has remained committed to his values of prioritizing personal freedom for the people who use his products.

I spent this week going down the rabbit hole on his story and, honestly, it’s inspiring.

I put it all together in this video:

The Billionaire Who Sacrificed Everything For Freedom

Pavel’s Early Life

Pavel saw what a difference living in a free society was like after his family moved to Italy when he was four.

They moved back to Russia after the Soviet Union fell, but Pavel brought an IBM computer with him.

While most kids were adjusting to post-Soviet life or getting access to a telephone for the first time, Pavel was building websites, hacking passwords, and questioning authority.

VKontakte’s Rise & Fall

By 2006 he had launched a simple social network called VKontakte (or VK, for short) to keep in touch with his college classmates after graduation.

It was invite-only to start, but rapidly spread to 170 million users across the post-Soviet world.

VK was modeled after Facebook but with radically different values:

Instead of raising outside capital, courting advertisers with advanced targeting based on user data, partnering with governments, and building a giant team Pavel wrote the code, designed the site, and bootstrapped the company himself along with his brother and two co-founders.

And by 2011 VK started attracting attention not only from users, but also the Russian government. Realizing he was in for a fight, Pavel took on an outside investor for the first time, raising $800 million at a $2 billion valuation.

Despite the police raiding his apartment and VK’s offices, Pavel stayed true to his values and refused to hand over user data. He didn’t want VK to become a place where people couldn’t trust their data would stay private.

As the intimidation tactics continued, Pavel’s two co-founders cashed out — selling their equity to another investor in a direct sale at a slightly higher valuation of $2.2 billion. After this, Pavel only owned 12% of the company with the rest being owned by the investors.

This left him with limited influence to make strategic decisions, and with both of the investors having alleged ties to the Kremlin they began to push Pavel to comply with government demands for user data.

And in 2013, the FSB demanded that VK hand over data on Ukrainian protesters and opposition figures. Pavel’s refusal led to increased scrutiny and pressure from authorities, channeled through VK’s investors, and coincided with other aggressive investor moves against Durov, including lawsuits and attempts to oust him as CEO.

Eventually, Pavel saw no path forward other than to sell his equity in VK for $300M and flee Russia to live in short term rentals across Europe. He left behind his home in exchange for his freedom.

Enjoying the story so far? Check out the video I put together telling it in full:

Founding Telegram

Around this time, he also realized that every digital communication channel had government backdoors.

So he and his brother quickly built an encrypted messaging platform called Telegram — again building everything in-house, of course. It wasn’t a startup — it was a survival mechanism.

Pavel thought about setting up an HQ for Telegram in Silicon Valley but after learning the FBI had tried to bribe one of his engineers to install a backdoor into Telegram, and being mugged when visiting San Francisco, he chose to keep nomading across Europe instead.

And within just two years Telegram had tens of millions of users despite a $0 marketing budget.

Pavel’s commitment to privacy made Telegram the platform of choice for countries with strong online censorship like Russia, Iran, and China which only increased the attention on Pavel as well as government demands for user data.

But unlike WhatsApp or Signal, Telegram didn’t bend, even when Pavel had to shut down the app in certain countries.

Durov Detained

After ten years and over a billion users, even European governments started ramping up their attacks in August of 2024.

After being arrested spending four days in solitary confinement despite not being formally charged with a crime, Pavel, who became a French citizen after leaving Russia, was told Telegram had ignored judicial requests from the French government — which he disputes.

Telegram complies with the EU Digital Services Act, a standard channel which provides only IP addresses and phone numbers of criminal suspects when countries request it with justification.

Pavel claims France did not use this standard process for the EU until after his arrest.

Now, despite being released and still not being formally charged with anything, Pavel remains under France’s control.

He can’t travel freely. If he wants to visit his family and home in Dubai, he has to do so under strict conditions from the French government, who say their investigation into Telegram is in the “investigative phase.”

Pavel sees this as an intimidation tactic meant to pressure him into weakening Telegram’s encryption or allowing the French to have backdoor access (though he stressed that no one has asked him for that yet).

Instead he’s referenced a now-defeated French bill that would have banned encryption by requiring backdoors in all messaging apps as evidence of their interest in this direction, and criticized a broader European trend he described as governments pushing laws that quietly erode digital freedoms, often under the guise of “keeping people safe” or “fighting crime.”

For over 20 years, Pavel has devoted his life to building tools that helps others live freely. Ironically, this has proven to be at odds with governments worldwide and put his own freedom at risk.

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