Pavel Durov

People who haven't had this experience of living in countries that don't have freedoms don't always realize how dangerous it is to gradually compromise your values, your principles, your freedoms, your rights.

public sector to stop increasing what they think should be the right size of government because today if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP it's

maybe as much or more than in the later stage of the Soviet Union.

So you have this disbalance where you have many more people representing the state as opposed to people trying to bring the country's economy forward by creating great products and great companies.

The startup field and my field, social media field, has been affected by it immensely.

There was one great startup in this realm in France in the last 10 years.

It was a location-based social network.

It was eventually sold to Snapchat.

But before it was sold, the founder asked me whether he should sell.

I told him never sell.

you have a great thing going, you have lots of users, you have organic traction in many countries.

And the first of this kind success story in France

But then he sold anyway in a couple of weeks.

And later I met him.

He's trying to do a new thing now.

I met him and I asked him.

I was trying to understand what went wrong.

And one of the things he told me about is that while he was trying to run his company,

competing with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, having all this pressure from investors, trying to hire the best people and persuade them to go to Paris.

And he did a great job, by the way, but while he was trying to do that, he got also attacked by some silly investigation, again, involving the data protection issues.