Pavel Durov

I would go back to school during breaks, play with my classmates, and soon people started to lose interest.

None of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore.

I killed the game.

So after that, when I got into the scene at Petersburg State University,

It was quite boring just to study because it was too easy.

So I thought, what can I do there?

I created a website for the students of my faculty first.

I organized the creation of digital answers to all exams and digitalized version of all lectures, which was something very unique back then.

Remember, it was 25 years ago.

I would put together a website where I would publish all these materials and pretty soon it became super popular.

I opened a discussion forum there.

In a few years I expanded to the university with all of its other departments and then to other universities.

We ended up having

tens of thousands of users, just as a student's portal.

We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles, blogs, all of it.

It was quite successful.

And after I graduated the university,

One of my ex-classmates from the school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper, the main business newspaper of St.

Petersburg.

And he asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?