Pavel Durov

I said, I'm not sure.

What's Facebook?

So we met.

Since he graduated from American University two years before that, he showed me Facebook.

I thought, well, I can already have all of this technology, but it's valuable to know which elements I should get rid of in order to scale this thing and have millions of users.

This is also something people don't appreciate that sometimes in order to move forward and have more success, you have to get rid of things, including technology.

Getting rid of features is super important.

Yes.

Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user.

The existing users will be happy.

They will be praising you.

They will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated.

if you're only relying on the feedback of existing users.

So as a result, I started the website called VKontakte or VK.

It means in touch in Russian.

Initially to solve my own personal problem, I graduated the university that same year and I wanted to be in touch, remain in touch with my ex-classmates from the university and the other fellow students.

And of course, as a 20-year-old, I wanted to meet other people, including good-looking girls.

So I started to build it from scratch.

For that one, I thought, I'm not going to use any third-party libraries, modules, because I want to make it as efficient as possible.

I was obsessing over every line of code.