Pavel Durov

But then how do you start something that large?

I didn't have any prior experience of creating a project of that scale, which would involve everything.

Before, I would reuse some existing solutions.

Here, I wanted to build from scratch, so I called my brother.

He was a postdoc student in

germany at that time in the max planck university and i asked him what should i start from and he told me just build a module to authorize users just don't not not just to log in you know yeah not even to sign up just to log in

Because you can pre-populate the database with credentials and emails and passwords.

It doesn't really matter.

But once you see that you can type in your password and email and you're in and it tells you hello using your name, then you will have a clear understanding where to go from there.

that's one of the best advice i've ever got in my life it's it worked perfectly by the way i started to build it and before i knew it i would have there on the website photo albums private messages this guest book we used to call the wall back on aka and i guess in the early days of facebook

We'd end up building something even more sophisticated than Facebook at the time, with more features.

I had a girlfriend at the time, I asked her, we need to somehow come up with a database of all Russian schools and universities and departments and subdivisions.

She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying, which departments do you have exactly at this point?

We need to know.

Or reaching out to the Department of Education, both in Russia and then in Ukraine and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan and other countries where VK ended up to be the largest and most popular social network.

So we did a few things that were quite unique at the time.

And for the first almost a year, I was the single employee of the company.

I was the back-end engineer, the front-end engineer, the designer.

I was the customer support officer.

I was the marketing guy as well.