Pavel Durov

coming up with all the warnings and the announcements, coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well.

That was an incredible experience that

gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.

Exactly.

It's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager and product manager inside Telegram because I will not...

take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members.

If somebody gives me, oh, I need three weeks to do that, I always reply, well, I built the first version of VK in just two weeks, why would you need three weeks?

It seems like something you could

make real in these three days, three weeks.

What are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from these three days?

And you know, the team knows me and that's why we are able today at Telegram to move at a very good pace of innovation.

Every month we're pushing several meaningful features.

I think out-competing everybody else in this industry in terms of what you can do within a short time frame.

So yes, that experience was invaluable.

As for the stack, I started from PHP and MySQL, Debian and Linux, but very soon I realized

I need to optimize this.

I started using Memcached.

Apache servers were not enough anymore.

We had to set up Nginx.

And my brother was still living in Germany, so he couldn't help me much for the first year of building BK.