Pavel Durov

Sometimes I would manage to get through to him through a call.

I would use an old school phone to call him.

with the wires.

I said, what do I do?

How do I install this thing called Nginx?

I'm not a Linux guy.

If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy, he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself.

But for the most part, I had to rely on just myself.

Having him there, though, helped.

when we started to grow fast and started to scale it.

Because at first you realize one server is not enough.

I need to buy another one.

Then another one and another one.

The database should be in a different server.

Then you have to split the database into tables.

Then you have to come up with a way to chart the tables using some criteria that would make sense that wouldn't break your user experience.

When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen of servers, surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect of it became impossible.

I remember asking him to come back.

He said, you need to help me with this thing.

It's starting to be really big.