Pavel Durov

And they put together the first customized data engine, which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached because it was, first of all, more specialized, more low-level.

A large chunk of it.

Like, for example, the search, the ad engine, because VK had targeted ads, they built that.

It was very efficient what they did.

Eventually, the private messaging part, the public messages part.

At some point, we realized there are very few websites online that load faster than VK.

Nice.

I remember in 2009, I went to Silicon Valley and I met Mark Zuckerberg the first time and some of the other core team members of early Facebook.

Remember, Facebook was just four or five years old then.

And everybody kept asking me, how come even here in Silicon Valley, BK loads faster than Facebook?

Everything seems to

appear instantly on your website.

What's the secret sauce?

That was one of the things that made them very curious.

As one of the core technological ideas, we prioritize speed.

We think that people can notice the difference, even if it's just a 50-million-millisecond difference.

The difference is subconscious.

It also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive, but also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure, the expenses.

Because if your code executes faster, it means you need fewer computational resources to run it.

So there is no way you can lose in making things faster.