Pavel Durov

When I sold the remaining share of my first company, I had to do it below market price because I didn't leave Russia completely without any pressures, you know.

I reinvested the vast majority of everything in Telegram.

Telegram is an operation that is losing money for me personally.

I didn't extract more from Telegram than I invested in it.

I never sold a single share.

But I also didn't want to sell Telegram, so how do you reach a point when you're profitable without sacrificing your values?

One of the ideas we explored was a subscription model, but only for certain additional features.

We wanted to keep all the existing features free and just add more business-related tools or tools for advanced users that they would have to pay for, say $4 or $5 a month.

It was quite unprecedented at the time.

It wasn't considered a viable option for messaging apps to do that.

We launched the premium subscriptions for Telegram in 2022, and now we have over 15 million paid subscribers.

This is some very significant recurring revenue.

We would receive more than half a billion dollars from premium subscriptions alone this year.

And it's growing fast.

For that, we had to innovate a lot.

We included over 50 different features into the premium package.

And then how do you make an app that is already more powerful than any other messaging app on the market?

even more useful so that people would be ready to pay for this extra.

That wasn't easy.

That took a lot of effort.