On the occasion of the 18th anniversary of the launch of VKontakte, Pavel Durov shared in his Telegram channel a story about how the idea of creating a social network arose, what was the main goal, how much time he spent on programming and whether his brother Nikolai, a talented mathematician, helped him .
Image source: Pavel Durov/VK
In 2006, Pavel Durov, a graduate of St. Petersburg University, decided to create a social network for students and graduates. The idea came about after he realized it would be difficult to keep in touch with former classmates without a dedicated platform. Having set himself the goal of developing such a website in four weeks, he began to complete this difficult and ambitious task.
However, creating a full-fledged social network in such a short period of time turned out to be an overestimation of its capabilities, especially considering the decision not to use ready-made modules from third-party developers, but to write everything from scratch, from user profiles and messages to the development of a search engine. However, it helped that Durov had been interested in programming since childhood. At the age of 12, he was already creating web games with vector animation and sound effects, and at 13, he taught children older than himself the Pascal programming language at summer camps for programmers.
«How and where to start?” – Durov wondered. At that time, his brother Nikolai, a mathematician and programmer, lived in Germany and defended his dissertation at the Max Planck University in Bonn. Although Nikolay refused to help with writing the code, considering web development “beneath his dignity,” he gave advice to start with the code for user authorization.
This advice helped. Durov began by creating a login page that generated user sessions, allowing them to be identified, profiles displayed, and the ability to edit them. In September 2006, Durov threw himself into work, spending 20 hours a day writing code and eating one meal a day. His main diet was pasta. The world around us ceased to exist, since only coding was important then.
Durov strove to make every section of the project flawless, which slowed down the process, but allowed him to minimize the time for correcting errors. By October 10, 2006, he completed the beta version of the social network and called it “VKontakte”. The project took six weeks instead of the planned four, but the result was worth it. Users invited from Durov’s previous project – a student portal created since 2003 – began registering in the thousands and also inviting friends.
A few months later, Pavel Durov hired a second developer. By that time, the social network already had a million users, and seven years later, VK’s audience reached 100 million active users per month. However, in 2014, due to a conflict of interest, the VK board fired Durov. He left the company and plunged into a new project, which he gave the name Telegram.
Durov notes that the experience of creating VK became key for his career. At Telegram, he simultaneously served as a front-end and back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator and product manager, which ultimately allowed him to gain a deeper understanding of the social network. This experience taught him an important principle: there are no big problems—there are many small ones that seem daunting when combined into a single whole. “Divide a large task into parts, organize them in the correct sequence – and you will succeed,” Durov wrote in Telegram.