Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile
While he is soft-spoken, his rebellious humor has gotten him in trouble, as he will be the first to admit.
.. Then there was Victory Day in 2012, when Russia celebrates the defeat of the Nazis. He posted on Twitter that “67 years ago Stalin defended from Hitler his right to suppress Soviet people.”
It created an outcry at a time of rising nationalism.
Mr. Durov grinned. “It was a disaster.”
.. His main interest was developing a social network. A friend who studied in America showed him Facebook, then in its infancy, and he learned from it.
“Some things like the layout of the early VKontakte was very influenced by Facebook,” Mr. Durov said. “Otherwise it could take ages for me to build, and I was not a professional designer.”
He also recruited fellow linguistics students to build a database catering to the post-Soviet university system, a step he said gave VKontakte “a tremendous competitive advantage.”