Pavel Durov

“And in Russia, they just could never beat VK for, like, a combination of, like, slightly political reasons, but also I've seen interviews with Zuckerberg where he's like, Dude, they're engineers. These are like the most brilliant mathematicians ever, and they'…”

“Telegram would be a multi-billion dollar startup. But again, there's no outside investors and there's no he'll never sell. So, you know, it's, nobody knows the real value.”

“And he basically self-funded it for a long time. Like he just put like fifty million of his own money into like doing it. He's like, there's no ads, there's no whatever.”

“He did a crypto token back when crypto was really hot, and he raised over a billion dollars for Their crypto coin. But then the SEC came after him and was like, this was basically like you were selling equity. Like you called it a token and as a utility, but l…”

“He is the sole director, equity holder, and he's the sole product manager. He works directly with every engineer and designer himself. He has no HR. He only recruits people through something called contest.com, which is a contest platform where he puts up engi…”

“He's got 30 full-time employees. So he's got 30 employees running a service that a billion people use all around the world”

“This guy's worth about fifteen billion dollars. So he's the richest expat in Dubai. He's one of the, you know, top 150 richest men in the world.”

“He had offers to sell 10% at a thirty billion dollar valuation. He turned it down. So he turned down three billion. Then they came back and said, we'll buy 10% out of forty billion dollar valuation. So four billion dollars. He turned it down, and he said, I do…”

“He's refused to sell any equity in the company. He took about a billion dollars of debt, but he never sells any equity. It's just him and his brother own the whole thing.”

“Pavel Durov was on Lex Freeman and talks about how he goes for four-hour swims, because he does his best thinking when he's swimming.”