Telegram founder and free speech advocate Pavel Durov was born on Oct. 10, 1984, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and demonstrated an early knack for computer science, culminating in the entrepreneur establishing several successful online social media platforms.
While studying at Saint Petersburg State University, Durov became inspired by the success of the Facebook social media site and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg — eventually starting the social media platform VKontakte (VK) in 2006.
VK is a platform similar to Facebook but geared toward Russian speakers, and it is one of the largest social media platforms in the world.
A picture of Pavel Durov as a teenager. Source: Cointelegraph
The meteoric growth of the platform eventually attracted the attention of state regulators, who pressured the company to censor the platform and comply with government requests to provide user information.
Durov refused to comply with these requests out