🔥 I love the Telegram team. Just yesterday, I suggested 10 improvements to our apps. We had mockups ready the same day, and today, we already have fully functional builds with these features implemented 😳

🆕 These updates include 5 improvements to gifts, 3 to hashtags, the ability to add media to a message after it’s been sent, and the ability to view the time a message was edited 🔜

⚡️ All in just one day. It’s no surprise that the Telegram team has shaped how most messaging apps work today, contributing to nearly every innovation in communication 😒

➕ Turning 40 today. Exactly 18 years ago I launched my first large project and grew it from zero to 100,000,000 users 👨‍🦳

Should I tell you how it happened in another “life stories” post? Feel free to vote in the meaningful poll below 🔽

#lifestories 🐶

Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.

I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.

I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.

And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.

The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”

This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.

That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.

In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.

I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.

On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.

I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.

That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.

I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.

4️⃣0️⃣ To celebrate my 40th birthday today, we’ve added 3 new limited edition gifts — 🎂🗓 🕯

They come from one of my favorite emoji packs — BirthdayCollection 🕯

Enjoy! 🍸

🏷 Telegram has launched the most affordable way for businesses to authenticate their customers’ phone numbers — just $0.01 per code, anywhere in the world.

📥 Now businesses can save millions by sending verification codes to their users right through Telegram. This method is much cheaper, faster, and more secure than traditional SMS verification. We call it Telegram Gateway 🔗

💵 Phone number verification is a multibillion-dollar industry. Telegram alone has been spending around $10M per month to authenticate all the users who sign up and log in to our service.

🏅 We’ve made this investment so that others won’t have to. Since we’ve already verified the phone numbers of nearly a billion people, other businesses can avoid high verification costs. And if the phone number they want to verify is not connected to a Telegram account, we won’t charge at all.

🎁 Our prices are unprecedentedly low, so I’m not sure if Telegram Gateway will become a significant revenue source for us. But we hope that this initiative will make the world more efficient, reducing costs and prices for many services worldwide 🤝

My favorite eatery in Paris suggests I get some inexpensive lawyers 😄

😎 If I had to give one piece of advice to people in their 20s who want to build something great, it would be: “Never drink alcohol.” 🍸

🤮 I haven’t drunk alcohol in nearly 20 years, but I’ve seen many successful people ruin themselves with it. Alcohol clouds your mental clarity and intuition for days after consumption. While it might lift your mood temporarily, it’s like taking out a loan — you’ll pay it back with interest. The short-term pleasure brings long-term misery 😵‍💫

🍔 I know it’s hard not to yield to social pressure: humans have evolved to copy the behaviors of those around them. But the habits of the majority are self-destructive — most people around us drink alcohol, eat fast food, and have passive lifestyles. And that’s fine. If you want to achieve something extraordinary, however, you’ll boost your chances by keeping both your mind and body healthy 😼

👀 Big day today — Telegram has taken its first step toward becoming a video platform 📺

🤬 Until now, videos in channels were displayed in exactly the same format they were uploaded, often requiring users to wait and download gigabytes just to watch a short clip ☹️

▶️ With today’s update, however, Telegram servers will compress popular videos into multiple quality options and optimize them for streaming. Now, when you watch a video, Telegram automatically selects the most suitable quality based on your connection speed ⚙️

👏 As a result, watching videos on Telegram is now a far smoother experience! Our October update includes more features that redefine messaging — but I’ll let you fully focus on (spooky) videos this Halloween 🎃