The Billionaire Who Started Russia's Facebook

Name: The Billionaire Who Started Russia's Facebook
Uploaded: 2024-05-18T01:29:47+00:00
Duration: 37 s
Channel: Sam Parr
Description: In this conversational excerpt, the speakers discuss Pavel Durov, the founder of VK, often dubbed the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. They highlight how VK…

18 May 2024 · 1 min

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In this conversational excerpt, the speakers discuss Pavel Durov, the founder of VK, often dubbed the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. They highlight how VK rapidly copied Facebook's features, sometimes within minutes, earning admiration from Facebook's own leadership for its speed. The dialogue then shifts to the Russian government's intervention, demanding user data to suppress anti‑government speech, which forced Durov to relinquish control of his platform. The segment underscores themes of tech rivalry, rapid innovation copying, and state censorship pressures in Russia.

Chapters

Pavel Durov. This guy's basically the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. It's even more impressive than Zuck. So when he was young, he built the Facebook of Russia and it was called VK. And in an interview, Zuck was talking to Sam Altman and he even said, God, the only ones we could never beat were the Russians. It was insane. We would make a change and literally like 12 minutes later they would have that update on their side. Like if we moved a pixel, they moved that pixel. And he's like, these guys were just the most prolific copiers we'd ever seen. So he creates VK, it becomes the Facebook of Russia. He won, but he had to sell it because one day the Russian government approaches him and says, we need some information about all your users and what they're saying. He's like, uh, what?
Why?
And they're like, well, there's been some users who are saying some anti-government things. As you know, that's not how we do shit around here. So give us some names and we'll make sure that they get quiet.
And while you're at it, drop your pants and bend over and cough.