Durov is an intriguing and polarizing figure, who has had his fair share of pits and peaks in just 40 years of life.
Pavel Durov was born in October 1984 in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg—though it was Leningrad back then, before the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in 1991.
Their creation, VKontakte (also known as VK), launched in September of that year, and amassed a million users just eight months later. Less than a year after that, their user base swelled to 10 million. By December 2008, Durov was the proud operator of Russia’s most popular social network.
