Secret to Telegram's success | Pavel Durov and Lex Fridman

The core engineering team is about 40 people. This includes back end, front end, designers, system administrators.

Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won't get enough work to do. And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. They're still there. They're still getting the salary, but they don't do anything. And if they don't do anything, more often than not, they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work, but by finding problems that don't exist within the team. And that can disrupt the team and the mood inside it even further. Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things. In our case, you know, we have tens of thousands of servers around the world, almost 100,000 distributed across several continents and data centers. If you try to manage this system manually without automation, you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient and interestingly much more reliable as well. And more resilient to the changing geopolitics, to the changing technology, all of that. Because if you automate the distributed aspect of the data storage and all the compute, then that's going to be resilient to everything the world throws at you. I suppose if you have people managing all of it, it becomes stale quickly. Yes, humans are attack vectors. And if you have a distributed system that runs itself automatically, you have a chance at increasing the security and speed of your service. This is what we've done with Telegram while also making it much more reliable because if some part of the network goes down, you can still switch to the other parts of it.

The way we designed Telegram is we never wanted to have any humans, any employees have any access to private messaging data. That's why since 2012, when we've been trying to come up with this design, we always invested a lot of effort into making sure that nobody can mess with it. Like if you hire an employee or any of the existing employees, they can't break the system in a way that would allow them to access messages of users. And then of course we launched end-to-end encrypted messaging that is even more protected but it has certain limitations. So you still have to rely on encrypted cloud. So an interesting engineering challenge was how you make sure that no point of failure can be created within your team or outside.

No. Never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted. You can extract all the hard drives and analyze it, but you won't get anything. It's all encrypted in a way that is undecipherable. That was very important for us. That's why we can say with confidence there hasn't ever been a leakage of data, any leak of data from Telegram, not in terms of private messages, not in terms of contact lists.