Launched 13 years ago, Telegram has grown into a major social media platform, boasting 1 billion monthly active users (roughly a third of Facebook’s, a platform 9 years its senior).
Telegram achieved this with a lean, fully remote team.
Much about Telegram is wrapped in mystery, and the company has not disclosed its exact staff size. In 2023, Fortune reported a company spokesperson saying Telegram had “an agile core team of around 60.” Its CEO, Pavel Durov, has said the engineering team is closer to 30.
Telegram’s LinkedIn page keeps the mystery: “Telegram has a ‘No LinkedIn’ policy,” it states, adding that individuals claiming to be past or current employees never worked at Telegram.
Valued at USD 30 billion, the company doesn’t seem to have a traditional office — though it does have an operational base in Dubai.
Super efficiency
In 2024, Pavel Durov told journalist Tucker Carlson that he employed only “about 30 engineers” to run his platform. He did not disclose the full size of Telegram’s team — what he did say was that he has no HR department, spends no money on marketing, and that he was still the only product manager.
“I think that having myself as the sole owner, director, and product manager for this extensive period of time and the company’s development allowed us to move faster,” he declared. “I still come up with most of the features; I still work directly with every engineer, every designer who is implementing these features. I’m running this company because I enjoy it. I’m the only product manager because I think this is the way I can contribute.”
When asked how big his HR department was, he replied: “Zero. Well, you could say it’s me.”
“We, in a way, decentralized that [the hiring process],” he explained. “We started a platform where we host contests for engineers — it’s actually contest.com, we have the separate platform for that — and we select the best of the best engineers as a result of the competitions that we organize; we hold them every month or two months. So, after a series of these competitions, we select the best of the best of the best, and then they maybe could join our team, which is just about 30 engineers. So, it’s really compact, the team, super efficient. It’s like a Navy SEAL team. This is how we operate; we don’t need an HR department to find super talented engineers.”
When Carlson asked why other companies didn’t do it like him, Durov said most tech companies aren’t lean because of pressure from public markets. He recalls asking Twitter’s previous leadership, Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, why they didn’t run the company with about 20 people, and Dorsey agreed it was possible in theory. But mass layoffs would spook Wall Street, which would read them as a sign something was badly wrong with the company — and that’s why they had to keep the unnecessary headcount.
Carlson then summarized: to keep the stock price high, the company had to run inefficiently. Durov added that, to Dorsey’s credit, Musk had to take Twitter private before he could make those cuts.
Durov also claimed to spend “zero dollars” on marketing Telegram. “We’ve never spent anything on acquiring users for marketing purposes; we’ve never promoted Telegram on other social platforms in any way,” he stated. “All of our growth is purely organic.”
Lean team, lean life
Durov seems to apply the same leanness to his personal life: in the interview, he claimed he doesn’t own any real estate, jets, or yachts — despite being a billionaire. “I don’t think this lifestyle is for me,” he said. “I like to stay focused on what we do at Telegram. I know that if I buy a house, buy a jet, something like that, I will be spending time trying to make it nice. This will require a lot of time and effort.”
How big of an advantage is Telegram’s lean team?
According to Fortune, Telegram’s lean team is not necessarily an advantage for a social media platform. Investors value Meta’s tens of thousands of content moderators for creating a safer environment.
Telegram’s biggest weakness is, in fact, its insufficient moderation. In 2024, Durov was arrested by French authorities at an airport near Paris. The arrest was part of an investigation into allegations that Telegram’s insufficient moderation made it a hotbed of criminal activity, and that it failed to cooperate with law enforcement. BBC’s article “Telegram: ‘The dark web in your pocket’” exposes the many criminal activities taking place in the app’s groups.
How Telegram started
Telegram’s origin story is pretty remarkable and date back to the 2000s in St. Petersburg, when Pavel Durov co-founded VKontakte, or VK, inspired by Facebook. Durov was fortunate to have a gifted elder brother, Nikolai — a multiple winner of international math and programming competitions — who helped develop the site. It was also handy that he had a billionaire friend, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, who became the largest shareholder.
In only a couple of years, VK became Russia’s top social media platform.
In January 2014, however, Durov announced that he had sold his 12% stake in the company. In a statement, he wrote, “What you own, sooner or later begins to own you.” While the sentence hints at his personal philosophy, he had likely been forced to sell his share.
By then, he was already working on a new project: Telegram.
In April that year, Durov was dismissed as VK’s CEO. He later said the company had been taken over by allies of President Vladimir Putin and implied that his ousting was due to his refusal to hand over the personal details of users to Russian authorities.
With USD 300 million from the sale stashed in a Swiss bank, Durov left Russia with his brother and devoted himself to the new platform. He was in charge of the user interface and features, while Nikolai was responsible for the encryption side. They’re both quite reclusive, with Pavel’s interviews on Tucker Carlson being a rare exception.
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