After his departure last month from the position of CEO at VKontakte (VK.com), the social networking site he founded, Pavel Durov announced on Facebook that he has established his “temporary HQ” in an undisclosed “Central European” country.
Durov is now working on a new mobile social network, which should launch in autumn of this year. With a team of 12 engineers, he is “looking for a permanent base to work from,” he said, in a country “that will allow us to develop our projects with privacy and freedom of speech in mind.”
“To give you an idea of our preferences, we dislike bureaucracy, police states, big governments, wars, socialism and excessive regulation. We like freedoms, strong judicial systems, small governments, free markets, neutrality and civil rights,” the young Russian entrepreneur explained.
Announcing that Russia had become “a country incompatible with Internet business,” Durov recently proclaimed his forced resignation a politically motivated move by Kremlin-friendly VK shareholders, the UCP fund and the Mail.ru Group – an assertion that was promptly denied by UCP. Durov was “fleeing lawsuits not politics,” the Russian fund stated.
Durov also claimed that he resisted pressure from Russia’s secret service, the FSB, to disclose personal information about Maidan activists a few months ago. Ironically, he had previously been accused of collaborating with the FSB in their surveillance of anti-Putin members of his social network in early 2012.
Will VK survive without Durov?
According to the Russian daily Izvestia, which cites several sources close to the social network, eight or nine VKontakte developers have left the company to follow Durov.
What’s more, Izvestia’s sources noted that the people who have stayed at VK are dissatisfied with the behavior of the new management and are also considering leaving. If they do so, another source added, VKontakte will be “down more often than it is working.”
On Facebook, Durov describes his team as six ACM champions and six winners of other programming contests. “These guys made it possible for Telegram Messenger to gather 40 million registered users worldwide within 8 months of its launch. Several members of this team, including my brother, were crucial to making VKontakte what it is today — the only social network that defeated Facebook in an open local market.”
