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The founder who runs a billion user company with 40 people (and no phone) Getty ImagesMost tech billionaires can’t function without their phones. Pavel Durov built a billion-user messaging app without one.

Pavel Durov, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Telegram, runs one of the world’s most valuable tech companies with just 40 engineers. His net worth is $17.1 billion and his messaging platform serves over 1 billion users and generates hundreds of millions in revenue. In a recent interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Durov revealed the extreme lifestyle choices and contrarian business strategies that power his success.

Silicon Valley tells you to hire fast and move faster. They say you need thousands of employees to scale. They insist constant connectivity drives innovation. Every single one of these “rules” holds you back. Durov proves it daily by doing the opposite.

I’ve studied hundreds of founders who break conventional wisdom. Most tinker around the edges. Durov obliterates the entire playbook. His approach reveals what happens when you combine physical discipline with ruthless business constraints.

Forget everything you think you know about building a tech empire. The real leverage comes from what you refuse to do.

Extreme discipline: How this billionaire runs a billion-user platform Start with physical discipline, not your inboxDurov begins every morning with 300 push-ups and 300 squats. No phone. No notifications. Just raw physical effort before anything else touches his mind. “The main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline,” he told Fridman. “If you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.”

MORE FOR YOUThis matters more than you think. Most founders wake up and immediately drown in other people’s priorities. Email, Slack, news feeds, all screaming for attention. Durov refuses. He builds his willpower first, then decides what deserves his focus. Try it tomorrow. Do 50 push-ups before you touch any device. Watch how differently your brain operates when you’ve already won the first battle of the day.

Why constraints beat resourcesDurov learned early that scarcity drives genius. Growing up in Soviet Russia, he couldn’t afford video games. So he built them. Limited access forced creativity. “Scarcity leads to creativity,” he explained. It’s “one of the reasons you have so many people who love to code coming from the Soviet Union or other places which didn’t have much access to modern technology.”

Now he applies the same principle to Telegram. Those 40 engineers manage 100,000 servers across multiple continents. How? Durov refuses to let them hire help. “When you intentionally don’t allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they’ll be forced to automate things,” he said. Force your team to build systems, not empires. Give them constraints that demand innovation. Maybe you think you need five developers for that project. What if you only had one?

Automate everything or sufferTelegram’s infrastructure would require tens of thousands of employees if managed manually. Instead, algorithms handle everything. Durov built this philosophy into the company’s DNA from day one. When servers fail, code fixes them. When traffic spikes, systems adapt automatically. No human intervention needed.

This obsession with efficiency runs deeper than saving money. “If your code executes faster, it means you need fewer computational resources to run it,” Durov noted. Every millisecond matters when a billion people open your app dozens of times daily. He calculated it: a half-second delay multiplied by billions of interactions equals centuries of wasted human time. Think about your own systems. What manual processes steal hours every week? Build the automation once, save those hours forever.

The anti-addiction business modelWhatsApp and every other messaging app uses targeted advertising. They mine your data, track your behavior, sell your attention. Durov leaves 80% of that revenue untouched. No targeted ads on Telegram. No invasive tracking. Just context-based ads that respect privacy.

Instead, 15 million users pay for Telegram Premium. They choose to support a platform that respects them. “Money has never been the primary goal,” Durov said. The subscription model seemed impossible for a messaging app. Now it generates over half a billion dollars annually. Build something people value, not something that exploits them. The money follows.

Competition as a hiring strategyForget LinkedIn. Forget recruiters. Durov finds engineers through coding competitions. Contestants solve real Telegram problems. Winners get hired. “What can be better than a competition?” he asked. “A coding contest where everybody who wants to join your company can demonstrate their skills, and then we just select the best.”

This filters for exactly what matters. Not resume padding. Not interview skills. Pure ability to solve hard problems. One engineer Durov tracked competed in ten contests starting at age 14. By 21, he’d won eight. Obviously hired. Create your own filter. Design challenges that mirror actual work. Let performance speak louder than credentials.

The real cost of every featureDurov personally reviews every pixel, every animation, every microsecond of delay. The message deletion effect (where texts evaporate into particles) took months to perfect. “Nobody really cares,” he admitted. “But there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected.”

This perfectionism scales. A poorly optimized feature running on a billion devices burns money and time. One careless developer introducing inefficiencies costs millions. “If you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted, inexperienced, you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses,” Durov warned. Excellence in tiny details creates massive advantages at scale.

How to build a billion-user company by saying noDurov’s approach flips every assumption about success. No phone. No bloated team. No surveillance capitalism. Just extreme focus applied to what actually matters. While Silicon Valley burns cash on thousands of employees, he builds the future with 40. The question remains: what unnecessary complexity are you accepting as normal?