Biography | Pavel Durov — The Unscheduled Berlin Stage Where Telegram Stepped Into View

On 28 October 2013 Pavel Durov walked onto an unscheduled fireside at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe and talked about a messenger that was not supposed to make money.

The venue was Arena Berlin, the converted 1927 bus depot at Eichenstrasse 4 in Alt-Treptow, across the Flutgraben from Osthafen.

The conference ran 28–29 October after a weekend hackathon in the same hall. TechCrunch's own recap named Durov's conversation with co-editor Alexia Tsotsis as the first day's highlight.

Telegram had been in development for about a year and a half. A TechCrunch product piece the night before put daily active users at roughly 100,000 and described secret chats, a self-destruct timer, and a custom protocol written by his brother Nikolai.

The timing was not accidental. Edward Snowden's disclosures were four months old. European rooms were full of people suddenly interested in who held the keys to a private message.

Durov presented Telegram as a non-profit project funded through Digital Fortress, not as VK's next product line.

Bloomberg, writing two weeks later, treated the Berlin appearance as the end of a long public silence: one of the few times the VK founder had taken a European tech stage.

The building is still an events hall. The stage is gone; the shed-like roof and the brick depot are not.

This pin is the public moment, not a current workplace. Telegram's later offices are out of scope.

What happened here is narrower and dated: a surprise set at a first-year Disrupt Europe, in a former bus garage, the week the rest of the industry learned the name of the app.

Photo: TechCrunch / Dan Taylor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Frame taken on the Disrupt Europe floor, 28 October 2013.