1. Meeting Nikolai

Back in 1993, when I was in the sixth grade, I went to a maths club at Physico-Mathematical Lyceum №239 where I met Kolya (short for Nikolai) Durov (Pavel Durov’s elder brother, Pavel himself was 9 years old at the time). His looks somewhat resembled those of Kolya Gerasimov from “A Guest from the Future” movie, and so did his character. He was expelled from our first summer camp in the middle of the shift for going outside the camp’s premises to a nearby railway station, missing the bus and returning an hour after the bedtime (everybody did that, the main thing was not to be caught). I have a special memory of his little notebook with ideas and projects: in particular, there was a scheme of a nuclear reactor he dreamed to build: with control rods, a cooling loop and turbines to generate power.

Photo shows Nikolai Durov (in the center) among the other members of maths club in the summer camp, 1994

We attended this club for 6 years, went together to All-Russian Mathematical Olympiads, training sessions in Moscow, the 39th International Mathematical Olympiad in 1998 in Taiwan. One of the most vivid remembrances of those times was Kaluga: the participants of the 23rd All-Russian Olympiad were housed in a suburb, and on the last day, after the awards, Kolya and I went to the shore of the Oka where we took much effort to make a bonfire in a strong wind. The bonfire was so good that aluminum wire burnt in it. But it would not go out in such a wind as well, and the fire must not be left unattended, so we had to drag the logs and dump them into the river. To put a long story short, we came back in about four hours, just to find out that a G.M.Kuznetsova, chief specialist of something from the Ministry of Education had come from Moscow to take Kolya to the awards ceremony, and had already been looking for him for hours. However, all this bureaucracy, such as trips to Moscow for the President’s awards ceremony, even in those times seemed a boring, but inevitable consequence of taking part in the Olympiads.

My medal from International Mathematical Olympiad, 1998

Diploma to medal of International Mathematical Olympiad, 1998

Diploma to Prize of President of Russian Federation (Boris Yeltsin then)

Another funny story that I still recall with pleasure happened during summer training before the International Olympiad. The training was held in a children’s camp on the shore of the Volga river, in a small town called Emmauss in the Tver region. The team members were for some reason or other arranged to do groups with a psychologist, to build teamwork. This idea did and does surprise me, for an Olympiad is a strictly personal contest, team members are made to sit far from each other, and it is strongly forbidden to communicate when doing the tasks. It was interesting, though, to see what it was, and with great enthusiasm we set about performing the tasks such as walking blindfolded guided by a comrade or drawing a tree or an animal (in 10 minutes allotted I came up with a wonderful dragon). In the same way Kolya and I were not at all surprised that the idea dwindled away and went no further than one session. It was only in the end of the training that we knew that the classes had gone on. It was just the two of us who would not be summoned, the other team members went on attending.

Summer training before 39th International Mathematical Olympiad, July 1998, Emmauss, Tver region. Photo shows Nikolai Durov. He had annoyed me somehow, and I turned him over with the bed

Russian team members on Chesma training yacht on the Volga. Me (Anton Rozenberg) in the center of the frame, Nikolai Durov in theforeground, left

Russian team for the 39th International Mathematical Olympiad, with team manager N.K.Agakhanov (right). Nikolai Durov first left, me (Anton Rozenberg) second left

Russian team for the 39th International Mathematical Olympiad, with team manager N.K.Agakhanov. Me (Anton Rozenberg) first row, right, Nikolai Durov second row, second left

Me (Anton Rozenberg, right) and Nikolai Durov (left) in Sheremetyevo, before leaving for Taiwan, to International Mathematical Olympiad

Taiwan, before the International Mathematical Olympiad. We are eating rice with chopsticks in a local joint for the first time. Nikolai Durov left, me (Anton Rozenberg) near him

Taiwan, Russian team at International Mathematical Olympiad. Me (Anton Rozenberg, left) and Nikolai Durov (right) in the middle row

Russian team at 39th International Mathematical Olympiad, Taiwan, 1998. Me (Anton Rozenberg) third right, Nikolai Durov second left

We went on to study at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of St. Petersburg State University, together we attended student military training in a camp near Luga. After university our paths diverged, at the moment I had been long employed as software engineer, Kolya had delved into mathematics and went to study in Germany.

Undergraduate military training after the 4th year of the college, 2002, Luga, Leningrad region. In barracks. Me (Anton Rozenberg) in center, Nikolai Durov right

Undergraduate military training after the 4th year of the college, 2002, Luga, Leningrad region. Nikolai Durov being sworn. Me (Anton Rozenberg) in ranks, fifth right in the first row

Undergraduate military training after 4th year, 2002, Luga, Leningrad region. Forming up. Nikolai Durov second right, me (Anton Rozenberg) third right

2. VK.com launches and grows

I did not know Pavel then, I just knew that Kolya had a junior brother who was studying at the faculty of philology and who published poems under a pseudonym, I think, of Kotovsky in some small faculty collections.

I was already interested in information safety, therefore I used old spare parts to assemble a second computer, rather weak and slow, to surf the internet. In the summer of 2006 a friend of mine invited me to join Russian social networks Odnoklassniki and Moy Krug, but it went no further than registration. And on February 13, 2007 on the forum of Novosibirsk Science Campus (!) I came across a message from Pavel Durov who promoted his project, a certain “closed reference book of students and graduates of Russian elite institutions of higher education” — that was when I learned of VKontakte. I liked the site immediately, both because it, unlike the other sites, worked fast on my computer and because it had a simple and clear structure: id numbers of the users were released consecutively, and you could easily see that there were, say, 70 thousand members on the site at the time, you enter any number and see the next live person, under a real name (it was unusual then: at the forums everybody used nicknames and picture avatars, not photos). It took me less than an hour to learn things, assess the registration rate of the new users and calculate the right time to become the owner of id77777.

I also found about a dozen of various bugs such as the possibility to open a photo in a larger resolution using its miniature, notes being accessible through direct links and other tricks related mainly to bypassing privacy.

There were only three persons from my year of college who had registered on the site, one of them being naturally Kolya; so it was him, to whom I wrote asking about where to send those bug reports. He suggested writing directly to his brother, Pavel Durov.

My first message in VKontakte was sent to Nikolai Durov [Image edited on Medium’s claim]

Getting to know Pavel Durov, first messages are on privacy issues [Image edited on Medium’s claim]

The site grew at breakneck speed, the list of bugs was on its heels and achieved 84 points.

Discussing problems and loads with Pavel Durov. 18 million messages did not seem a huge number then [Image edited on Medium’s claim]

In June the first volunteer customer support team was created and in July Kolya invited me to visit him and discuss possible cooperation.

At that time VKontakte had many competitors: Odnoklassniki, Moy Fakultet, Connect.ua, but it was obvious to me that that the future belongs to VK, I liked this site and agreed to join its team without hesitations, never mind the salary, which was lower than at my current position.

Discussion of meeting on 11 July, 2007. Nikolai and Pavel Durov invite me to visit them [Image edited on Medium’s claim]

Thus I became VKontakte’s first system administrator, and after the probation period Deputy Technical Director (technical director being Kolya). We both were engaged in administering all equipment, setting up new servers, balancing loads and recovering after breakdowns, safeguarding against DDoS attacks and even fixing php code, and sometimes developing new services.

The work was hugely interesting but hard, essentially without weekends, with breaks only enough to sleep, and with the minimum load being at about 5 o’clock in the morning when all residents of St. Petersburg and Moscow were asleep, we had to work during the night and sleep in the morning and afternoon. It is very difficult in winter in St. Petersburg, it went so far that I did not see any daylight at all.

I remember seeing the servers of VKontakte for the first time, it was then just one server room in Tekhnodom, a ramshackle industrial building on the premises of the Baltic Plant, filled with racks with towers, the second server room was being built. There were about three hundred servers then, and it was something unbelievable. Who could imagine at the time that by 2013 there would be 35,000 servers scattered in five datacenters (and just seven sysadmins for all this).

In first server room of Tekhnodom, very first servers of VKontakte. Me (Anton Rozenberg) left, Nikolai Durov right

On Tsvetochnaya construction site, second datacenter of Selektel and the first one to be constructed specifically for us. Nikolai Durov right, me (Anton Rozenberg) near him

So the site was growing and changing, then there were stories with “load testing”, Runet Prizes, and peering wars with monopolist providers when we had to move the servers from Moscow to St. Petersburg on buses. There was a separate service called VKadre to store all VKontakte videos, and at some moment of time, we found out that the last technical expert there had left about a month before, and only director and accountant remained. I had then to write a new system urgently from zero to recode and store the videos, adding therewith new extensions (360, 480 and 720p). There were demands from FSB to close protest groups in 2011 and police searches in 2013. Datacenters were built, first Selectel for VKontakte, then ICVA (Research Center for High-Voltage Apparatus Making). An article can be written about each of these stories.

ICVA, first stage of first datacenter owned by VKontakte

ICVA, “shooting gallery” in semi-destroyed building — now there are servers there as well. Me (Anton Rozenberg) in the center, Nikolai Durov left

Yet, I never aspired to become a celebrity, I even managed to avoid being mentioned in the “Durov’s Code” book. Overall, the work of system administrators did not imply the same publicity as that of the developers. Who would write in the site’s blog about the that a router costing 4 million dollars failed to reload in the night or about 1000 new servers being launched?

First in the world Cisco ASR 9022 router. A tablet commemorating this event was somewhere in office. Cost of its full scope of supply exceeded $4,000,000. VKontakte had two such routers to service the traffic. And also two Juniper MX2020 with similar parameters

Professional day, system administrator’s day, was quite a low-key celebration as well. In picture: board with strategic schemes for implementation of “superservers” (in the left part of the board)

During the first year we would meet at the Durovs’, in Kamyshovaya Street. I recall a large portrait of Khodorkovsky hanging on their WC door, it was funny, my door had a map of the world on it. We used to work until late, closer to midnight Albina Aleksandrovna (mom of the Durov brothers) would send Kolya and Pavel to walk me to the metro. I assume this was the only way to tear them off the screens and make them take a stroll. Later on, after DST fund bought a part of the shares, Pavel bought an apartment in the Nevsky Avenue, and we began to gather and work there. In 2010 the Singer House office appeared, first on the 6th floor, then the 7th floor was added to it, with an exit to the dome and the roof.

Me (Anton Rozenberg) performing important testing of quadcopter in th VKoffice. In the background you can see a toy railroad. Now this office belongs to another company

A frugal cake to commemorate 5th VK anniversary

A game of Monopoly in the round office on level 7, right below the dome (interior was inherited from previous tenants). Open notebooks indisputably prove that we were working at the same time. Soon, though, some rather explicit pictures taken on this table and sofa in the background appeared online, so we c̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶c̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶s̶, so we discontinued playing, and just worked

Here you see, sometimes I even worked from a tent (and somebody even lived in office with bed in it). Now this office belongs to another company

By the way, my office (which later in fact became the place where all sysadmins gathered) was that very room with a huge panorama window on the corner of Nevsky Avenue and Griboyedov Channel Embankment which many people believed to be Pavel’s office. It did not suite him because of the noise, but I liked the view and plenty of light. So it was from my office that Pavel and Ilya Perekopsky let five-thousand ruble note airplanes fly. I remember well that day, it was Saturday, crowds of people in the street were celebrating the City’s Day, and I dropped in to work a little. And the guys came searching for a window from which it would be easier to toss the money planes. I tried to talk them out of this idea understanding the boyish nature of it and possible negative media consequences (shortly before that Pavel had made his first public appearance donating a million dollars to Wikipedia). But I failed to bring them round. I refused to participate, but I was the only photographer who shot the scene first from inside, then from the street.

The people in the street reacted differently: somebody didn’t believe that the money was real, somebody passed by nonchalantly. I remember another software engineer who was also present that day in the office remarking calmly that a sum that had been thrown out of the window exceeded his monthly pay.

Pavel Durov (left) with Ilya Perekopsky (in the center) throwing money from my office window