Creators "Vkontakte" and Telegram sued for 100 million rubles for an ex-employee for the disclosure of confidential data

Pavel Durov

Yesterday, Anton Rosenberg, who speaks of himself as the former deputy technical director of Vkontakte and ex-director of special areas in the Telegram, spoke about a major conflict with Pavel and Nikolai Durov. According to Rosenberg, the brothers dismissed him from the Telegram, and now they are trying to collect 100 million rubles from him, allegedly for disclosing commercial secrets.

Rosenberg provides a large amount of factual material about his work in both companies, both as one of the leaders of the social network and as a top manager of Telegram. The original of the story, placed on the famous Medium resource, is replete with a huge amount of details of Rosenberg’s biography, from childhood up to the present moment. On Geektimes, an abbreviated version of events is published, without very personal moments, but with the details of Rosenberg's work mentioned in the original post.

How it all began

So, Anton Rosenberg has been acquainted with Nikolai Durov for a very long time - since the sixth grade. First, they studied at the St. Petersburg Mathematical Lyceum, and then - at St. Petersburg State University. Since both were very capable, they were often sent together to various Olympiads and competitions, which they won with an enviable constancy.
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The sad guy in the center is Nikolai Durov (source: medium.com)

It is interesting, by the way, that Durov kept a kind of technical diary, where the main ideas and projects of the future entrepreneur were spelled out. There was even a drawing (or rather, a diagram) of a nuclear reactor, with all the details and features.

Work in "Vkontakte"

After studying, their paths diverged until 2007, when Rosenberg, seeing the Vkontakte social network site (or rather, not even the site at first, but the message about it on the Novosibirsk Academgorodok forum), decided to contact its creators to tell about the bugs and problems in the work of a new resource. Nikolay Durov, who held the position of technical director at the time, invited him to a meeting at the office and after a while Rosenberg took the position of deputy to his classmate.

His becoming as a manager may have been influenced not by his acquaintance with Nikolai, but by the fact that Rosenberg, when meeting a social network site, he said, “found about a dozen different bugs, such as the ability to see a photo in high resolution in its miniature, notes on direct links and other tricks, mainly related to the ability to bypass privacy. " The number of problems found grew until it became clear that this could not continue, and all this should be gradually eliminated.


List of bugs submitted by Rosenberg Durov

The matter gradually moved forward, and the leadership was in friendly relations. Directors and deputies often visited each other. By the way, Rosenberg worked just in the office where Pavel Durov and his colleagues somehow decided to launch airplanes from bills in denominations of five thousand rubles.

Rosenberg was engaged in the Durov administration of equipment, setting up servers, load balancing, protection from DDoS attacks and other purely technical things.


Rosenberg in the photo with the servers is on the left, Durov is on the right. Source: medium.com

Years passed, the site load gradually grew, and several server racks were, of course, not enough. New data centers were built, technologies were improved. It is clear that there was more interesting than can be told in the framework of one article - Anton Rosenberg himself speaks about it: “You can write a separate article about each of these stories.” The details of the technical work turned out to be behind the scenes and were not mentioned in the media. “At night, the router did not come out of reboot for $ 4 million? 1000 new servers commissioned? No one has written about this on the site’s blog, ”Rosenberg says. He also says that there is almost no mention of him precisely because of the non-publicity of his work.

Telegraph

Yes, there is no typo in the headline. In 2012, both brothers began work on creating a secure messenger. Initially, the project had the code name Telegra.ph or simply Telegraph. To work on it, they founded almost the same name LLC Telegraph (registration - August 7, 2012). The messenger was decided to develop as a private communication channel, access to the correspondence of users of which will not be anyone but the users themselves.

A year later, on August 14, 2014, the first version of Telegram messenger for iPhone appeared. It was necessary to rename it to Telegram because of the interest in the project of auditors from the UCP fund, which bought 48% of Vkontakte shares.

As a result, all the developers of VK engines went to the Telegraph office, plus Nikolay Durov himself went there. After he finally left Vkontakte, Rosenberg became the technical director of the social network.

After some time, Pavel Durov began to think about leaving Vkontakte. That very statement of the creator of the social network about his dismissal, posted on April 1 , was made on the humorous advice of Rosenberg. Then a refutation was made, but on April 21 Durov was fired for real.


Durov found out about his dismissal on the plane. Photo: medium.com

Rosenberg also filed an application of pure solidarity, although he regretted his decision.


According to him, despite the temporary inaction, he has maintained excellent relations with his brothers. Both he and his wife repeatedly "joined the" family "trips (developers and their families)." Well, in 2016, Pavel Durov again invited Rosenberg to work, as a “director of special areas”. The essence of the post - the fight against spam.

“So I returned to the native atmosphere of a startup, an interesting job, a friendly team of friends, a familiar office and everything that I liked. Yes, and without shareholder conflicts and the resulting bureaucracy. Without exaggeration, I can say that it was a dream job, ”says Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s wife also joined this company.

The end of the "dream job"

Well, and then something strange happened. According to Rosenberg, he learned that Nikolai Durov is not indifferent to his, Rosenberg, future wife. But he himself does not feel friendly feelings at all, but rather enmity.

After conversations with Nikolai and Pavel Durov, it became clear that they would like Anton to quit. But he did not agree: “I, of course, refused. I feel sorry for Nikolai, but why should I lose my favorite job because of his actions, because of a personal conflict in which he was entirely to blame? ”

Whatever it was, further Rosenberg already gives different details of his personal life, his and Nikolay Durov, which are unlikely to be of interest to readers of Geektimes.

Interestingly, to dismiss an employee who does not want to leave, the “formal CEO” accused Rosenberg of systematic absenteeism. More specifically, then 19 in the last month.

After Telegram's servers, all Rosenberg's correspondence was deleted from the moment of registration in 2013 and until February 14, 2017, which he, however, managed to save. Here is an interesting technical detail - probably, the delete_first_messages request (“delete the first N user messages”) was made for deletion. This feature was developed in the text-engine engine, created for VC, and then laid out in open source. Telegram probably used the code. The author of the text-engine is Nikolai Durov.

Whatever it was, but Rosenberg was fired, as he said, without paying wage arrears and severance pay.

Trial

After all that had happened, Rosenberg filed a lawsuit to declare the dismissal illegal. Before filing, he assured all the necessary documents from a notary, including correspondence in the Telegram.

On August 8, a preliminary hearing took place. In addition, there is a counterclaim from Telegraf LLC represented by General Director Alexander Dmitrievich Stepanov. The amount of the counterclaim is 100 million rubles. The formal reason for the claim is that Anton indicated in Facebook the place of his work Telegram, and also provided screenshots of working correspondence. The text of the claim can be found here .

Opinion of the opposite side

After it became known about this whole story, several publications became interested in it at once. The first media that managed to get a comment from the other side, that is, from Pavel Durov, was Medusa.

Immediately after asking if Durov Rosenberg knows, he answered the following: “I know. From his family, he heard that a person suffers from mental illness. I would not like in this connection to comment at length on this story. ”

Durov also says that he did not dismiss Rosenberg for absenteeism, since “he could not dismiss the person who did not work for me”.

Another interesting point is that Durov denies a direct connection between Telegraph LLC and Telegram messenger. To the question about their connection, he took the following: “Once there was outsourced the analysis of Russian-language spam by the former VK moderators, saying that there was no connection now. However, Medusa was able to find out that “one of the founders of the British Telegram Messenger LLP, which downloaded the Telegram messenger in the app stores, is Telegraph Inc., registered in Belize. According to the register, the same Telegraph Inc owns LLC Telegraph. ”


The complex structure of organizations related to Telegram. Source: medium.com

As an afterword

Today, September 19, lawsuits will be held in St. Petersburg at once in two cases related to Rosenberg. First, in the Kuibyshev court, the case of Rosenberg’s illegal dismissal will be heard, and at 14:30 the hearing of Telegraph LLC against Rosenberg will begin.

Whatever the case, and whoever of the two sides is right or guilty, the whole story deserves to be heard. There are a lot of interesting things about the work of Vkontakte and Telegram, including the internal kitchen. There is interesting information about why those or other decisions were taken by the management of the companies. As mentioned above, we decided to miss a lot of personal details in our material, but if they are also of interest, then you can learn about everything in the original post of Rosenberg .