A Couple of Thoughts on Pavel Durov's Talk at DLD 2012
Today was the 3rd day of the DLD 2012 conference (Digital, Life, Design). A couple of thoughts, just to reason them through.
VKontakte has existed for about 5 years already, it seems. During that time Durov had only been seen in public once, at an event called Highload++, where he talked about the technical side of VKontakte.
In recent years all public-facing duties were handled by journalist Vladislav Tsyplyukhin, which, according to him, was why he had been hired. Durov himself, according to Tsyplyukhin, considered communication with journalists, interviews, and other events to be a pointless waste of time that he could spend on something useful.
Because of that secrecy, there were even rumors that Durov did not exist, that he was a fictional character, part of the image, that nobody had seen him.
Today those myths were dispelled after Durov's public appearance.
The talk was dedicated to Wikipedia, and Durov briefly spoke about VKontakte, presenting the social network as vk.com. Wikipedia is, in my view, more of a reason for the talk, although you cannot accuse Durov of hypocrisy here: even a schoolkid understands how important Wikipedia already is for the world. But it was all arranged beautifully: the first public appearance at a major conference, where many people in the West, I think, had not even known about VK. The timely Megaupload topic, a donation of 1 million dollars in support of Wikipedia: all of this, to me personally, looks like a beautiful entry onto the international stage.
It is not enough to announce somewhere that yes, we also have a project no worse than Facebook, with tens of millions of visitors per day. You have to grab people's minds so they start talking about you. And here the wow effect kicks in: the owner of the project donates a whole million dollars to Wikipedia. People's subconscious and associations start working.
I don't know what will happen next, but VK's entrance onto the international stage has happened. Despite Durov's nervousness during the talk, which many people point out. Considering that this was Durov's first such talk, and at this level, I think many people would not have been able to say anything coherent in a non-native language in his place at all.
The entrance really was elegant: here we are. We are not just another startup; we are already 5 years old, we have enormous popularity, and we came here not to attract investors and ask for your money: we have money, after all we do support Wikipedia with a million dollars. And the pattern is quite common: a project is represented by one person. Just as Facebook is associated with Mark Zuckerberg, or Google with Brin and Page, VK will be associated with Durov.
If this had not been such an important step for VK, Durov would hardly have come out of the shadows and personally gone to present the social network he created. They even changed the logo for this. I don't know how successful it is: for people who associate VK with the Cyrillic «ВКонтакте», it may have become unclear, but for the West it may be perfectly suitable. Besides, the logo does not just contain the name of the social network, it is designed as an icon, which I have always liked in many logos.
I think that's all. I wish VK and Pavel Durov good luck in their new endeavors.