One of the biggest rivals to Meta Platforms Inc.'s META WhatsApp is Telegram Messenger. Built by Russian-born Emirati entrepreneur Pavel Durov, the service has nearly a billion users, but no human resources (HR) department and one engineer for nearly 30 million users.
What Happened: Durov told conservative media personality and former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, that despite scaling up Telegram to nearly a billion users, with 2.5 million signing up each day, he has managed to keep his team lean.
Not just that, Durov says Telegram has not raised funds by offloading equity. It has raised over $1.5 billion via bond sales so far, and $1.7 billion via a cryptocurrency project.
However, Durov has kept equity close to his chest so far.
"Having myself as the sole owner, director, and project manager for this extensive period of time and the company's development allowed us to move faster."
Not just that, Durov says he still comes up with most of the features and gets them implemented by his engineers and designers.
"I still come up with most of the features, I still work directly with every engineer, every designer who is implementing these features."
Rather than being overwhelmed by thinking up features for an app used by nearly a billion users, Durov says he enjoys it.
"I'm running this company because I enjoy it. I'm the only project manager because I think this is the way I can contribute."
This shocked Carlson, but that was not the end of it.
Durov says Telegram does not have a dedicated human resources department.
The messaging service only has 30 engineers on its payroll. "It's a really compact team, super efficient, like a Navy SEAL team. This is how we operate."
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Why It Matters: The Telegram story, in terms of manpower, is quite similar to that of WhatsApp before it was acquired by Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., in 2014 for $19 billion.
At the time, WhatsApp too, scaled its service to a billion users with only 50 engineers. This allowed it to be nimble enough to manage its costs prior to being scooped up by Mark Zuckerberg.
On the other hand, Twitter, now X, suffered from being too bloated. Its co-founder, Jack Dorsey, admitted that he "grew the company size too quickly" after Elon Musk fired thousands of employees.
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