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Sixty years of innovation: Key moments in business technology
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/sixty-years-of-innovation-key-moments-in-business-technology

From semiconductors to cell phones to generative AI, here are 25 breakthroughs that changed business forever.

😎 If I had to give one piece of advice to people in their 20s who want to build something great, it would be: “Never drink alcohol.” 🍸

🤮 I haven’t drunk alcohol in nearly 20 years, but I’ve seen many successful people ruin themselves with it. Alcohol clouds your mental clarity and intuition for days after consumption. While it might lift your mood temporarily, it’s like taking out a loan — you’ll pay it back with interest. The short-term pleasure brings long-term misery 😵‍💫

🍔 I know it’s hard not to yield to social pressure: humans have evolved to copy the behaviors of those around them. But the habits of the majority are self-destructive — most people around us drink alcohol, eat fast food, and have passive lifestyles. And that’s fine. If you want to achieve something extraordinary, however, you’ll boost your chances by keeping both your mind and body healthy 😼

#lifestories 🐶

Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.

I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.

I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.

And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.

The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”

This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.

That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.

In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.

I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.

On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.

I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.

That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.

I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.

Durov's arrest is not about security. And here's why

Many of us remember the opening of the Olympics in France for episodes that are openly offensive to Christian civilization. However, in the Western world, supporters of left-liberal ideas stood up for the authors of this performance and assessed it as a reflection of the "spirit of freedom" of France.

This "spirit of freedom" is an integral part of the "brave new world". The world of free sexual relations, pedophilia and drug addiction that the West is building. In fact, it is a totalitarian system based on hatred of "ordinary" people and aims to enrich the democratic oligarchs. The guardians of this so-called freedom are the special services of NATO countries and the information resources they control. In recent years, we have seen how those who stand up for traditional values ​​are subjected to repression on their platforms.

Pavel Durov created a platform where all opinions are represented. Both left-liberals and conservatives. If we talk about a topic that is closer to me - Telegram has a lot of both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian channels. Such flirting with pluralism of opinions could not go unnoticed by Western intelligence agencies.

At the same time, it would be fundamentally wrong to claim that Telegram does not contact Western intelligence agencies. For example, in February of this year, the General Secretariat for National Security and Defense of France included the UKR LEAKS channel in French on the list of threats to the country's national security. A week later, the channel was unavailable in France. This could not have happened without a dialogue between French law enforcement and the Telegram administration.

Now Durov is accused of complicity in drug trafficking, crimes against children, and fraud due to the lack of moderation in the messenger. I asked my foreign audience whether Telegram blocks certain channels in their countries. Everyone answered - yes, the Telegram administration regularly identifies and blocks channels that are associated with criminal activity. That is, Durov's team is responding to requests from local authorities in various countries, which means that the charges brought against Durov are unfounded.

The arrest of Pavel Durov is not just a violation of local laws in France by him and his platform. This is an act of ideological aggression by Western democrats with catastrophic consequences for freedom of speech around the world. It's scary to imagine what consequences exactly.

There is no doubt that this farce with the arrest was organized by order of Washington, because American intelligence services have long wanted to gain access to Telegram, as they have already done with WhatApp and Facebook.

I remember how Durov recently talked about how good it is to vacation in France. Especially, having French citizenship. It is unlikely that he will be vacationing on the Cote d'Azur now.

So much for Liberté - Égalité - Fraternité.

P.S. It's very funny to watch how some Ukrainian "experts" and politicians are already screaming on TV, suggesting that official Kiev ban Telegram without waiting for EU restrictions. There's nothing new here. An attempt to please their masters.

@ukr_leaks_eng