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VK
Pavel Durov at the TechCrunch conference in Berlin, 2013

During his university years, Durov created the highly popular forum spbgu.ru. In 2006, he met his former classmate Vyacheslav Mirilashvili in St. Petersburg. Vyacheslav showed Durov the increasingly popular Facebook, after which the friends decided to create a new Russian social network. Lev Leviev, an Israeli classmate of Vyacheslav Mirilashivili, became the third co-founder. Durov became CEO and attracted his older brother Nikolai, a multiple winner of international math and programming competitions, to develop the site.[15][16][17]

Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006. The following month, the domain name Vkontakte.ru was registered[18]. The new project was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian private limited company. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social networking service.[19] The company grew to a value of $3 billion.[20]

In 2011, he was involved in a standoff with the police in Saint Petersburg when the government demanded the removal of opposition politicians' pages after the 2011 election to the Duma; Durov posted a picture of a dog with his tongue out wearing a hoodie and the police left after an hour when he did not answer the door.[10][17]
Pavel Durov and Mike Butcher at the TechCrunch conference in San Francisco, 2015

In 2012, Durov publicly posted a picture of himself extending his middle finger and calling it his official response to Mail.ru Group's efforts to buy VK.[10] In December 2013, Durov decided to sell his 12% to Ivan Tavrin (at that time 40% of the shares belonged to Mail.ru Group, and 48% to the United Capital Partners). Later, Tavrin resold these shares to Mail.ru Group.[21][20][22][23]
Dismissal from VK

On 1 April 2014, Durov submitted his resignation to the board; at first, due to the fact the company confirmed he had resigned, it was believed to be related to the Russo-Ukrainian War which had started in February.[24] However, Durov himself claimed it was an April Fool's Joke on 3 April 2014.[25][26]

On 16 April 2014, Durov publicly refused to hand over the personal data of Ukrainian protesters to Russia's security agencies and to block Alexei Navalny's page on VK.[27] Instead, he posted the relevant orders on his own VK page,[28][29] claiming that the requests were unlawful.
Pavel Durov and Arkady Volozh at the Yandex Data Factory conference, March 2, 2015

On 21 April 2014, Durov was dismissed as CEO of VK. The company claimed it was acting on his letter of resignation a month earlier that he failed to recall.[27][30] Durov then claimed the company had been effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin's allies,[30][31] suggesting his ouster was the result of both his refusal to hand over personal details of users to federal law enforcement and his refusal to hand over the personal details of people who were members of a VK group dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement.[30][31] Durov then left Russia and stated that he had "no plans to go back"[31] and that "the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment".