Quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of product — Telegram's core engineering team of ~40 people out-innovates competitors through automation and avoiding coordination overhead.

Durov explains that Telegram runs with only about 40 core engineers because large teams waste 90% of their time coordinating, underworked employees demotivate others, and resource constraints force automation. This approach has allowed Telegram to manage nearly 100,000 servers globally through algorithms rather than armies of system administrators. ✦ AI generated

Pavel Durov · Lex Fridman · 2025-10-01 · original ↗

What we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won't get enough work to do. And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. ... Also, when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things. In our case, we have 10s of thousands of servers around the world, almost 100,000, distributed across several continents and data centers. If you try to manage this system manually without automation, you will probably end up hiring thousands of people, 10s of thousands of people. But if you rely on algorithms and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well.

verbatim transcript · starts at 83:31