Durov says Jensen Huang's rookie mistake was having a board

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Friday that Jensen Huang's real error was letting a board sit above him. Durov wrote it in his Telegram channel a day after Huang resigned as Nvidia's chief executive and left the company's board.

“Jensen made a rookie mistake. He had a board.”

— Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, post in his Telegram channel

Quote source: Telegram, Pavel Durov's channel, 13 November 2026.

He then set the two cases side by side: "In 2014, my board kicked me out for saying no to spies. In 2026, Jensen's board kicked him out for saying yes to one." His advice to founders fit in one line: "Don't have a board. Be the board."

The two exits Durov compares

In April 2014 Durov lost his job as head of VK, the social network he had founded. He said at the time that the owners pushed him out after he refused requests from Russia's FSB for data on organisers of Ukraine's Euromaidan protests. Mail.ru Group took full control of VK later that year, and Durov went on to build Telegram, where he has said he is the only shareholder.

Huang admitted on 8 November to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed International, whom The New York Times reported US officials suspected of working for the Chinese government. Beijing called the reports a smear. The board opened an investigation, and on Thursday Huang stepped down, as we reported in the story on Huang's resignation.

Nvidia's SEC filing describes a resignation accepted by the board and gives no reason. Colette Kress is interim CEO, and Harvey C. Jones became the board's first chair.

A running joke this week

Durov had been circling the story for two days. On Wednesday evening he complained that spy agencies never send him any "honeypots". On Thursday he posted a "correction": his Instagram messages held hundreds of interested "models", and he asked them to send Grams on Telegram instead.

Durov mixed the jokes with promotion. On 11 November Durov reported more than a million Gram wallets activated in 48 hours. Each one is a non-custodial wallet inside Telegram, the product we covered when Durov announced Gram in July.

What a board is for

If a founder follows Durov's advice, they keep full control and lose the people who can stop them. Nvidia shareholders elect the directors, and those directors could act once the investigation began. At Telegram, Durov answers to no one in that seat.

If you hold shares in a founder-run company, open its latest proxy statement and find who can remove the CEO. You will learn more about the risk there than from any of the founder's posts.

Durov's comparison is his personal view; Nvidia has not said why Huang resigned, and its investigation findings are not public. This text is for information only and is not investment advice.