Biography

Pavel’s journey in the world of the Internet started after his grandparents got a digital phone line which was able to sustain mind blowing 28.8 kbit/s. He had to use it from 3 AM to 9 AM as it was the only plan which was affordable for his family. 

After being an active user of the Internet for a few years he narrowed his interest to the field of Internet security and half year later he got the prestigious volunteer position of column editor at a large regional Internet media portal dedicated to Internet technologies.

Pavel was responsible for curating content about Internet security and had to work with a content management system implemented in Perl. Pavel immediately fell in love with this system and with assistance of mentors from the Telecom community on IRC he learnt the basics of the Perl programming language which was shortly followed by C++ which he learnt on its own.

Pavel's active contribution to the Internet community started around the time when he enrolled at the University to become a physicist. His first Community contribution was a free and open source application for checking traffic usage and balance for residential ISP he was a customer of. 

Pavel got a full time job on the third course of University (he moved from physics to computer science). It was a Perl developer position at domain name Registrar where he learnt skills of working with large code bases and started his way in understanding Internet governance in general.

Programming was not only Pavel's passion. He loves Linux and open source with the bottom of his heart. That's how he met his new friend with whom Pavel co-founded his first startup in the cloud computing industry - hosting provider FastVPS. 

During his time at FastVPS Pavel accumulated first hand experience in running multinational medium sized business which was spread over many countries and time zones. Company had a presence in Europe and the US. At FastVPS Pavel got familiar with BGP and worked on an early version of open source detection tool FastNetMon in his spare time.  In 2015 and 2016 FastVPS was recognized as one of the most successful companies in Estonia in the Internet field and hosted around 250 000 domain names. 

What happened next was inspired by Pavel's desire to make an impact on the Worldwide scale and learn how large networks operate.  He closely followed a small but very ambitious Californian startup. They were different from other players on the market as they had free tier service which provided basic security and complete authoritative DNS service for websites absolutely free. That's exact mission and scale Pavel looked for.

Name of this startup was Cloudflare. After a challenging 3 day long interview Pavel got the position of DNS engineer in a team of 3 people which was tasked with complete rewrite of Cloudflare Authoritative DNS. This team was led by prominent DNS expert Olafur Gudmundsson, who became Pavel's mentor in corporate politics. This project was a great success and was built to scale up to 100 millions of domain zones. The same logic with minor adjustments still empowers Cloudflare DNS these days. 

At the time being Pavel is CTO and co-founder of British DDoS detection vendor FastNetMon with headquarters in Central London. His company offers an affordable on premise DDoS detection solution to companies on all continents (with only exception to Antarctica) and funds development of an open source edition of their product called FastNetMon Community which is being used by users from 148 countries Worldwide.