We can say it without fear: Jan Koum is one of the most important people in the modern world. And one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 21st century. What can we say about its instant messaging application, WhatsApp: nearly three billion people use it. His story, however, is far from the typical story of the tech genius born in Silicon Valley..
Who could have told this Ukrainian immigrant who, at 16, lived on grants and vouchers, scrubbing floors and eating at the neighborhood soup kitchen, would end up with assets of around $20 billion. And it all started with anger, a newly purchased iPhone and an idea.
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Who is Jan Kuom, co-founder of WhatsApp
But who is Jan Koum? Born in kyiv, Ukraine as Yan Borysovych Kum, this computer scientist grew up in a poor Jewish family oppressed by the Soviet regime. At the age of 16, he emigrated with his mother and grandmother to the United States, where they settled in a small apartment in Mountain View, California. His father remained in Ukraine and died in 1997.
The same year, Koum worked as a tester at Ernst & Young. There he met his better half at work, Brian Acton, with whom he would later found WhatsApp. On the other hand, and after a bitter battle, his mother died of cancer in 2000. She was the neighborhood babysitter. Koum, at the time, was working at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, next to Brian Acton’s office, inspecting the company’s advertising system, Project Panama.
From Yahoo to WhatsApp
Acton was quite exhausted: “he invested in the dot-com boom and lost millions in the 2000 crisis,” as Forbes recounts. Kuom was no better either, uninspired and less satisfied. In 2007, Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a sabbatical. Well the reality is that both knocked on Facebook’s door and both were rejected. In 2008, they continued their decompressive journey. This is how he remembers his days in Argentina: “I had a SIM card but I didn’t know how to get them to call me. The area codes and prefixes are so complicated!”
It was then that Koum had the idea of creating a messaging application that would take advantage of the internet connection of smartphones. Along the way, he spent the $400,000 he had saved, but not before buying an iPhone.. It was then that he realized that the new App Store could be a new and promising market. He visited Alex Fishman, “a Russian friend who invited the local Russian community to his home in west San Jose for weekly movie and pizza nights.”
Koum had an idea: display the user’s status. What happens if the battery is low and the battery is busy? I missed dozens of calls every time I was at the gym, not knowing who those numbers belonged to. Kuom needed an iPhone developer and his man was Russian Igor Solomennikov. This is how WhatsApp was born, in 2009, with the financial support of Acton, which invested $250,000.
Why Apple?
During his journey, Jobs fought to create a new market for hardware and software. Koum recounts, in the best and most revealing interview ever conducted, how was inspired by the idea of WhatsApp when he saw that his iPhone had a status feature that showed whether the user was available or not. And Koum thought it would be useful to create an app that would allow users to communicate with each other and change their status at their convenience. An idea, let’s emphasize it, coming from Steve Jobs’ team.
The moral debt contracted by Koum can be understood. He wanted an app based on simplicity and utility, something very “Apple” that didn’t distract with complicated functions. But it was now necessary to capitalize on the idea: WhatsApp was stillborn, without users. Desperate, Koum began considering another job. “Give it a few more months,” Acton advised.
In June 2009, with iOS 3 (iPhone OS 3.0, as it was then called), Apple introduced push notifications. And everything changed. Savagely. People downloaded the new version from iTunes and Jan took the opportunity to update WhatsApp. If you now change your status, for example to “I can’t talk, I’m at the gym”, iPhone sends a notification to all contacts in your network. And it worked. It turned into a sort of instant messaging. And for only 0.89 dollars. Forget SMS or MMS at a few cents for a few characters.
Steve Jobs was of course angry: WhatsApp was using too much bandwidth. He complained to Koum and asked him to reduce the size of photos sent by users. Koum refused to do so, arguing that it would affect the quality of service. They were both right. WhatsApp has begun to reduce the quality of multimedia files and optimize its communication processes, without losing the simplicity and speed that characterize it.
In 2010, it arrived on Android at no cost; in 2011, under Windows. Yes free, forever, no matter how many viral message chains you receive. In 2011, groups of 15 people could already be created – the “peñas”, as some called them. In 2014, WhatsApp already had nearly 500 million active users each month, following the same principles.
A service courtesy of META
Until the long-awaited moment arrives. One summer afternoon, Koum received a call from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. He wanted to buy WhatsApp and put $19 billion on the table. There was no similar precedent. Overnight, Koum became one of the richest men on the planet, with a seat on the Facebook board of directors. Until the pressures to transform his little big idea “invited” him to rise again. Today, WhatsApp, as its home screen says, is just a service offered by META.
We already know the rest: Zuckerberg’s engineers integrated WhatsApp into their larger ecosystem – Facebook and Instagram and, from there, into the business cosmos – data marketing, filling these green meadows with advertising. Koum and Jobs clashed from time to time, but at least they always kept the same view of privacy. Taking steps in this direction is the best way to protect both of your legacies.
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