Whatsapp co-founder Jan Koum’s numbers are remarkable: 1 billion dollars a year, 2 billion dollars in stock options and the 20 billion dollars Facebook spent to acquire the company, of which Koum still owns 45%.
From USSR-era Ukraine to Silicon Valley
Jan Koum was born in Kiev, he went to a school with no heating and the bathroom in the playground, and at home he did not use the telephone in case it was tapped by the KGB. When he was 16 he moved to the US with his mother where he received government assistance and meal tickets. He started work very young, cleaning floors in a shop, and later enrolled at San Jose State University finding a job with Ernst & Young as a security tester.
First step: Yahoo! Inc.
In the US Koum met Brian Acton, four years his senior, who had forged a good career at Yahoo Inc. At just 21, thanks to the support of his friend who regarded him as brilliant, he began working part-time for the multinational company. He stayed at Yahoo! for 9 years, eventually becoming infrastructure manager, before he and Brian decided to quit and travel round South America together:
“Dealing with ads is depressing. You don’t make anyone’s life better by making advertisements work better. We were emotionally drained”
he told Forbes during an interview.
From rejection by Facebook to the Whatsapp project
Having returned from their trip Koum and Brian both applied to work at Facebook but both were turned down. Money began to run out and Koum needed the right idea to launch at the right time. The idea came to him while looking at people’s statuses on a Mac Mini: how cool would it be to see your friends’ statuses next to their names in your phone’s address book? And so Whatsapp was born, an instant messaging app for communicating with people anywhere in the world through a device that everyone has in their pockets. A powerful and innovative invention that quickly proved a major hit.
Zuckerberg’s proposition
In 2014, the Facebook proposition: 20 billion dollars for the application that enables everyone to communicate without barriers, of which Koum still owns 45%. A source of great pride for a young man that escaped from a place where the channels of communication were tapped and who is now one of the richest under-40’s on the planet with assets worth $9.2 billion.