WhatsApp - Jan

Sendil Anbhu February 22, 2014

The talk of the business world from past few days is - Facebook's $19 billion deal to buy WhatsApp. WhatsApp was the brainchild of Jan Koum.

Jan Koum, was born on February 24, 1976. in a small village outside of Kiev, Ukraine, the only child of a housewife and a construction manager who built hospitals and schools.

At 16, Koum and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, a result of the troubling political and anti-Semitic environment, and got a small two-bedroom apartment though government assistance. His dad never made it over. She took up babysitting and Koum swept the floor of a grocery store to help make ends meet.

Koum was a troublemaker at school but by 18 had also taught himself computer networking by purchasing manuals from a used book store and returning them when he was done. He joined a hacker group called w00w00 on the Efnet internet relay chat network, squirreled into the servers of Silicon Graphics and chatted with Napster co-founder Sean Fanning.

He enrolled at San Jose State University and moonlighted at Ernst & Young as a security tester. In 1997, he found himself sitting across a desk from Brian Acton, Yahoo employee, to inspect the company’s advertising system.

Six months later Koum interviewed at Yahoo and got a job as an infrastructure engineer. When Koum’s mother died of cancer in 2000 the young Ukrainian was suddenly alone; The two went skiing and played soccer and ultimate Frisbee.

Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. In September 2007 Koum and Acton finally left Yahoo. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook.

Koum was eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo, and drifting.

Then in January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited the home of Alex Fishman, a Russian friend The two of them stood for hours talking about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.

“Jan was showing me his address book,” recalls Fishman. “His thinking was it would be really cool to have statuses next to individual names of the people.” The statuses would show if you were on a call, your battery was low, or you were at the gym.

Koum could do the backend, but he needed an iPhone developer, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he’d found on RentACoder.com.

Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up,” and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.

after finding lot of defects in WhatsApp, Jan updated WhatsApp so that each time you changed your status — “Can’t talk, I’m at the gym” — it would ping everyone in your network. Fishman’s Russian friends started using it to ping each other with jokey custom statuses like, “I woke up late,” or “I’m on my way.”

Koum released WhatsApp 2.0 with a messaging component and watched his active users suddenly swell to 250,000.

He went to see Acton, who was still unemployed. He and Koum worked out of the Red Rock Cafe, a watering hole for startup founders on the corner of California and Bryant in Mountain View;

In October Acton got five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted cofounder status and a stake. He officially joined on Nov. 1. (The two founders still have a combined stake in excess of 60% — a large number for a tech startup — and Koum is thought to have the larger share because he implemented the original idea nine months before Acton came on board.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton

With Koum and Acton working for free for the first few years, their biggest early cost was sending verification texts to users. Fortunately WhatsApp was gradually bringing in revenue, roughly $5,000 a month by early 2010 and enough to cover the costs then.

The founders occasionally switched the app from “free” to “paid” so they wouldn’t grow too fast. In Dec. 2009 they updated WhatsApp for the iPhone to send photos, and were shocked to see user growth increasing even when it had the $1 price tag. By early 2011 WhatsApp was squarely in the top 20 of all apps in the U.S.

Two years later in Feb. 2013, when WhatsApp’s user base had swelled to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50, Acton and Koum agreed it was time to raise some more money.

Now WhatsApp became a part of peoples daily life. with Facebook's $19 billion deal, Jan Koum and Brian Acton were in the billioners list.