Founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum is a billionaire today, but life wasn’t always so easy for him.
Early Years
Jan Koum was born in 1976 in Kiev, Ukraine, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. Koum was raised in a town just outside of Kiev for most of his young life until 1992 when he and his mother emigrated to the United States. The family spent the rest of his childhood in a humble two bedroomed apartment in Mountain View, California which they obtained through a welfare program.
As a teenager, Koum worked as a cleaner at the local grocery store to support himself and his mother while they struggled financially, living off food stamps and government support. At 18, Koum discovered his passion for technology and taught himself computer networking through the study of manuals. Koum didn’t have the money to pay for new manuals so he bought them from a used book shop and returned them after reading them to save money.
Although self-taught in computer programming, Koum went on to higher education and studied at San Jose State University. While studying he worked part-time as a security tester at Ernst & Young, where he met WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton in 1997.
By the time Koum was in his mid 20’s both his mother and father had passed away and he was living alone. He leaned on his good friend Acton for support and together they left Ernst & Young to work at Yahoo!. In 1997 Koum dropped out of university so he could focus his attention on his work as an infrastructure engineer. Jan worked at Yahoo! for approximately 9 years before leaving and later starting his own company, WhatsApp Inc. alongside Acton.
After evaluating the app store on his new iPhone in 2009, Koum realized there was an opportunity to create messaging applications. Koum named the app WhatsApp due to its similarity with the phrase ‘what’s up’ and released it in May 2009.
When WhatsApp was first released to the public, it was very unpopular. The product had a very limited number of users and was crashing constantly.
Koum’s luck seemed to change when Apple released push notifications which allowed WhatsApp to notify users once they had received a message. The app was adapted to become an instant messenger app where users would message contacts globally for free. The instant messenger like feature gained attention and WhatsApp’s popularity skyrocketed.
Facebook Acquisition
In 2014 Mark Zuckerberg acquired WhatsApp from Koum and Acton for the price of $19 billion. Interestingly, seven years before Facebook bought WhatsApp and two years before they founded the app in 2009, both Koum and Acton had applied for jobs at Facebook in 2007 but were rejected. Koum sat on the board of directors at Facebook for four years until stepping down in 2018 due to disputes with Facebook over their data-stealing scandal.
Koum’s story is an incredible story of an outsider who overcame a difficult upbringing and huge personal loss to build something that literally changed the world.
Until next time… ✌🏾
Your rising outsider,
Munatsi
Twitter: @Munatsi_
Twitter: @OutsiderRising