Jan Koum | Success story of WhatsApp

Jan Koum is a co-founder of WhatsApp. He Launched whatsApp on May 3, 2009

Jan Koum:

Jan Koum was born in a small village Kiev, Ukraine on 24 February 1976. His life was full of hardship and deprivation(the lack or denial of something considered to be a necessity) both in relationship and finances. Their house didn't have electricity supply. Due to these trouble Jan Koum( at the age of 16 ), his mother and grandmother shifted to  Mountain View, California in 1992.  His father had intended to join family later but didn't left Ukraine and died in 1997.

In California he and his mother managed to get a 2 bedroom apartment with the government support. During these days his mother worked as a babysitter and he himself worked as a cleaner at grocery store. But his mother died in 2000 due to cancer.

By the age of 18 he became interested in programming. He enroll at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester. And in 1996 he had also joined the group of hackers called w00w00, where he met the future founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.

Beginning:

In 1997 he met Brain Acton while he was working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Later in 1997 Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo! as a infrastructure engineer and after a sort time he quit the university. Both Jan Koum and Brain Acton worked together in Yahoo for 9 years. In 2007 they left Yahoo and after a year they applied in Facebook but both were rejected. In January 2009 Jan Koum bought an iphone. When he saw the app store he realized that App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps and decided to make an application. 

He talked about the idea to his friend Alex Fishman. After the discussion he immediately chose the name "whatsApp" and after a week on his birthday he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. In beginning whatsapp was not popular.  But its fortunes began to turn after Apple added push notification ability to apps in June 2009. Koum changed WhatsApp to "ping" users when they received a message, and soon afterwards he and Fishman's Russian friends in the area began to use WhatsApp as a messaging tool instead of SMS. within few days many people started using WhatsApp but Brain Acton was still unemployed ans Jan Koum offered him to join WhatsApp. He granted Acton Co-founder status when he managed to bring in $250,000 in seed funding.

Jan Koum completely dislikes any kind of advertisements or marketing promotions. When WhatApp was launched it was paid application but people liked to use it instead of free messaging app.

To cover the primary cost of sending verification texts to users, WhatsApp was changed from a free service to a paid one. In 2009, ability to send photos was added to iphone version. By early 2011 WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps at Apple's App store. After then Many multinational companies started investing in WhatsApp. Till 2013 WhatsApp had 400 million active users monthly. 

On February 9,2014 Mark Zuckerberg asked Koum to have a dinner at his home and formally proposed Jan to join the Facebook. After 10 days Facebook announced that it was acquiring WhatsApp for U.S.$19 billion. Facebook pain $4 billion in cash, $12 billion as Facebook share and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders Koum and Acton. After the acquisition by facebook users felt a loss of services, leading to anger across social media. Over the first half of 2016, Koum sold more than $2.4 billion worth of Facebook stock. On April 30,2018 he announced that he is leaving WhatsApp and stepping down from Fcebook's board of directors because of disputes with Facebook Inc.

After some month it was discoverd that Jan Koum was still formally employed by Facebook and he is earning 450 million by Facebook due to rest and vest method. Today WhatsApp have more than 1 billion active users.