Jan Koum (WhatsApp)

This photo was almost certainly taken on the second floor of the Red Rock Cafe in Mountain View.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Koum

Koum was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Jewish.[6] He grew up in Fastiv, outside Kyiv, and moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California in 1992,[7] where a social support program helped the family to get a small two-bedroom apartment,[8] at the age of 16. His father had intended to join the family later, but finally remained in Ukraine.[9] At first Koum's mother worked as a babysitter, while he himself worked as a cleaner at a grocery. By the age of 18 he became interested in programming. He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.[8]

In February 1996, a restraining order was granted against Koum in state court in San Jose, California. An ex-girlfriend detailed incidents in which she said Koum verbally and physically threatened her. In October 2014, Koum said about the restraining order, "I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action."[10]

In 1997, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester.[8] Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.[8] 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.[8]

His profile on FlyerTalk:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/jkb76.html

2009.05.09 - A post promoting WhatsApp (no one responded)

hi there,
i hate shameless self promotion, but i couldn't resist posting here because i wrote this app with people like us in mind (those who travel a lot)
ever since i semi-retired a little over a year ago, i been traveling A LOT and i hated it when people tried to reach me when i am on the plane or out of the country. so i asked myself -- wouldn't it be cool if i just set a status for my iPhone, similar to how you can set a status on yahoo messenger or skype.
problem found - problem solved. so i spent a couple of months and developed a little tool called WhatsApp - it can let you set a status like "On the flight to munich, send email instead of calling me" or "In Japan for two weeks, my cell there is +81 829 282718"
our site with screenshots and faq is: http://www.whatsapp.com and direct itunes link is: http://itunes.com/app/whatsapp
i would like to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. hit or miss?
(of course app is useless 'til your contacts begin to use it also)
P.S. - i know a lot of you are BlackBerry users, and we are working on a BlackBerry version already (wish there was more hours in the day)

2009.07.15 - Two months later (in the same thread):

hi there,
just wanted to mention that version for blackberry is available. you can see BB screenshots of the app in action here:
http://www.whatsapp.com/bb.html
and you can download the BB app from http://www.whatsapp.com/bb/

2013.04 - Interview with WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum

This is the first camera footage of their company
This office is at 303 Bryant St., Mountain View, CA.
- How I know:
  - An article I read suggested that their first real office was in Mountain View, just a few blocks from the welfare office where Jan Koum collected money when he was broke.
  - If you slow down the footage in this video you'll see a "Speck" logo on the door of the building as they're walking in. It has a distinct shape for the "k" at the end of the word.
  - A quick Google search turned up this article: Menlo Equities pays $40 million for Speck Products headquarters in Mountain View
  - If you then go to Google Maps and type in the address you'll see the same houses and entrance shown in the video:

2014.01 - WhatsApp founder Jan Koum interviewed by David Rowan at DLD14

1:50 - They have ~50 employees, ~25 engineers and ~20 support staff.
5:50 - The interviewer says they have almost as many messages being sent via WhatsApp as through SMS, and Jan replies, "I guess; I don't know."
- So Jan really didn't know what the volume is for SMS? Or was he dodging having to admit that WhatsApp hadn't yet caught up to SMS?
6:20 - The interviewer asks how much pressure they're experiencing to sell (this was just a month or two before they sold to Facebook)/
15:50 - The interviewer asks what their long-term goal is. Jan responds that the original goal was to be on every single smartphone. He says there are ~1-1.5billion at the moment and projected to be 5 billion within a few years.
16:20 - The interviewer asks if they'll sell out. Jan responds that the goal is to build something sustainable, not something to pump and dump.

0:30 - Jan talks about his background
- Ukraine. US in 1992, 16 at the time.
- It was hard to keep in touch with people.

2:00 - They show his resume.
- Spent 9 years at Yahoo, dropped out of college.
- He explains how he met Acton.
- Acton recruited Koum.
- Seeing how Yahoo scaled was extremely useful when starting WhatsApp.
- They were able to recruit a lot of the people they met at Yahoo.

4:10 - Jan had about 25 engineers supporting 400 million users.

4:30 - Jim Goetz talks about Jan learning from Yahoo's mistakes.

5:45 - He was trying to both work and go to school, and he ended up dropping out.

6:10 - Q: Can you tell me the moment that you decided to start the company.
A: He started out trying to build a product, not a company.
- He bought an iPhone in January 2009, just a few months after the SDK came out.
- The original idea was not messaging; it was a status indicator (like Twitter?)
- They were able to use a lot of the code they wrote for the messaging, so pivoting was easy.

8:20 - Q: Jim, can you talk about how you met Jan?
- Jan wasn't responding
-