Jan Koum

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Jan Koum (born February 24, 1976) is a Ukrainian American computer programmer.

He is the co-founder and was the CEO of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc.

in February 2014 for US$19.3 billion. In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 62, with an estimated worth of more than $7.5 billion.

He was the highest-ranked newcomer to the list that year.

Early life

Koum was born in Kyiv, then in the Ukrainian SSR, on February 24, 1976. He grew up in Fastiv. In 1992, at the age of 16, he moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California. A social support program helped the family get a small two-bedroom apartment there. His father had intended to join the family later, but he never left Ukraine and died in 1997. Koum and his mother remained in touch with his father until his death. At first, his mother worked as a babysitter while he worked as a cleaner at a grocery store. His mother died in 2000 after a long battle with cancer.

Personal life

Koum is Jewish. He dislikes being called an entrepreneur and once tweeted, "Next person to call me an entrepreneur is getting punched in the face by my bodyguard." He feels that he is not an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are motivated by the desire to make money, whereas he has said that he only wants to build useful products.

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".

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Career

Koum had been interested in programming by the age of 18. He attended San Jose State University and spent time as a security tester at Ernst & Young. He also joined w00w00, a computer security think tank that started in 1996, where he met future Napster designers Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.

While working at Ernst & Young in 1997, Koum met Brian Acton.

Later that year, he was hired by Yahoo!

I am a system engineer, but I prefer to write an infrastructure engineer. He left school just after. Koum and Acton worked at Yahoo for nine years. Together. They stopped and went on a year off, cruising around South America, and playing ultimate frisbee in September 2007. Both of them wanted to work at Facebook but were turned down.

Koum bought an iPhone in January 2009 and discovered that the then seven-month-old App Store was going to create a whole new market of apps. Alex Fishman visited Koum's idea for an app for hours. "What's up" was Koum's first name shortly, so it's likely it's just what sounds like "what's up." He registered WhatsApp Inc. in California a week later, on his 33rd birthday.

WhatsApp's initial success was unpopular, but its fortunes began to turn after Apple introduced push notification capability to applications in June 2009. When they received a text, Koum changed WhatsApp to "ping" users, and soon afterward, he and Fishman's Russian friends in the area began using WhatsApp as a messenger system in place of SMS. The app attracted a large fan base, and Koum convinced Acton, who was then unemployed, to join the company. After Acton managed to raise $250,000 in seed funds, Koum was given Acton co-founder status.

Zuckerberg ordered Koum to have dinner at his house on February 9, 2014, and he had already offered Koum a contract to join the Facebook board. Facebook revealed that it was purchasing WhatsApp for US$19 billion ten days later. Koum sold more than $2.4 billion worth of Facebook shares in the first half of the year, or about half of his total assets.

Due to problems with Facebook, Koum revealed in April 2018 that he was leaving WhatsApp and stepping down from Facebook's board of directors. It was originally thought that by leaving he was forfeiting his unvested property, worth almost $1 billion. However, several months later, it was discovered that he was still officially employed by Facebook, worth a reported $450 million in stock from the company, using a scheme called "rest and vest."

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