Watch Jan Koum’s Story Of Rising From Rags To Riches

Focus on simplicity, listen to your customers and iterate if you fail – Jan Koum

Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, has lived by this principle and now, he has become one of THE most successful entrepreneurs we have seen in this century. Born in Ukraine, Jan faced a life of true hardship. He knew the meaning of living in the throes of deprivation. At one point of time, Koum was so poor his house did not even have electricity.

Jan Koum’s mother decided enough was enough. When Jan was 16 years old, both him and his mother left their home in Ukraine to move to Mountain View, California, in an attempt to create a better life for themselves. Even while they moved to have a better life, they had to leave Jan’s father behind. He never made it to the states and passed away in 1997.

The great American dream did not make its way to Jan’s life as quickly as he hoped. Everything in the United States was expensive. By 18, Jan knew he wanted to learn to program. He knew this was his destiny. Jan studied by buying second hand books and stationary and returning them after he was done.

Just when things seemed to fall into place for Koum, he was hit with a major blow when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Koum had to work odd jobs in order to scrape together enough funds to get his mother the treatment she needed. Unfortunately, she succumbed to cancer in 2000 and Koum was left to fend for himself in a strange and unknown country.

While working and studying, Koum realized nothing about college excited him and he decided to quit. In 2007, Koum joined Yahoo and this is where he met Brian Acton. Acton would become one of Koum’s closest friends. Very soon, Koum and Acton realized they were not excited about the direction in which Yahoo was going and decided quit together.

WhatsApp was developed over cups of tea. What started off as only an idea had now developed in a first of its kind, full blown app. By 2009, Jan publicly released the app and it became an instant hit. This pushed him to create the 2.0 version.

WhatsApp now has over 1 billion users worldwide and no one can seem to shake off the greatness of this app. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in a landmark $ 19 billion deal over the course of a few days and a bottle of Johnie Walker!

WhatsApp has come a long way from just being a messaging service, to being a globally used app that enables voice calls, video calls and provides end to end encryption of messages. Watch the amazing journey of Jan Koum from Ukraine to the United Staes of America and the development of one of the easiest and earliest messaging services, WhatsApp, here!