The Story of WhatsApp is a testament to the will and dedication that you need to uplift your life from the lowest point. Look at the growth of WhatsApp, which started as a status-updating app that has now become the sole bearer of delivering messages worldwide.
Table of Contents
The Background
It was 1992, just one year after the fall of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republic), A family of immigrants from Ukraine a newly formed country from the disintegration of the USSR arrived in the United States in the hope of freedom, a better lifestyle, and good opportunities. It was a family of a young teenager, his mother, and his grandmother looking forward to a new beginning.
The family struggled to meet their daily expenses and barely had any money to upgrade their life to their expectations. Due to limited money, the teenager used to save his old Soviet notebooks for school and would queue up with his mother to seek food stamps under government subsidy.
At the same time, in another part of the same country was another person who had just lost a small fortune due to “The dot-com bubble in the United States“. It was a dot-com domain crash that over the years piled up to result in wiping over $5 trillion from the market.
Very soon these two individuals will meet each other while working at Yahoo. The then-biggest search engine in the world.
These two friends are Jan Koum (The immigrant from Ukraine) and Brian Acton. While working at Yahoo both of them came together to disrupt the communication sector by developing a private and secure messaging app that respected users’ privacy and was not bugged with specialized ads. Little did they have visioned that in the year 2024, the app would cater to 2.95 billion monthly active users worldwide with over 160 billion messages delivered every day.
Struggle in USSR
We will talk about the inspiring success story of Jan Koum and Brian Acton who invested their blood, sweat, and tears to make WhatsApp the most sought-after company in the world. Jan Koum was born in a Jewish family in the rural areas of Ukraine was at that time under the U.S.S.R regime and is currently involved in the conflict with the Russian Federation. But this was during the Soviet Era, so being Jewish and living in a rural area under the USSR regime was not at all as easy as it may sound.
Growing up Jan and his family lived in a simple house that did not even have decent facilities for daily survival such as regular electricity connection, or room heaters as well as living in a country that mostly had a temperature below 0° and was constantly freezing, they did not even have hot water. The family could not use any form of communication device as it was strictly prohibited as they were often tapped by the communist government. To worsen things even more, for being financially unwell he also had to constantly go through the irregularities of hardships as well.
Trauma Resulting in Action
As a child, Jan Koum experienced the negative effects of growing up in a Communist regime (U.S.S.R) that forced complete control over the daily life of individuals, resulting in deeply influencing his strong commitment to privacy protection and secure data transfer. This sense resulted in the making of WhatsApp keeping privacy and user security the central pillar of development.
Moving to Mountain View California in 1992
After living almost his entire teenage year under the USSR regime, in an attempt to put all the struggle to an end Jan along with his mother and grandmother decided to move to Mountain View California in 1992. In the US survival was even more difficult as they had to go through daily ups and downs. The family somehow managed to get a two-bedroom apartment with the help of a social group. During this time Jan began to show interest in computers and started to learn computer networking by reading manuals that he used to purchase from a bookstore.
At the age of 16, to support their daily need, Jan worked at a grocery store, and his mother worked as a babysitter. Things were looking steady for the immigrant family but very soon another tragedy pushed them hard as Jan’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. Jan believed in this philosophy “Whatever did not kill you only made you stronger –Friedrich Nietzsche’s”. This phase of his life was only making him stronger for upcoming endeavors. Endeavors that would put Jan on the list of people who made a change and created a mass impact on humans. His adversities were only making him more resilient in the pursuit of greatness.
In the coming next 2 years, Jan had fully trained himself with essential computer knowledge, knowing almost all about computer networking and programming, and was all set to take up his next task.
For further study, He enrolled at the famous San Jose State University for additional knowledge and began working with Ernst & Young as a security tester. In only 6 months he got the biggest opportunity of his life when he was selected to work for Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. Working for Yahoo was a big thing back then. This timeline is off when he was still studying at the San Jose State University. Yahoo back then was just another startup(and Google was nowhere close) and was beginning to grow.
Since Jan loved what he was doing he dropped out of college and moved ahead with Yahoo, however, his happiness was short-lived as his mother couldn’t outbeat cancer for long, and sadly passed away in the year 2000 leaving Jan all alone.
In this difficult time, Jan was all alone and this is when his friend from Yahoo, Brian Action stepped up and helped him fight the loneliness in his life by inviting Jan to his house. Slowly time healed Jan, and together with Brian, both spent almost a decade working for Yahoo and gained precious knowledge and experience.
The Facebook Rejection Timeline – from 2009
It was the time of a young company was taking over the world and growing rapidly Facebook.com. Both Brian and Jan applied for a role at Facebook but got rejected. The rejection could have disappointed anyone, but it became a vital point for the birth of something extraordinary. Instead of dwelling on the rejection, both Brian and Koum channel their disappointment to develop something of their own.
The Story of WhatsApp – The Vision Behind Privacy
Later in January 2009, the iPhone gradually started to become popular throughout the USA. Jan bought one and quickly began to realize that the 7-month-old app store was in the process of launching a whole new range of apps. This gave him a brilliant idea of a status-updating app that was soon transitioned into a dedicated messaging service app, although the idea itself was at very early stages they were very clear about three rules.
- Their service would not carry any advertising.
- Their service would be a satisfying experience.
- Keeping in mind the privacy of their customers their product would not store any messages additionally they would also continue to deliver the product without any gimmicks or stunts with an endless amount of readability and experience.
The Trauma of the USSR and The Story of WhatsApp
Growing up in the USSR regime Jan Koum had it in his mind that privacy is the most precious thing in this world and no other should have access to one’s personal space. The trauma he faced living under a controlled communist regime eventually got cured by the development of WhatsApp where he was determined to not let anyone bargain on privacy.
Confident with their faith and vision in mobile messaging technology, Acton and Koum founded WhatsApp in 2009. They developed a mobile application that would revolutionize the way people exchanged messages privately, enabling them to send various types of messages including text, images, videos, and more at a fraction of the cost of traditional SMS that used to be unaffordable for most in early 2009.
Having figured this out, Jan quickly got the name WhatsApp Incorporated on his birthday, that is, the 24th of February 2009, in California. Now, as the work of app development progressed, they figured that WhatsApp kept crashing and getting stuck at a particular point. The process of developing the app successfully was so frustrating that at one point even Jan himself lost hope and felt like moving on from the product. But Brian somehow kept him hooked and asked him to invest a little more time in it and along with him overcame this problem eventually WhatsApp was launched in February 2009 as a paid messaging app costing .99 cents per year.
Initially, the App didn’t do well and was on the verge of wasting a lot of personal investments from the initial team. But as they say “Fortune favours the brave”.
Finally, a few months down the line, help came from Apple; they launched their push notifications for iPhone, which used to ping their users when they weren’t using the app. But the problem was till August 2009, WhatsApp was not showing any major significant growth. This was the time, Jan persuaded Brian Acton to join him in the development of WhatsApp. Later, in October of 2009, Brian contacted several old Yahoo buddies and got together a $250,000 seed funding. This earned Brian the title of co-founder, and since then, there has been no stopping for this tech phenomenon.
WhatsApp’s user-friendly interface, end-to-end encryption, and ad-free model quickly garnered millions of users worldwide, and the app was an instant hit.
Rapid Growth and Global Dominance of WhatsApp
By early 2014, WhatsApp had witnessed humongous growth in its user base, with millions of people across the globe using its messaging service. WhatsApp had never publicized or promoted itself anywhere and had organically grown in numbers. By that time, WhatsApp had only 55 employees working tirelessly who were serving millions of people each day. Later, the very next month, in February 2014, Facebook declared that they were acquiring WhatsApp in a deal that was started to be one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history.
The growth of the WhatsApp messaging app was nothing sort of spectacular. By 2014, it had crossed over 600 million users worldwide. Facebook, although a little late began to realize the potential threat the messaging app could cause to its fleet of apps and eventually decided to buy the product. In February 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for an astonishing $19 billion in cash and stock, it was the most expensive tech acquisition in history.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp at a whopping $19 billion and also offered a board member position to Jan in Facebook. Jan Koum signed the “Facebook takeover of WhatsApp” contract at an unused but very familiar building in Silicon Valley, this was the building where he and his mother once queued to collect food stamps.
Quit because of dishonesty.
In the “Facebook takeover of WhatsApp,” term sheet Facebook promised to not change the privacy controls of WhatsApp and let the original members control it, but soon started to disturb the policy which eventually led both Brian (Stockholder) and Jan Koum (Positioned) to opt out of the given positions and role on Facebook.
Both Brian and Jan Koum got their fair share as promised and ended up becoming a billionaire. Jan Koum is now doing investment-related work through his firm Newlands and Brian is the board member of another secure messaging platform the Signal Messaging App.
Lessons
WhatsApp will always be known for being the brainchild of Jan Koum and Brian Acton and their best creation that respected users’ privacy at any cost. The ups and downs, the setbacks, and nothing could stop them from delivering what they believed to be exactly necessary for the world.
This was the story of WhatsApp, this is Ankit from magazinerichkids.com, I hope you liked the story and I will see you again shortly.
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