Jan Koum — tech (whatsapp) with roots in the USSR
Jan Borysovych Koum was born on 24 February 1976 in Kyiv, then in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union, into a Jewish family. He grew up in Fastiv, a town in the Kyiv region, where his father worked in construction. In 1992, at sixteen, he moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California; his father, who intended to join them later, never left Ukraine.
A social support programme helped the family to obtain a small two-bedroom flat, and they relied for a time on food stamps; his mother worked as a babysitter while he cleaned at a grocery store. He enrolled at San Jose State University and worked as a security tester at Ernst & Young, where in 1997 he met Brian Acton. Later that year he left university to join Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer. He and Acton worked at Yahoo! for nearly a decade, leaving in September 2007; both then applied to work at Facebook and were turned down.
In January 2009, after buying an iPhone and seeing the possibilities of the new App Store, Koum conceived a simple app that would show users' status messages, and he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. on his thirty-third birthday, 24 February 2009. When Apple introduced push notifications that summer, he changed the app to alert users to messages, and his Russian-speaking circle in Mountain View began using it in place of text messages. Acton joined as co-founder, bringing $250,000 in seed funding from former Yahoo! colleagues. Before its sale the company took no outside venture capital other than from Sequoia, and Koum held about 43 per cent of it.
On 19 February 2014 Facebook announced that it was acquiring WhatsApp for about $19 billion in cash and stock, at the time one of the largest acquisitions in the technology industry, and Koum joined Facebook's board of directors while continuing to run WhatsApp. He became one of the richest people in the world. In April 2018 he announced that he was leaving WhatsApp and stepping down from Facebook's board, reportedly after disagreements with Facebook's management over data privacy and advertising.
"Emigrated with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California, in 1992, at sixteen; his father stayed in Ukraine."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine); grew up in Fastiv
Born in Kyiv in 1976 into a Jewish family and raised in Fastiv, in the Kyiv region of the Ukrainian SSR, he left for the United States at sixteen in 1992 with his mother and grandmother.
Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine); grew up in Fastiv. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
""Privacy and security is in our DNA." — Jan Koum, WhatsApp blog, 2014"