Whatsapp is now had become the synonym for chatting application and it is probably the largest messaging platform in the world. Founder of this app has a dream in his mind to make an ad-free service, doesn’t store user data, and not exploit users. The success of the founder of Whatsapp is very inspirational because he is the guy who cleaned grocery stores and there was a when he is rejected by Facebook for Job. So without any further rubbish lets dive.
Whatsapp and Jan Koum success story
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Whatsapp founders |
Jan Koum is one of the founders of Whatsapp. He was born In a small village in Ukraine, therefore, his life was very hard and his family financial condition was also not good even his house doesn't have an electricity supply in it but after some time Jan and his mother migrated from Ukrain to California when he was of 16 years. Jan and his mother got a 2 bedroom apartment with some help from the U.S. Government. Jan and his mother have to stay stand in long ques for ration and other essential supplies which were under government subsidy because they had very limited cash and Jan used to reuse their soviet notebook paper for his studies. During this time he learning computer networking with reading it manually which he purchased from the book store. At this age, Jan started working as a floor cleaner at a grocery shop and his mother started working as a baby sitter. Jan was the guy who wanted to start something different which has the potential to change the world.
When things started looking good Jan a tragedy happened and his mother diagnosed with cancer and his life was nearly collapsed. So in the next 2 years, he trained himself to computer networking and this created a sudden interest in programming so he enrolled himself in San Jose State University along with this he started working in a company as a security tester and he worked there for around 6 months. Jan got selected in Yahoo as an infrastructure Engineer while working in Yahoo he loved programming so he dropped out of college and started working full time at yahoo. But in the year 2000 his mother passed away due to cancer. At that time Brian Acton invited him to play football at his home and together they worked 9 years in Yahoo and they tell that they go very good experience and knowledge at yahoo. In 2009 they both applied to work on Facebook but they get rejected. In the same year, Jan bought an iPhone and he founded that the AppStore of iPhone has very less application in it so he took this as an opportunity and an idea come in his mind to create an app which will not serve ads to the user and will take care of full user privacy on their server and the most important thing is their service will be very excellent quality so that the users doesn't have to compromise with the quality. Jan doesn’t like advertising its product even he did not set a signboard outside there office. With these thoughts in mind, Jan registered Whatsapp Inc on his birthday on 24 February 2009 in California. While making this service they faced many problems the biggest early-stage problem of them was, Whatsapp is kept crashing or stuck at any point of usage. This problem had become a headache for them because no solution was working on it even at a point of time they got very frustrated and lost there hope to further work on the project. Jan thoughted to give up and try to find a new job for him but at this hard time, Brian helped him out and give him the motivation to work on the project and asked him to work on it for few more months. After a few months help comes from Apple. They launched push notification but use to pin the user when they were not using the app.
Till 2009 Whatsapp doesn’t have any significant growth in user base at that moment of time Jan told Brian Acton to join the company and he started working for the company. He called several Yahoo employed with which they had worked and collected a seed funding of about 250k dollars which gave Brian the post of Co-founder of Whatsapp. After this step there were no stopping points for WhatsApp they got huge success and at the starting of the year 2014, they got about 430 million users were using WhatsApp. Whatsapp had never advertised its service commercially but they get that much amount of users and about 50 billion messages sent daily. Whatsapp has grown at this huge amount with only 55 employees who are serving millions of users. In 2014 Facebook acquired Whatsapp with the money of around 19 billion dollars which was one of the biggest acquisitions in history. Facebook acquired WhatsApp only because they want to be the number one social media platform in the world along with this Facebook offered Jan a board member position Facebook. Jan signed the acquisition contract in the building where he and his mother once stayed in the queue for subsidy food. Whatsapp office is still located in the mountain view California.
This story gives us a message that hardships only rise for new opportunities and who take advantage of these opportunities wins in life. So motivated and stay strong.
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