Though far from being a household name like Mark Zuckerberg, Jan Koum is one of the men responsible for an app you probably use everyday – WhatsApp. Koum’s name has featured quite a bit in the media lately, as the WhatsApp co-founder announced that he would be formally stepping down from his position as CEO on April 30th. The decision has attracted a lot of attention, thanks in no small part to WhatsApp’s relationship with Facebook.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, the company’s biggest acquisition to date at the time. But by late 2017 WhatsApp co-founder, Brian Acton, had thrown in the towel. Now that Koum is following suit, it begs the question – why? Surely a multi-billion dollar deal with one of the world’s most powerful companies is the dream? To understand how Koum could break his lucrative ties with Facebook, it’s important to examine how he became a tech titan in the first place.
Born in communist Ukraine in 1976, Koum emigrated to California with his mother and grandmother at the age of 16. His early life was marked by poverty, his family surviving mostly on food stamps while Jan supported his mother’s income as a babysitter through working as a cleaner in a grocery store. As a teenager, he became intensely interested in computer programming. He would buy books on coding, web design, and programming and devour the information within them, returning them once he’d learned everything within their pages.
His passion for programming led him to enroll in San Jose State University, where he supported himself by working as a security tester for Ernst & Young. It was here that he had a fateful encounter with Brian Acton, a Yahoo! Employee who secured Koum a job at the online giant. Koum dropped out of university to work full-time at Yahoo! Alongside Acton, and it was here that their professional relationship and friendship blossomed.
In 2007 both Koum and Acton left Yahoo! To explore other avenues. They spent a year travelling throughout South America together, before returning to the United States to get back to work.
In 2009 Koum purchased an iPhone and was inspired by the potential of the fledgling app store. The earliest iterations of WhatsApp, and its core values that Koum stuck to as the company grew, were evidently influenced by his upbringing in the USSR. Koum’s vision was for an app that had no advertising, no gimmicks, and which would allow users to send messages that were encrypted and not stored, so that privacy was kept as the utmost priority. The first version of the app operated as a status-sharing system, where users could view the status of their contacts. The app was slow to take off, until Apple introduced push notifications that informed users when their contacts had changed their status.
It wasn’t until WhatsApp 2.0 that the ability to send and receive direct messages was introduced, at which point the app’s popularity skyrocketed. Throughout their rapid growth, Koum kept a note from Acton pinned to his desk – “No ads! No games! No gimmicks!” These three fundamental values, along with their commitment to user privacy, was to remain uncompromised no matter what.
Privacy would end up being the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to Koum and Acton’s relationship with Facebook. Due to Facebook’s lax attitude to user privacy, and their sharing of user information with Cambridge Analytica and others, the relationship no longer seemed compatible with WhatsApp’s values. After his resignation in 2017, Acton has become fiercely anti-Facebook, going as far as to urge his Twitter followers to delete their accounts in March of this year.
The final straw for Koum, however, would be Facebook’s proposition of weakening WhatsApp’s encryptions, to allow for the mining of user data. It stood as the antithesis of what he envisioned for the app, but the final blow was yet to come. After announcing his departure from WhatsApp, it has now been suggested that in his absence the app could now start carrying ads. The WhatsApp that Koum and Acton created could soon be a thing of the past.
Though this is the end for Koum and WhatsApp, we can eagerly await what he does next, whether he creates something with Acton again or not. In the world of tech, Koum stands apart as someone who started with virtually nothing and worked his way into the Fortune 500 list, without once compromising his own values. His name might not be well-known, but what he gave us was an online communication method that genuinely had its users’ best interests at heart. Sadly, in this day and age, that’s something of a rarity.
There is no doubt that Koum will go on to better things, and that his dignified stance will mark him as an inspiration to a generation of programmers and entrepreneurs who prioritize user experience. If there’s one thing the tech world needs right now, it’s more people like Jan Koum.
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