John Koum, one of the founders of WhatsApp, was a poor refugee who became an influential billionaire with his perseverance.
John Koum, one of the founders of WhatsApp, was a poor refugee who became an influential billionaire with his perseverance. Born in 1976 in a small village near Kyiv, Ukraine, John spent his childhood under the control of the Communists and the Soviet Union in a relatively poor family.
A house that did not have hot water and this living situation continued for a long time. He recently told the Independent in an interview: "You can read George Orwell's novel 1984 and get to know that situation to some extent, but the story is completely different for me, I have experienced that situation with flesh and blood It was not pleasant!"
Since his family was Jewish and Jews did not have a good status in the Soviet Union at that time, Kom's mother decided to immigrate to America so that his father could join them later, which never happened and the father could not find himself in his distant family. deliver However, at the age of 16, John entered the state of California in 1992 and settled in a two-bedroom house in San Francisco with his mother and with the help of financial and non-financial assistance from the American government. In the beginning, Jan got a job sweeping a store near their house so that he could cover the household bills. After finishing high school, he entered San Hoza State University, but he did not last long in this university and left without completing his studies.
Through one of the security companies in San Francisco, he was able to enter Yahoo in 1997 and take a small responsibility for a few years in this big company. This pleasant event in John's life coincided with another sad news that his father died this year. Throughout his teenage years, he always missed the constant communication with his father and other friends in Ukraine, because on the one hand, the cost of telephones was high for a newly arrived refugee, and on the other hand, there were always security concerns in Ukraine at that time. Therefore, one of John's dreams since he was a teenager was to create a device through which people anywhere in the world could talk to each other easily, without cost and without security concerns. Kom's work period at Yahoo introduced him to Brian Acton, the other founder of WhatsApp and one of the old employees of Yahoo.
John Kom is a person who does not make much noise in the field of cyberspace, and the purchase of his company by Facebook made him more popular. If we take a look at his social media profiles, we can see that he did not even mention being the executive director or founder of WhatsApp on his Twitter and only mentioned the name of the company as his workplace. In his LinkedIn profile, with a passing reference to his work experience at Yahoo, he only vaguely wrote that: "He has done some work there."
Now let's go to the establishment and launch of WhatsApp. In 2009, before writing the full version of WhatsApp, John registered his company in Mountain View and invited Acton to cooperate. The name he chose for his software is derived from the term that is popular among the American people, "WhatsApp", what does it mean? After writing his software, John puts it on the App Store for the Apple operating system, but the initial version does not have a very positive feedback and suffers from many disadvantages, this is where John gives up on continuing the work, but he is faced with Acton's reaction: "If you step back now, you are no more a fool! So pull yourself together." John tries to fix the shortcomings of the initial version in the next update, and from the next update, not only WhatsApp becomes a popular application, but its compatible version for Android, Blackberry and other new phones will also enter the market.
One of the main principles of WhatsApp and its founders is an environment free of advertisements. Since the beginning, WhatsApp has not been able to receive and publish any advertisements, and one of the main conditions for its managers to join Facebook has been to comply with this principle in the WhatsApp application in the future. Quoting the main character of the movie Fight Club, Kom says about advertisements: "Advertisements only make you work in vain and look for clothes and cars that are ultimately useless." Another goal of WhatsApp has always been to provide a safe environment for its users, so when you want to create an account on WhatsApp, you don't need to give your age, gender or place of residence. On the other hand, your messages are not stored on WhatsApp servers, because if this happens, your cyber security may be compromised.
John Kom says: "The storage of personal information in social networks and large sites is mainly because these companies want to have valid statistics of their users so that they can send them advertisements related to their tastes and habits, but because WhatsApp is a free environment Since it is advertising, he does not see the need for this and this will increase the security of his users. According to him, 18 billion messages are exchanged daily on WhatsApp among its 450 million users, and if all of these were to be stored, they could be misused by authoritarian governments and endanger the security of users. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why WhatsApp is so popular among Internet users.
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WhatsApp was finally bought by Facebook in 2013 for $16 billion at the time of the deal and $3 billion in fixed Facebook stock in future years. The interesting point of the story is that years ago, both Koum and Acton refused to join the Facebook team and were rejected by the recruitment team of this company - as well as the Twitter company. John Koum, who owned 45 percent of WhatsApp's shares, has now become a seven billion dollar man, and in addition to executive management, he also holds one of the seats on Facebook's board of directors. In his recent interviews, he mentions the realization of the American dream, a dream that within two decades has turned a poor refugee teenager who was barely making ends meet into a popular and successful billionaire, a billionaire who has made the world a better place to live in. It has connected more people much more easily than before.
Source: Itroz blog
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