Saturday, November 9, 2024, 12:16
The American dream is a now universal concept that explains how, by working hard, one can achieve whatever they want. But in essence he was talking specifically about migrants who arrived in the United States with one hand in front and one behind to end up triumphing.
Such was the case of Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp. He was born 52 years ago in a district of kyiv, and his childhood was spent amid the cold and scarcity so common in what was still the Soviet Union. I didn’t have drinking water at home, and the school I attended didn’t even have an indoor bathroom: the physiological relief, outdoors.
There was also no freedom of expression. “You can read ‘1984’, but to live there was to experience it,” he said in an interview with ‘Wired’ magazine. Being of Jewish origin didn’t exactly help make his existence more bearable either. Koum emigrated with his mother to the United States in 1992, when he was only 16 years old. In those first moments she worked cleaning supermarkets while her mother took care of children. Visits to the neighborhood soup kitchen were part of both of their daily routines.
Everything began to change, although its fruits would not come until years later, when young Jan enrolled at San José State University and, shortly after, went to work as a software security tester at the professional services company Ernst&Young.
He also acquired technological knowledge self-taught, reading used manuals, and through conversations in hacker chats. In 1997 his career experienced a huge qualitative leap, when he was hired as a system engineer at Yahoo. There, he would also meet Brian Acton, his future partner in business projects.
A decade later, both, now inseparable friends, left Yahoo and tried to access one of Facebook’s job offers, but were rejected.
The providence of the iPhone
The emergence of the iPhone at the end of that decade was like a revelation for Koum, who immediately sensed the potential of the new mobile phone tool and its application store. Thinking about the Apple Store, in February 2009 he created WhatsApp, derived from the expression “What’s Up” (“What’s up? What’s up?” in Spanish). Initially it was a status update app, intended to report when someone couldn’t answer phone calls.
The invention did not quite come to fruition, until providence crossed in the form of notifications, Apple’s brilliant idea to keep iPhone users aware of the device at all times. Later, Koum had the brilliant idea of facilitating access to WhatsApp without having to enter a password, something that was necessary in other devices and tools at the time, such as the Blackberry.
His colleague Acton enlisted the help of early investors, former colleagues at Yahoo. It was $250,000, enough to get off the ground, before new financial support arrived, this one much more forceful ($8 million) from the Sequoia venture capital fund.
Whatsapp ended up becoming an unbeatable messaging application, with the privacy of communications as its flagship. «I grew up in a society where everything you did was spied on, recorded and snitched on. When I was a child, I had friends who got into trouble for telling anecdotes about communist leaders,” Koum recalled to justify his obsession with encrypted conversations.
The sale to Facebook
In 2014, the destinies of Koum, Acton and Facebook crossed again. The two entrepreneurs were no longer rejected, as in 2007, but courted: the social network paid $19 billion for Facebook. Koum was already super rich and went straight to number 63 on the Forbes list of American fortunes (more than $7.5 billion), which he had already doubled by 2023.
The Ukrainian entrepreneur who is a naturalized American, who in May of this year could be seen on the docks of Malaga with his 100-meter-long yacht valued at $220 million, invests part of his fortune in donations of different types. For example, to foundations dedicated to supporting IT projects, or to universities. And he is especially active in his financial support of conservative, pro-Israel, and Zionist Jewish organizations in the United States, such as AIPAC (United States-Israel Public Affairs Committee).
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