Jan Koum, a Ukranian, went to the US at the age of 16
due to the hostile treatment Jews were receiving in the
country. When they arrived in the US, Jan and his
mother lived on food stamps. He met Brian Acton in
1997 at Yahoo, where they were both working and they
became friends. By 2007, the two of them men had
become disillusioned and they left Yahoo to seek new
challenges.
Koum founded WhatsApp in 2009 after he had been
turned down by Facebook and was joined by Acton
who had also been turned down by Twitter and
Facebook. They created a project that allowed them to
concentrate on creating an easy-to-use messaging
product and the approach paid off. WhatsApp amassed
450 million monthly users. Their idea was that smart
phone users should be able to easily message each
other without incurring fees from phone carriers. They
refused to advertise their product and only relied on
the recommendations of users of the product. In 2014,
Facebook decided to purchase WhatsApp for a
whooping 19 billion dollars!

Lessons from Jan Koum’s (and Brian Acton’s) story:

Your background is not an excuse for failure in life:
Jan Koum did menial jobs like cleaning and mopping
at a grocery store while his mother took up a
babysitting job. At a point in his life, he and his
mother depended on allowances from the government.
(Jan signed the agreement with Facebook on the door
of the social services office where he and his mother
used to stand in line to collect food stamps.)
Adversity should make you stronger and resilient not
break you: Jan learnt computer networking all by
himself with the help of manuals from a used book
store. He couldn’t afford to pay for lessons but he has
become a billionaire today.
You can profit from your experience: Jan’s experience
in communist Ukraine where phone lines were bugged
by secret police greatly influenced his decision to
create WhatsApp. He wanted a service that guaranteed
messaging privacy. “I grew up in a country where I
remember my parents not being able to have a
conversation on the phone,” he explained. “The walls
had ears and you couldn’t speak freely.”
If you find your job unexciting, get out: Jan and Brian
became disillusioned with life at Yahoo and they quit.
Don’t allow disappointment to overwhelm you: Jan
and Brian were turned down for employment by
Facebook. Brian was also rejected by Twitter and he
took it on the chin. Read this: “Got denied by Twitter
HQ. That’s ok. Would have been a long commute.”
and this “Facebook turned me down. It was a great
opportunity to connect with some fantastic people.
Looking forward to life’s next adventure.”
Be passion-driven not money-driven: Jan wanted to
create a product that would meet a need, and when
this product filled the need, money came. Today he is
a billionaire. Money was not his primary motivation.
He says he just wanted to build a great product. “I
started WhatsApp, to build a product. I do not want to
create a company around it, the goal was not to earn.
We wanted to spend our time building a service people
wanted to use because it worked and saved them
money and made their lives better in a small way.” He
tweeted in 2012 that he was not an entrepreneur:
“Next person to call me an entrepreneur is getting
punched in the face by my bodyguard, seriously.”
A good product will advertise itself: WhatsApp has a
‘no ads’ policy. The company refuses to be involved in
promotions, marketing and advertising and it has over
450 million active users, reaching the number faster
than any other company in history. This is what
WhatsApp says about advertising, “No one wakes up
excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep
thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow. We know
people go to sleep excited about who they chatted
with that day (and disappointed about who they
didn’t). We want WhatsApp to be the product that
keeps you awake… and that you reach for in the
morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see
an advertisement.”
Jan’s is an inspirational story that yet again proves
that as long as you refuse to give up but continue to
look for a way out, you will eventually have your big
break.

http://www.opinions.ng/get-inspired-read-the-story-of-whatsapp-creator-jan-koum/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=get-inspired-read-the-story-of-whatsapp-creator-jan-koum

nice one....i ll soon get dia, u ll also get dia in jesus name

Good one. Write up like this should be dotting the FP of NL. But thanks to scandals that drive traffic like hot cakes

*In waje's voice*
"Am so inspired"!!!