Jan Koum

Jan Koum
Jan Koum (left) with Brian Acton
Native name	Ян Кум
Born	(1976-02-24) February 24, 1976 Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	San Jose State University (dropped out)
Occupation	CEO of WhatsApp & Managing Director in Facebook, Inc.
Years active	2009 present
Organization	WhatsApp Inc.
Known for	Co-founded WhatsApp
Home town	Fastiv, Ukraine
Net worth	US$9.7 billion (May 2016)[1]

Jan Koum (Ukrainian: Ян Кум; born February 24, 1976) is a Ukrainian-American internet inventor^[2] and computer programmer. He is the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp (with Brian Acton), a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion.

In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 62, with an estimated worth of more than seven and half billion dollars. He was the highest-ranked newcomer to the list that year.^[3]

Life and career

Koum was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Jewish.^[4] He grew up in Fastiv, outside Kyiv, and moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California in 1992,^[5] where a social support program helped the family to get a small two-bedroom apartment,^[6] at the age of 16. His father had intended to join the family later, but finally remained in Ukraine.^[7] At first Koum's mother worked as a babysitter, while he himself worked as a cleaner at a grocery. By the age of 18 he became interested in programming. He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.^[6]

In February 1996, a restraining order was granted against Koum in state court in San Jose, California. An ex-girlfriend detailed incidents in which she said Koum verbally and physically threatened her. In October 2014, Koum said about the restraining order, "I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action".^[8]

In 1997, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester.^[6] Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum's idea for an app over tea at Fishman's kitchen counter.^[6] Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.^[6]

WhatsApp became popular in just a small amount of time, and this caught Facebook's attention. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg first contacted Koum in the spring 2012. The two began meeting at a coffee shop in Los Altos, California, then began a series of dinners and walks in the hills above Silicon Valley. ^[9]

On February 9, 2014 Zuckerberg asked Koum to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed Koum a deal to join the Facebook board - 10 days later Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 Billion USD.^{[10][11][12][13][14]}

Over the first half of 2016, Koum sold more than $2.4 billion worth of Facebook stock, which was about a half of his total holdings. He is estimated to still own another $2.4 billion in Facebook stock.^[15]

His mother died in 2000 of cancer in the United States, while his father died in Ukraine in 1997.

Trivia

Jan Koum was part of a group of hackers called w00w00, where he met^[6][16] the future founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.

In November 2014, Koum donated $1,000,000 to The FreeBSD Foundation, and close to $556 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) the same year.^[17]

References

External links

• Jan Koum on Twitter
  
• www.WhatsApp.com