From the Ukrainian province to billionaires: the success story of the founder of WhatsApp Jan Kuma

A native of Ukraine, Yang Kum, immigrating to the United States as a teenager, went 20 years from surviving on social benefits to creating the world's most popular mobile messenger bought by Facebook for $ 19 billion.

Photo: Shutterstock

He chose a symbolic location to conclude an agreement to sell the WhatsApp messenger - an inconspicuous, non-residential white building a few blocks from WhatsApp headquarters in Mountain View (California). The office of the non-profit organization North County Social Services used to be located here, where Kumu once had to go to receive food using social stamps, writes Forbes.

Now in this building he became a billionaire. For the project with revenues of $ 20 million per year, the world's largest social network 19 February 2014 of the year laid out a record $ 19 billion. Of these, Qom accounted for $ 6,8 billion .

In 1992, Yang, together with his mother and grandmother, immigrated to the United States from the small town of Fastiv, near Kiev, fearing persecution because of the Jewish roots of the family. The first computer appeared at Kuma when he was 19 years old, reports “Success diary".

In the US, immigrants faced financial difficulties. In order to somehow survive, Kum got a job working as a cleaner at the store, as he could not find any other work at that time. At the same time the guy managed to learn.

Later, Yana's mother was diagnosed with cancer - and they survived due to her disability allowance.

At first, Kum could not get used to new people. He was very indignant at the cold and cruel style of communication and behavior of Americans, who, he said, were very different from friendly and kind-hearted Ukrainians.

By the 18 years, Kum became interested in studying and programming. He was self-taught and knowledge was gained using textbooks that he rented.

This bore fruit - Ian joined a well-known hacker group, where he was involved in official hacking of the servers of major companies to identify gaps in their protection.

During a part-time job, Kum met the future co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, who got him a job at Yahoo.

In the new work, Jan saw his chance. He left university to develop himself in the field of IT, as his studies distracted him from this.

After a while, Kum and Ecton decided to leave Yahoo and go on a free flight.

Ian understood that the future lay in social networks, and really wanted to work at Facebook, but was refused.

After a while, Kuma got the idea - to create a mobile application in the form of a messenger.

He got down to business, and in 2009, his messenger appeared, which did not receive any popularity. Almost no one was interested in the application.

He was ready to quit his venture, but Acton persuaded him to wait a bit. WhatsApp saved the fact that the IPhone has a function of pop-up messages, thanks to which the instant messenger in a moment gained unreal popularity.

When the 2.0 upgrade came out, WhatsApp already had 250 thousands of users. Ian Kum found an investor: Jim Goetz from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital loaned him first $ 8 million, then the company received another $ 50 million investment.

Kum admitted that at that moment his work was completely absorbed.

“It's called 'man in the zone.' For the first 2 years I only commuted to work, forgot what my nephew and friends looked like, gained 40 pounds (18 kg), stopped exercising. I arrived at the office at 10 am, and at XNUMX am I left home just to spend the night. When a person begins to feel that people need his product, he finds himself in a vicious circle. There’s nothing wrong with that,” said the programmer.

Some time later, Facebook, which refused to employ Koum, paid a record $19 billion for his creation - this was one of the largest transactions in the Internet industry.

“Objectively, we are the first to come up with a concept where an application is built on a phone number, and your social graph is contacts in your phone book. Now this is a fairly popular scheme, it is used not only by instant messengers,” Kum said in an interview with the publication The vilage.

Koum and Acton will continue to manage WhatsApp after its acquisition by Facebook. According to 42-year-old Acton, he and his partner are like yin and yang - completely different: he is a naive optimist, Koum is more paranoid. They both share the desire to create a product for the entire planet.

“In the next few years, there will be 5 billion smartphone owners on Earth who will potentially pay us money,” says Koum.

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