San Francisco: Jan Koum and Brian Acton together founded WhatsApp in 2009 after working for Yahoo and getting rejected by Facebook and Twitter. Jan Koum, moved to California from Ukraine at the age of 16 to escape anti-Semitism and oppressive tactics of secret police.
Koum, who turns 38 on Sunday, was a poor immigrant who queued up for food stamps with his mother. He even swept floors in a grocery store until his mother got disability payment after getting diagnosed with cancer. Koum enrolled into a state university in Silicon Valley and met Acton while on assignment at Yahoo in 1997. Within a year, Koum was working as an engineer at Yahoo and the pair were on their way to being close friends.
Acton and Koum left Yahoo in 2007 and took a year off, exploring. They applied for jobs at Facebook after returning home but were both denied a place. Koum, living off dwindling savings, decided to tap into the smartphone market after citing the new frontier with the iPhone and Apple’s online App Store.
The idea of a messaging service synched to people’s contact lists was born and Koum enlisted Acton into the venture.  The credo of the app being “No Ads. No Games. No Gimmicks†was shaped due to koum’s aversion to tactics of secret police in communist countries of gathering information on people. The formula led to stunning growth to more than 450 million users, with 50 billion messages handled daily.