A lot of my time, effort, and focus is spent on ‘WhatsApp’. And that, to me, is more valuable and rewarding than to work on anything else. Jan Koum Read Quote
A lot of times, people start out with a lot of good ideas, but then they don’t execute. They lose the purity of their vision. You end up running around in circles. Jan Koum Read Quote
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product, and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it. Jan Koum Read Quote
A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in Whatsapp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life. Jan Koum Read Quote
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through. Jan Koum Read Quote
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data. Jan Koum Read Quote
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union. Jan Koum Read Quote