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.
Life and career
Koum was born in Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). He is of Jewish origin. He grew up in Fastiv, outside Kiev, and moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California in 1992, where a social support program helped the family to get a small two-bedroom apartment, at the age of 16. His father had intended to join the family later, but finally remained in Ukraine. 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.
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”.
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. 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. 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.
WhatsApp became popular in just a short 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.
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.
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.
His mother died in 2000 of cancer in the United States, while his father died in Ukraine in 1997.
Jan Koum is an American internet entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion as of January 2018. He is best recognized as the co-founder and chief executive officer of the mobile messaging application “WhatsApp”. In February 2014, the application was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion.
Jan Koum was born on February 24, 1976, in Kiev Ukraine. While studying at the San Jose State University, Koum was working as a security tester for Ernst & Young. Eventually, he was hired by Yahoo where he spent the next 9 years of his life.
In 2009, he created the application which enabled users from all over the world to send messages from their mobile phones for free. Today, the application is considered as the largest mobile messaging service provider with total active users of over 430 million.
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