Social work success story... Jan Koum grew up in Fastiv, outside Kiev in Ukraine. As a teenager, when Jewish immigration opened up in the 1990s, he immigrated with his mother and grandmother to California where they were able to find a social support program that helped the family to get a small apartment and food stamps to help them settle into their new life.[6] Jan went to the local public high school and was able to go to one of californias public universities. At first Koums 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 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, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.[6] He and Acton built their little home town business into a 55 worker company that served an unmet need in countries with limited access to the internet. A couple of weeks ago, Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That’s where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom -which brought in a miniscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world’s largest social network. (Wall street journal: The 19 Billion Dollar sale to Facebook values the 55 employees of WhatsApp at a jaw-dropping $345.5 million per staffer, about four-and-a-half times more than the previous record, which was set when Facebook on-boarded Instagram’s staff of 35 for a billion dollars in 2012.) Recently on NPR, Jan Koum,said one of the first things he did after he signed the papers was call his social worker to tell him about the sale. Read more at: jewishbusinessnews/2014/02/20/whatsapp-jan-koum-the-story-of-a-man-who-kept-it-simple/ littlegreenfootballs/page/305639_Exclusive-_The_Rags-to-Riches_#DgepL68e7sZf0w8x.99 latimes/business/technology/la-fi-tn-confirmed-facebooks-19-billion-whatsapp-deal-is-jawdropping-20140302,0,5388152.story#ixzz2v2wOF2yC money.cnn/video/technology/2014/02/20/t-whatsapp-founders-food-stamps-to-billionaires-facebook.cnnmoney/index.html?iid=S_Taboola
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 07:38:46 +0000
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