The name ‘Jan Koum’ must be popping up everywhere on Internet, social media, TV and newspapers.  For the starters, he is a Whatsapp Co founder and CEO and is in the news for all good reason after his start up was acquired by Facebook. I woke up to that news in the wee hours of Thursday and clicked on to his profile on Forbes. It was relatively huge article to read around 4 o clock in the morning but somehow mangled it. Before I start let me give is achievement a credit, He is former Yahoo employee and was waiting in queue to get government food coupons few years back but today he is a billionaire worth astonishing $7 billion.

Jan koum, was born to working Jewsih family in Kiev, Ukraine where there’s political chaos everywhere due to communalism and anti semantic policies. Ukraine is a country where even a normal telephone call between the family members is tapped by the state, Condition is even worse for Jews. As a result his family planned a move to United States but only he and his mom made to US while his never made it and died in 1997 in Ukraine. At the beginning of their life in US, Jan wiped floors in a grocery shop for daily ends meet while doing his high school.  

He later started studying about networking from tech magazines from a used book store and started interest in networking and he meets a guy named Brian Acton, a Yahoo Employee. While pursuing his college he joined Yahoo as a Security and operations Engineer in 1998(time of net boom). He had to drop out of college as his boss at Yahoo required him to concentrate on work full time (Yahoo was a relatively small firm then). He went on to work in couple of other Job Profiles in the same firm for few more years. In 2007, Jan Koum who had $400,000 savings from all these years stint with Yahoo feels his daily job was too boring and he left the job along with Brian Acton.  Both roam around South Americas and some time doing nothing.

After returning from South America, both friends tried for a job in Facebook but were rejected outright.

As nothing to do both started spending free time doing nothing as they had huge chunk of saving they saved from their stint in Yahoo.

In these free years, he makes some Russian friends in a coffee shop to watch football matches.  In coffee shop, Friends used to wait for others to come till they came. So Jan started to think of an App which will show status about what a person is doing at the moment like ‘In gym’, ‘in a meeting’,’ I’m busy’ or even to say my battery is low. He shared the idea with his Yahoo colleague Brian who had invested few startups earlier.  After few months he finally met an Apple app developer and a beta or immature version of Whatsapp was created and was installed on Jan’s newly bought iphone but it had full of bugs and was very slow. Jan started working on building on numbers database to create accounts he primarily targeted his Russian friends.

The Initial version of Whatsapp which was intended to become a status conveyor was not so successful and Jan started to think of searching for a job. But Brian came and motivated him to give some more time and fought hard to get a venture capitalist.  With initial funding of $250,000 Whatsapp got financial boost and he called many other developed from LA. It was released on iPhone and was released to ping each other as a messenger rather than its intended development.

Whatsapp 2.0 released with a pure cross platform data messaging service and rest is historyJ J. Today, jan is worth $7 billion with his 45% of shares in Whatsapp and his partner Brian Acton worth around $2.5 billion with his 15% shares in Whatsapp.  

Emotional man Jan signed papers of the Whatsapp and Facebook deal in the bay area where he used to get food coupons from the government.

Once a Facebook reject Jan koum, he will join Facebook as a one of the director’s very soon.