Words matter. These are the best Jan Koum Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.
I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.
Users get unlimited ‘WhatsApp’. We get happy users who don’t have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans.
If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don’t just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.
The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn’t because you don’t know where things are going to go in the future.
We’ve taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.
I didn’t have a computer until I was 19 – but I did have an abacus.
I grew up watching ‘Disco Dancer’. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.
Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state – the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.
In terms of security and privacy, what people care about the most is the privacy of their messages.
Our focus remains on delivering the promise of WhatsApp far and wide so that people around the world have the freedom to speak their mind without fear.
We’re not interested in bombarding our users with, ‘Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.’ It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.
People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works.
People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible.
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.
It’s important for people to have freedom to use whatever product they want. We have no problems with other people using other apps, so long as they keep using ‘WhatsApp’.
Communication is at the very core of our society. That’s what makes us human.
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.
Everybody I meet who uses ‘WhatsApp’, I ask them a question: ‘How did you hear about it?’ And they say, ‘My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.’ We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.
Anybody can build a company and sell the company the next day. That doesn’t make you special, it doesn’t make you unique, it doesn’t make you all that great.
We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.
On my iPhone 3GS, I use ‘Instagram’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘Touch’.
I grew up in a country where advertising doesn’t exist.
WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.
The message growth rate in Brazil – it’s not like a hockey stick: it’s like a vertical line.
I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn’t speak freely.
A lot of companies are global.
We’re not advertisement-driven, so we don’t need personal databases.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo – there’s a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.
Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don’t want to be interrupted by ads when you’re chatting with your loved ones.
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.
Everybody who wants to join ‘WhatsApp’, we’ll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.
What makes our product work is the way we’re tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.
‘WhatsApp’ began as a simple idea: ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.
People have SMS, right? It stinks. It’s a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.
In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.
I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.
Clearly, you can’t believe everything you read in the press.
I have many regrets and things I wish I could go back and change, but I have also worked hard and tried to improve myself.
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.
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.
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.
Ironically, I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood. I grew up watching ‘Disco Dancer;’ I watched it some 20 times as a kid.
In Russia, you really learn about a person.
We’re obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones.
