Want to know the story behind WhatsApp? Wired spent three days with the company that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has just purchased for a cool $19billion.
The magazine spends time with the company’s founder Jan Koum to find out just why WhatsApp became so popular. Koum was born and raised in communist Ukraine and at 16 moved to the US where he and his mother lived on welfare.
However, Koum’s life made a turn for the better when he was employed by Yahoo! in 1997. In 2007 he left to set up his own company and in 2009 finally came up with the idea for WhatsApp
After starting life as an app to let users see if it was a convenient time to call friends and family, he decided to turn it into an instant messaging service. He had three rules: no ads, no games and no gimmicks. He would also not store messages, allowing users total privacy. He’d had no adverts around him throughout his communist upbringing, though he’d had no privacy either and it taught him a lot.
Of course, there’s a whole lots more to the story, including the input of Koum’s former Yahoo! co-worker Brian Acton, but we’ll let you read that for yourself inside the April issue of Wired…
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Posted by Amy Power.
