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. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
We hear lots of stories where grandparents go to a store and buy a smartphone so they can keep in touch with kids and grandkids. – Jan Koum
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn’t. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
We want to do one thing and do it really well. For us, that’s communications between people who are friends and relatives. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
The message growth rate in Brazil – it’s not like a hockey stick: it’s like a vertical line. – Jan Koum
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. – Jan Koum
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product, and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it. – Jan Koum
In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like. – Jan Koum
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’. – Jan Koum
‘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. – Jan Koum
What makes our product work is the way we’re tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement. – Jan Koum
We’re somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don’t have these checks and balances. – Jan Koum
I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas. – Jan Koum
