Jan Koum Biography and Net Worth

Jan Koum is the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and Koum left the company in 2018 amidst arguments over the business model and concerns about Facebook’s data privacy policies. 

Koum was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1976, and he immigrated to California at age 16 with his mother. Koum developed an interest in computer programming around age 18, and he enrolled at San Jose State University.

While still in school, he worked for Ernst & Young as a security tester. It was there that he met his future WhatsApp co-founder, Brian Acton. In 1997, he quit school after being hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He stayed with the company for nine years, as did Acton. In 2007, the two left Yahoo and spent a year traveling. 

After purchasing an iPhone in January 2009, Koum quickly realized the potential of the app industry and developed the idea for WhatsApp, incorporating the company just a month later on February 24. Initially, it served as a digital address book that allowed users to display and update a status, such as “At work,” “Battery low,” or “Can’t talk, in a meeting.”

After a quiet first few months, the app started to take off when Apple introduced push notifications, allowing WhatsApp to “ping” its users with status updates.

As people began changing their statuses regularly to communicate with one another, Koum realized he had created an instant messaging platform. At the time, the only other free text messaging service was BlackBerry’s BBM, which only worked between BlackBerries, and the value of connecting people internationally for free was unmatched.

After releasing WhatsApp 2.0 with a messaging component, active users soared to 250,000. Koum brought Acton onto the team, granting him co-founder status after he secured $250,000 in seed funding. By February 2013, the company had 200 million users and had accepted $8 million in venture capital from Sequoia. That year, they took another $50 million in funding and doubled their staff from 50 to 100. 

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg courted Koum over dinner, proposing that he join Facebook’s board. 10 days later, Facebook’s $19.3 billion acquisition of WhatsApp was announced. The acquisition put Koum on Forbes’ list of the 400 Richest Americans with an estimated $7.5 billion net worth at the time.

In 2016, he sold over $2.4 billion of his Facebook stock, nearly half his total holdings. In 2018, he announced his departure from WhatsApp and Facebook.