Jan Koum

He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Soviet Union on 24-2-1976. Now he is living in USA and have American Citizenship.

At the age of 16 he worked as a cleaner at a grocery. At the age of 18 he started liking computer programming and enrolled at San Jose State University, and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.

In 1997, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo.

Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up,” and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California

WhatsApp became popular in just a small amount of time, and this caught Facebook's attention. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg first contacted Koum in the spring 2012.

Because of popularity and huge amount of user many company contacted Jan Koum to buy this application.

Finally, Facebook Inc acquired WhatsApp in February 2014 for US $19 Billion. Currently Jan Koum is working at Facebook Inc as a CEO of WhatsApp & Managing Director.

WHATSAPP

WhatsApp is an instant messaging app for smartphones that operates under a subscription business model. The proprietary, cross-platform app uses the Internet to send text messages, images, video, user location and audio media messages.

In January 2015, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app with more than 600 million active users. In April 2015, WhatsApp reached 800 million active users.