Stories of Ukrainian jews. Jan Koum

The historic $19bln deal between WhatsApp and Facebook was signed in a non-residential building in Mountain View, California, which once housed the office of a non-profit North County Social Services organization. Jan Koum, who emigrated with his mother in 1992 from Fastiv in the Kyiv region, had to come to this building more than once for a portion of charity soup.
On February 19, 2014, Facebook laid out a third of its free funds for the super popular messenger, and Jan Koum became the owner of a fortune worth $6.8bln in one day.
It took Mark Zuckerberg two years to persuade Jan to sell the WhatsApp he had developed. Koum resisted for a long time, because he categorically did not want any ads in his messenger. The same requirement stayed after the Facebook merger. Keeping the app free until the audience reaches 4-5 billion people was also one of the main conditions of Jan Koum and his partner Brian Acton. At the time of the agreement, the WhatsApp audience already numbered about half a billion users. Presently, this number has exceeded one billion.
The chair of the vice president of Facebook, which Jan Koum received along with the sale of his brainchild, he nevertheless left in 2018. According to Washington Post, Koum’s disagreement with the attempts to monetize the personal data of WhatsApp users in the interests of Facebook was among the main reasons of his leaving. His partner Brian Acton left Facebook a year earlier for the same reason.
To date, Jan Koum is ranked No 183 in the Forbes billionaire rating with a fortune of $10bln. He always fondly recalls his childhood near Kyiv, - wrote Boris Lozhkin on Facebook.
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Видео Stories of Ukrainian jews. Jan Koum канала Boris Lozhkin