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John Koum, co-founder and CEO of WhatsApp, was born on February 24, 1976 in Kyiv, Ukraine and sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion. He is now one of the 100 richest people in the world with a fortune of 10.4 billion dollars. The history of WhatsApp is an emotional and inspiring story. Let’s get started and see how WhatsApp grew from a simple idea to the most popular messaging app around the world.
Who is John Kom, the founder of WhatsApp?
John Kom was born in the suburbs of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. During the Soviet Union, it was not easy to be a Jew and a villager. He lived in a house that had no electricity or running water, and the temperature rarely rose above zero degrees. They didn’t even have a phone in their house because they were bugged by the government. In this way, John Kom had a difficult childhood.To end this situation, the family decided to immigrate to America.
As a child, John started reading computer manuals and became interested in programming
John dropped out of college in 2000 after his mother died, but learned computer science from tutorials and conversations used in hacker chats. After working for six months at Ernst & Young, he was hired as an infrastructure engineer at Yahoo.
After some time, John Koum applied for employment at Facebook but was rejected. At the same time, Brian Acton’s request was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter. With their savings, they traveled to South America and tried their luck with new projects. This was the beginning of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp got investment
By 2013, WhatsApp had 200 million users and 50 employees. At this point, the founders decided they needed another investment. They received another $50 million from Sequoia, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. WhatsApp reached 400 million users in 2013 and 600 million users in 2014. It didn’t take long for WhatsApp to surpass its main competitors and reach 1 billion users.
Facebook bought WhatsApp
And of course, this success did not go away from Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes! Zuckerberg first contacted the founders of WhatsApp in January 2012. After several meetings in Silicon Valley, Mark offered Koum to join Facebook. In April 2014, WhatsApp officially joined the Facebook family. The cost of this work was exactly 19 billion dollars! John Koum, the 37-year-old Ukrainian who founded WhatsApp, did not want to sign the contract to sell his messaging service at his company’s headquarters. He signed the contract of sale while leaning against the glass door of an abandoned building that used to be a social services office, where he once stood in line with his mother to get food on a public assistance card. WhatsApp is becoming more popular day by day. Although its founders are not on good terms with Facebook now, the app is getting more reliable with updates released almost every week.
What is WhatsApp and what is its use?
WhatsApp was launched in 2009 and over time it has become one of the most popular text and voice messaging programs as well as one of the social networks in the world. WhatsApp is free to use and part of the appeal of this program is that it works on different mobile phone and computer operating systems and helps in messaging. You can use it to send messages, make voice calls and host video conversations through your desktop or mobile phone; In other words, it can use your Wi-Fi and mobile data to make one-on-one or group calls, allowing users to share voice, video, and text messages with different people or groups. This program uses your internet connection and phone number to send all user messages, including text, audio and video. It is interesting to know that this service is very similar to short message services (SMS panels), but the obvious difference is that the cost of using WhatsApp is significantly lower than SMS. Now that you are a little familiar with one of the popular social networks, stay with Bemeshu until the end of the article to get more information about this program.
Other advantages of WhatsApp
- Very little internet usage
- No need to create an account
- Automatic execution of the program at high speed
- It has the ability to send messages such as text, audio and video
- With the possibility of individual or group conversation
- It has beautiful and practical emojis
- It has the ability to share your location and display it on the map
- The possibility of creating special groups and group chat
- Identification and display of people who are not in the user’s mobile phone contact list.
- The possibility of blocking people
- temporarily or even permanently
- Updateable
