WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide. – Jan Koum
A lot of my time, effort, and focus is spent on ‘WhatsApp’. And that, to me, is more valuable and rewarding than to work on anything else. – Jan Koum
If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don’t just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue. – Jan Koum
Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don’t want to be interrupted by ads when you’re chatting with your loved ones. – Jan Koum
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it. – Jan Koum
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data. – Jan Koum
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow. – Jan Koum
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through. – Jan Koum
Our team has always believed that neither cost and distance should ever prevent people from connecting with their friends and loved ones, and won’t rest until everyone, everywhere is empowered with that opportunity. – Jan Koum
Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out? – Jan Koum
Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and ‘WhatsApp’; he never had and will never have original ideas. – Jan Koum
Everybody who wants to join ‘WhatsApp’, we’ll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them. – Jan Koum
A lot of times, people start out with a lot of good ideas, but then they don’t execute. They lose the purity of their vision. You end up running around in circles. – Jan Koum
Anybody can build a company and sell the company the next day. That doesn’t make you special, it doesn’t make you unique, it doesn’t make you all that great. – Jan Koum
Users get unlimited ‘WhatsApp’. We get happy users who don’t have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans. – Jan Koum
Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state – the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech. – Jan Koum
People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works. – Jan Koum
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union. – Jan Koum
A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in Whatsapp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life. – Jan Koum