HiaS:1 (How it all started) - WhatsApp, Brian Acton, Jan Koum

Most of us are familiar with Whatsapp.
To techies (and Wikipedia), it is a freeware and cross-platform messaging and voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook, but to us average beings, it’s just a fun platform where we send texts, make voice and video calls, share files and other media with friends (and family).
Now a few of us might not know it was written in ‘Erlang’ and founded Feb. 24, 2009 (about 9 years ago) by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, but what we do know is that we can’t seem to do without it.
Our friends are putting up great and funny stories, you’re probably hurriedly going back to read replies or even put up what you think is interesting or funny.
For entrepreneurs interested in start-ups and SMEs, we often tend to wonder how a simple app evolves into an app or service that millions cannot do without.
We often also wonder what it’s like being in the shoes of the founders or co-founders before the big break.
Well these thoughts led me to putting up a series on my blog:
How it all Started (HiaS) which would feature different startups, brands, founders/ co-founders, CEOs, etc. looking at their lives from past till present.

HiaS.1: Whatsapp, Jan Koum, Brian Acton.
Whatsapp was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton as mentioned earlier and the current CEO is Chris Daniels. It is also owned by Facebook which acquired it for about US $19.5 BILLION.
As at February this year, Whatsapp has a user base of over one and a half billion, which makes it the most popular messaging app at the time.
Now, let us look deeply at the biography of the founders.

Brian Acton
He is American and is a computer programmer and internet entrepreneur.
He was born on Feb. 17, 1972 (46 years) in Michigan but he grew up in Central Florida.
He graduated from Lake Howell high school after which he received a scholarship to study engineering at the University of Pennsylvania but left after a year to study at Stanford University with a degree in Computer science.
When he was 20 years old, he became a systems administrator for Rockwell intl. before becoming a product tester at Apple inc. and Adobe systems.
In 1996, (four years later), and two years after his graduation from Stanford, he became the 44th employee hired by Yahoo Inc.
In 1998, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester.
For the next nine (9) years, they worked at Yahoo during which he invested in the dotcom boom of 2000 and lost millions.
In Sept. 2007, he left Yahoo and spent a year travelling around South America.
They both applied, and failed to work at Facebook.
In Jan. 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and discovered that the seven month-old app store had a whole lot of new industry apps.
He visited his friend, Alex Fishman and talked about developing an app.
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 Caliornia.
In 2014, Koum and Acton agreed to sell Whatsapp to Facebook for approximately $19 billion USD in cash and stock.
It is worth noting that, at the time, Acton held over 20% stake in the company, making him worth about $3.8 billion.
In Sept. 2017, Acton left Whatsapp over a dispute with Facebook regarding monetization of Whatsapp and now he has a foundation called Signal foundation, co-founded with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018, and is currently worth $6.0 billion USD.
He is married to Tegan Acton.

Jan Koum
Jan Koum is a Ukrainian American entrepreneur and computer programmer.
He was born on Feb. 24, 1976 (42 years) [Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union] but currently resides in Santa Clara, California, United States.
He is currently worth US $9.2 billion and in 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 4000 richest Americans at position 62, with an estimated worth of more than $7.5 billion.
He was born in Kyiv, Soviet Union and is of Jewish origin, but grew up in Fastiv, outside Kyiv.
He moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain view, California in 1992 (when he was 16 years old), where a social support program helped the family secure a small two-bedroom apartment.
His father intended to join the family later, but never left Ukraine and died in 1997.
Koum and his mother stayed in touch with his father until his death.
At first, Koum’s mother worked as a babysitter, while he himself worked as a cleaner at a grocery store.
His mother died in 2000 after a long battle with cancer.
At age 18, Koum became interested in programming.
*(It is no doubt that environment influences a person’s mind-set and interests).
He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.
He also joined a group of hackers that began in 1996 called w00w00, where he met the future founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.
In 1997, Koum met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester.
He was also hired by Yahoo later in 1997 after which he left in 2007 travelling around South America and playing ultimate Frisbee.
Whatsapp was initially unpopular, but its fortunes began to rise after Apple added push notification ability to apps in June 2009.
Koum changed Whatsapp to “ping” users when they received a message and soon afterwards he and Fishman’s Russian friends in the area began to use Whatsapp as a messaging tool in place of SMS.
The app gained a large userbase and Koum convinced Acton, who was then still unemployed to join the company. Koum granted Acton co-founder status after Acton managed to bring in $250,000 in seed funding.
0n Feb. 9, 2014, Zuckerberg asked Koum to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed Koum a deal to join the Facebook board.
10 days later, Facebook announced that it was acquiring Whatsapp for US $19 billion.
Over the first half of 2016, Koum sold more than $2.4 million worth of Facebook stock, which was about half of his total holdings.
On April 30, 2018, Koum announced that he was leaving Whatsapp and stepping down from Facebook’s board of directors due to disputes with Facebook.
It was originally thought that by leaving Facebook, he was forfeiting his unvested stock, worth almost $1 billion. However, several months later it was discovered that he was still formally employed by Facebook, earning a reported $450 million in stocks from the company through a method called “rest and vest”.
Koum has always made it clear that he is not driven by money but the desire to build useful products.
*I guess he achieved both.

Source: Wikipedia (List of Internet entrepreneurs).
as edited by Wisdom Okubo.
(P.s) - paragraphs with asterisk (*) stand for author's comments.

25 notes on becoming - Boluwatife Afolabi.

‘I confess, like a true poet, that I am only broken by the sources of things’ – Peter Akinlabi
 
I
I write to tell you that the walls of my bones are made of contention and I am always situated between desires that threaten to break or mould me.
 
II
I write to tell you that I am not the cartographer of memory and that sometimes,
I forget my way home and stumble into women who offer to teach me the ways of water:
How to be soft, how healing comes in waves, how to open my body into the sea and drown all the things that hurt.
 
III
I write to tell you that my love is a nomad and while wandering here in Ibadan it fell into the hands of a woman wearing your face.
 
IV
I write to tell you that the second name for movement is uncertainty.
 
V
I write to tell you about hope.
How it is a dream where children grow into the belly of a barren woman,
how she wakes in the morning smelling of loss and longing.
 
VI
I write to tell you that scars are a lot like borders.
How my body is a map filled with dirt and death
and there is a sea in my eyes that takes and takes and on moonless nights
how I ache and ache beneath my hills and valleys
and call all the names of god painted on my tongue for the touch of mother and fullness,
how my prayers come back to me dressed in a void.
 
VII
I write to tell you that while writing this, language betrayed me and my mind assumed the form of a tabula rasa.
 
VIII
I write to tell you that silence is the name for protest and prison.
 
IX
I write to tell you that a river once came to life in the road between my palms
(some people say it is also a form of worship) so I closed my eyes, named all my fears and gifted them to the deep.
They came flowing back singing my name.
 
X
I write to tell you that I carry all your names in my mouth now
and my tongue don’t fit into this small space anymore
and mother said new songs don’t float out of mouths heavy with names
and children here don’t dance to night songs because all the birds have drowned in silence
and the night is longer here in Ojoo and I still melt into fear when your name escapes from the gap between my teeth and dissolves into the wind.
 
XI
I write to tell you that old words don’t have to die for new words to live.
 
XII
I write to tell you that all the children are going
or have gone and our dreams have now run out of colour.
 
XIII
I write to tell you about unknown languages.
How they fold themselves under tongues that have grown weary of seeking god,
how grown men trapped in a well of glossolalia,
are screaming
and dancing
and singing
and drowning under the weight of heavy tongues.
 
XIV
I write to tell you that I am a poem in exile,
hiding my grief in metaphors breaking the weight of my loss into syllables and rhymes,
because a man must not cry this is how I have learnt to hide my body from water,
cover my wounds with Cauliflower to stop my softness from spilling into mud,
because a man must not cry.
 
XV
I write to tell you that I wrote a song for all the boys we used to dance with that didn’t come back home, they say songs are voices that didn’t die.
I tried to sing lost boys back home, but I lost my voice singing.
 
XVI
I write to tell you that I wrote another love song for all my old lovers and poured it into the beak of a bird
but the bird died of grief.
 
XVII
I write to tell you that I have built many rooms in people that won’t stay
and called them home.
 
XVIII
I write to tell you about the way bodies open up to love
vulnerable
unguarded
like flower petals waiting for sunlight or water,
the way I left my body open for god waiting,
waiting
waiting.
 
XIX
I write to tell you about my sin how it is cheap.
How I sometimes wear it like a hat for everyone to see
or paint it black and call it guilt,
tuck it safely under my shiny clothes watch it stick to my black skin and dissolve into my bones
till,
till my body becomes too heavy for ablution.
 
XX
I write to tell you that in Ondo, a boy embraced the softness of another boy
and men, carrying the name of god on their lips rushed to kiss him with kisses of fire.
They said his body looked like sin, they said fire puries everything.
 
XXI
I write to tell you to battle forgetfulness this way:
Trap a shred of memory in a fist swallow it whole and call it a requiem
or a dirge
or an elegy
tell them it’s for the children we forgot to name in Baga and Damboa and Kummabza and Garkin Fulani because our tongues grew weary of naming names,
tell them how we bought dolls for the girls and asked them to paint where it hurt the most,
tell them our girls painted everywhere.
 
XXII
I write to tell you, lover
that my body is an endless sea of desire
and by god, when you laugh my body caves into itself
and my heart seems to melt into water.
 
XXIII
I write to tell you that I have wandered and wondered
and called salvation many names—
Eros
Ninkasi
Yeshua.
 
XXIV
I write to tell you about bodies that have forgotten the way home because
home is a bird in the mouth of a coffin
or a child in the face of a gun
or a boat in the embrace of a storm or an empty room smelling of stale prayers and dying songs
because home is another name for loss
and to remember is to betray a body
and gift it to grief again.
 
XXV
Finally,
I write to tell you about how I roused my body to life after it fell into Nadir. How I sat it under dripping honey and called it sweet names,
beautiful, bonny, beloved
gathered my reflection with affection everywhere I found it,
sang slow songs into the teeth
of all the tired boys inside my bones and told them:
you are enough
you are enough
you were always enough.
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boluwatife Afolabi is the author of ‘The Cartographer of Memory’
an electronic poetry chapbook published by the Sankofa Initiative. His works have appeared in Saraba Magazine, Arts and Africa, Expound magazine, African Writers etc.
He is also the poetry editor at agbowo.org.
He lives and writes from Ibadan, Nigeria.
Twitter: @oluafolabi