In April 2018, Koum announced that he was leaving WhatsApp and stepping down from Facebook's board of directors due to disputes with Facebook. Over the first half of 2016, Koum sold more than $2.4 billion worth of Facebook stock, which was about half of his total holdings. Ten days later Facebook announced that it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion. On February 9, 2014, Zuckerberg asked Koum to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed Koum a deal to join the Facebook board. Koum granted Acton co-founder status after Acton managed to bring in $250,000 in seed funding.
The app gained a large user base, and Koum convinced Acton, then unemployed, to join the company. Koum changed WhatsApp to "ping" users when they received a message, and soon afterward he and Fishman's Russian friends in the area began to use WhatsApp as a messaging tool, in place of SMS. WhatsApp was initially unpopular, but its fortunes began to turn after Apple added push notification ability to apps in June 2009. A week later, on his 33rd birthday, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up". He visited his friend Alex Fishman, and they talked for hours about Koum's idea for an app. In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. Both applied to work at Facebook but were rejected. In September 2007, they left and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Over the next nine years, Koum and Acton worked at Yahoo! together. Later that year, he was hired by Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer. In 1997, Koum met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young. He also joined w00w00, a computer security think tank started in 1996, where he met future Napster creators Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter. He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Career īy the age of 18, Koum had become interested in computer programming. His mother died in 2000 after a long battle with cancer. At first, his mother worked as a babysitter while he worked as a cleaner at a grocery store. Koum and his mother remained in touch with his father until his death. His father had intended to join the family later, but he never left Ukraine and died in 1997. A social support program helped the family get a small two-bedroom apartment there. In 1992, at the age of 16, he moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California. Koum was born in Kyiv, then in the Ukrainian SSR, on February 24, 1976. 62, with an estimated net worth of $7.5 billion, the highest-ranked newcomer to the list that year. He entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans in 2014 at No. According to Forbes, he has an estimated net worth of US$13.8 billion as of September 2022, making him one of the richest people in the world. He is the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for US$19.3 billion. Jan Koum ( Ukrainian: Ян Кум born Yan Borysovych Kum, Ukrainian: Ян Борисович Кум, on February 24, 1976) is a Ukrainian-American billionaire businessman and computer programmer. Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Kyiv, Ukraine)
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