#Ceo of whatsapp inc update

The team agreed as he promised not to push advertising models on them. He eventually succeeded in meeting them and proposed the deal of being a strategic advisor and investing around 8 million dollars for more than 15 percent of the firm.

“The only time I’ve seen that in my venture career,” he said. According to him, the fact that the startup was already paying corporate income taxes was what made it stand out. However, Sequoia Capital’s partner Jim Goetz was persistent and spent 8 months wooing the pair just to have a talk. They believed it to be a bailout as most venture capitalists were inclined towards the advertising business model they hated. It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”īesides marketing, the founding pair was also dusting away all the meeting requests from VCs interested in investing. In fact, when asked why isn’t Jan boasting about this success, he replied – Their main focus was their product which seemed sustainable with its $1 paid model as WhatsApp was among the list of top 20 applications on App Store in 2011. Jan & Brian were not actually a fan of marketing and press. “Being able to reach somebody halfway across the world instantly, on a device that is always with you, was powerful,” – Jan Koum This is how version 2.0 came into existence. Jan recognised this accidental opportunity at his town-house in Santa Clara and soon realised the need for upgrading the operating model of the status app to an internet-based instant messaging application. In no time, this feature became a channel for instant messaging, and users started chatting with each other through statuses like someone would post “What’s up, Karen?” and Karen would reply by changing her status.

#Ceo of whatsapp inc update

Jan capitalised on this update and did some alterations to Whatsapp, which sent push notifications to friends whenever a user changed his status on the application.įishman’s Russian friends found it fun and started using it to update their own whereabouts and ping each of their friends with statuses like – “I woke late” or “Can’t talk, I’m at the gym”. The motive behind this update was to remind the users when they are not using an installed application. In June 2009, Apple launched the push notifications update. At that time, Acton encouraged by saying – made Koum so disappointed that he lost all the hope and started to look for a new job. Moreover, issues like battery draining, crashing of the app, etc. He demoed WhatsApp to some friends, including Fisherman, but none of them liked it. He named it ‘WhatsApp’ because it sounded more like what’s up, which aligned with the idea of statuses. Koum succeeded in developing the iOS application and incorporated the ‘WhatsApp inc.’ in California on 24th February 2009 The beginning of the journey was not a smooth one, but they paved their way through like many other successful entrepreneurs. So, Alex introduced them to a Russian developer, Igor Solomennikov, whom he found on.

But executing this idea was impossible without the help of an iOS developer.

Koum discussed the idea with Acton, and both started visiting Alex Fishman for more insights. He wanted to build an app that shows statuses next to the individual names of the users. Jan Koum bought an iPhone in January 2009 and soon realised the app industry’s potential on few months old App Store.