1. PRESENTATION ON
JAN KOUM

4.  Jan Koum was born in February 24, 1976 in a
small village near Kiev in Ukraine.
 He is the CEO and co-founder with Brian
acton of whatsapp, a mobile messaging
application which was acquired by facebook
link.

5.  He was so poor as a teenager that he used to
save his old notebooks for school .
 He led a life full of hardships as his family
struggled hard to meet ends meet.
 His house did not even have electricity.

6.  However, Koum escaped from the trouble-
torn place when he was just 16 years old,
along with his mother.
They migrated to Mountain View and
managed to get a two-bedroom apartment
with the help of government support

7.  Jan Koum used to do menial jobs like cleaning
and mopping at a grocery store while his
mother took up a baby sitting job.
 Life took a tragic turn when his mother was
diagnosed with cancer.
 They lived on allowances from the government

8.  But life’s adversities only made Jan Koum
stronger and resilient.
 By 18, he learnt computer networking all by
himself with the help of manuals from a used
book store.

9.  Finally, he enrolled at San Jose State University
worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.
 Little did he realize that this was the beginning
of an illustrious career.
 Meeting Brian Acton was a turning point in his
life.
.

10.  The most interesting part of his journey is
that Jan Koum applied for a job in Facebook
and he is rejected in 2009.
 Face book turned me down. It was a great
opportunity to connect with some fantastic
people. Looking forward to life's next
adventure.

11.  Incidentally, in 2009, the seeds of this
amazing innovation were sown.
 Koum bought an iPhone and figured out that
apps would be the next big thing. He thought
creating a hassle-free and instant messaging
service would work wonders across the globe
if it had mobile users as base.
 he idea was to get people across the world to
network on a single platform effortlessly.

12.  Koum had even thought of giving up the idea
but Brian Acton convinced him to try it for a
few months. Initially, the messaging service
was tried on phones of his Russian friends.
 The response was encouraging. Koum
released WhatsApp 2.0 with a messaging
component and active users went up to
250,000.
 By 2011, WhatsApp found a place among the
top 20 apps in the US app store

13.  Two years later in 2013, WhatsApp’s user
base had zoomed to 200 million active users.
 Today WhatsApp has more than 450 million
active users, and reached that number faster
than any other company in history, points out
Venture Capitalist Jim Goetz in a blog on
Sequoia Capital website which has invested in
the company.

14.  In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400
richest Americans at position 62, with an
estimated worth of more than seven and half
billion dollars. He was the highest-ranked
newcomer to the list that year
 Facebook this week bought WhatsApp in a
stock-and-cash deal worth up to $19 billion
and gave Koum a seat on the social network's
board of directors.

15.  “WhatsApp is a simple, fast and reliable
mobile messaging service that is used by over
450 million people on every major mobile
platform. More than 1 million people sign up
for WhatsApp every day