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Jan Koum [1976-0] American

Rank: 105
Businessman, Internet Entrepreneur

Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-American internet inventor and computer programmer. He is the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion.

Chance, Communication, Education, Intelligence

Quote	Tags	Rank
I want to do one thing and do it well.		101
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.		102
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.		103
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.	Intelligence	104
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.		105
Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.		106
I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.		107
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.		108
I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.		109
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.	Chance, Education	110
Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.	Communication	111
I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.		112
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.		113
Ironically, I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood. I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer;' I watched it some 20 times as a kid.		114
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.		115
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?		116
I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.		117
I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.		118
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.		119
When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.		120
I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.		121
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.		122
People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.		123
We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.		124
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.		125
What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.		126
The message growth rate in Brazil - it's not like a hockey stick: it's like a vertical line.		201
I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.		202
I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer'. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.		203
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.		204
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.		205
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.		206
Our focus remains on delivering the promise of WhatsApp far and wide so that people around the world have the freedom to speak their mind without fear.		207
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.		208
Everybody I meet who uses 'WhatsApp', I ask them a question: 'How did you hear about it?' And they say, 'My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.' We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.		209
Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.		210
Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.		211
People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works.		212
Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.		213
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.		214
'WhatsApp' began as a simple idea: ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.		215
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.		216
On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.		217
It's important for people to have freedom to use whatever product they want. We have no problems with other people using other apps, so long as they keep using 'WhatsApp'.		218
I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.		219
We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.		220
WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.		221
We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.		222
In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like.		223

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