Whatsapp
Foundation
Whatsapp was started by Jan Koum, Ukrainian more than five
years ago. In earlier years after arriving from Ukraine Koum and his mother
stood in line to collect food stamps in the North Country social services
office.
He own 45% in the co. He was working with Yahoo left Yahoo in
2007 with his Yahoo engineer Brain action and started a co. known as whatsapp.
They decided not to place advertisement on their app and stick to that policy. Users who download WhatsApp on their phones are greeted
with a link that reads "Why we don't sell ads."
They just stick to their plan to dominate Mobile messaging
that clicked in such a way that they had more than 300 million daily active
users and 600 million pics are uploaded on whatsapp. Facebook has daily more
than 700 million active users and 350 million pics are uploaded on Facebook.
WhatsApp doesn’t collect information like name, gender,
address or age. Instead, users are approved after their phone numbers are
authenticated. Like technology titans Bill Gates and
Mark Zuckerberg, Koum dropped out of college.
FACEBOOK
Whatsapp Deal
Now Facebook buys whatsapp for 19 billion dollars which when
converted into Rs. Comes out to be Rs 1,20,000 crore.
"When advertising is involved, you the user are the
product," Koum wrote in a 2012 blog post, WhatsApp charges 99 cents a
year, as they have advertisement base.
Whatsapp has 55 EMPLOYEES valuing it at $344 million per employee
WhatsApp amassed 450 million monthly users -- twice as many
as Twitter Inc. -- who send billions of messages a day. Facebook Mark
Zuckerberg bought their five-year-old company in the largest Internet deal
since Time Warner’s $124 billion merger with AOL in 2001.
Koum will join Facebook’s board of directors once the deal
goes through. Facebook declined to make him or Acton available for an
interview.
Brain Acton other partner in Whatsapp, 42, grew up in
Michigan and was employee No. 44 at Yahoo, working on advertising, shopping and
travel services, according to Wired. He invested during the boom and lost
millions of dollars when the market imploded, according to Forbes.
Facebook
Rejected them earlier:-
After exiting Yahoo, Acton said on Twitter that he was turned
down for a job at Facebook in 2009. He even not allowed
Brain Action later hired Koum at Yahoo and served as his
mentor, inviting him over to his house and taking him skiing, Forbes said.
The two founded WhatsApp later that year with the idea that
smartphone users should be able to easily message each other without incurring
fees from phone carriers. The service is free for a year, then costs 99 cents
per year after that.
Stained Carpeting
In addition to avoiding advertising and self promotion, the
two founders also mostly avoided Silicon Valley investors, and were adamant
that they didn’t need any funding in 2010.
Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested $8 million in
WhatsApp in 2011, for a more than 15 percent stake that is now worth about $3.5
billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal.
Koum said in a statement on the company’s website that
WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently.