Jan Koum

A week later, on his 33rd birthday, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.

Jan Koum (born Yan Borysovych Kum,, on February 24, 1976) is a Ukrainian-American billionaire businessman and computer programmer.

Yan Borysovych Koum was born in Kyiv, then in the Ukrainian SSR, on February 24, 1976 into a Jewish family.

He grew up in Fastiv.

In 1992, at the age of 16, he moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California.

A social support program helped the family get a small two-bedroom apartment there.

He also joined w00w00, a computer security think tank started in 1996, where he met future Napster creators Shawn Fanning and Jordan Ritter.

His father had intended to join the family later, but he never left Ukraine and died in 1997.

Koum and his mother remained in touch with his father until his death.

At first, his mother worked as a babysitter while he worked as a cleaner at a grocery store.

In 1997, Koum met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young.

Later that year, he was hired by Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer.

He quit school shortly thereafter.

Over the next nine years, Koum and Acton worked at Yahoo!

together.

His mother died in 2000 after a long battle with cancer.

By the age of 18, Koum had become interested in computer programming.

He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.

In September 2007, they left and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee.

Both applied to work at Facebook but were rejected.

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.

He visited his friend Alex Fishman, and they talked for hours about Koum's idea for an app.

Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up".

WhatsApp was initially unpopular, but its fortunes began to turn after Apple added push notification ability to apps in June 2009.

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.

The app gained a large user base, and Koum convinced Acton, then unemployed, to join the company.

Koum granted Acton co-founder status after Acton managed to bring in $250,000 in seed funding.

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.

According to Forbes, he has an estimated net worth of US$15.2 billion as of October 2023, making him one of the richest people in the world.

Koum was ranked 44th on the Forbes' list of richest Americans in 2023 with a net worth of $15.1 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.

Ten days later Facebook announced that it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion.

In 2014, Koum donated $1 million to The FreeBSD Foundation and close to $556 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF).

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.

In 2016, The FreeBSD Foundation received another $500,000; further donations from the Koum Family Foundation included $750,000 in 2018 and $500,000 in 2019.

To support relief efforts during the 2022 Russian-Ukraine war, Koum donated $17 million to the European Jewish Association and $10.6 million to the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS.

Known for his conservative political views, Koum has made donations to right-wing Israeli causes: $600,000 to the Maccabee Task Force, $6 million to Friends of Ir David, and $175,000 to Central Fund of Israel.

In April 2018, Koum announced that he was leaving WhatsApp and stepping down from Facebook's board of directors due to disputes with Facebook.

It was originally thought that by leaving he was forfeiting his unvested stock, worth almost $1 billion.

However, several months later it was discovered that he was still formally employed by Facebook, earning a reported $450 million in stock from the company through a method called "rest and vest".