Congrats to Jan and Brian: From Zero to $19 Billion in Five Years

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WhatsApp Messenger

A couple of ultimate-Frisbee friends
from my days at Yahoo!, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, went on to make a little messaging app with
the silly name “WhatsApp” that I've been running on my phone for a few
years. It's quite convenient for communicating with friends while on the
go.

It's much nicer than the traditional SMS phone messaging. “Frictionless
messaging”. That's why 320 million people actually use it every day. I last used it an hour ago to chat with my brother.

Anyway, I just found out that these friends sold their little messaging app to Facebook for $19,000,000,000.

I'm so thrilled for them.

It's particularly sweet for Brian because early on while he was “helping Jan on his app”, Brian applied for a job at Facebook. He was turned down:

Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure.

— Brian Acton (@brianacton) August 3, 2009

So he went full-in with Jan on WhatsApp. Quite the adventure, indeed!

By the way, the “WhatsApp” name comes from their original idea for their
app... when I first started testing it for them
in early 2009, its intent was merely a
current-status tool, so your friends could see what you were doing
at the moment (“At the gym”, “in a meeting; don't bother me”, etc.). I tried to be
helpful in testing, but practically speaking I
didn't think it would be useful; who's going to go to the trouble to
keep the status updated all the time on the off chance that a friend will find the information useful?

I'm glad that they moved the focus to messaging.

Congrats to Jan, Brian, and their small team! Unlike winning the
lottery, this was earned, building something from scratch that
creates real value for others. WhatsApp spawned a slew of copycats (the
most popular being LINE, which appeals to the early-teen crowd, and
Facebook's own Messenger), but WhatsApp remains the Gold Standard for
mobile messaging. Simple. Clean. Fast. No ads. cross-platform. A dollar a year.

Finally, a little tidbit about Jan from the early days at Yahoo!  Jan used to be the
most hated person at Yahoo! among the engineers, because when he joined as
the first person with a clue about Internet security, he forced us all to
start using secure tools for communicating among our back-end machines. We
had been used to an easy free (but decidedly insecure) world, and Jan's changes were
inconvenient and disruptive. We all hated him for it. Of course, he was
absolutely right, and over time he earned the respect he was due.