Jan Koum Quotes

On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.

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.

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.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.

I want to do one thing and do it well.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.

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?

WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.

In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like.

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.

'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.

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.

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.

If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.

Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.

We focus a lot on the quality of experience, speed, reliability. It's not sexy from a lot of people's perspective, it's not glitzy in the feature set, but it's what people come to rely on.

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.

We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.

I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.

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.

I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.

People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works.

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.

I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.

I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.

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.

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.

I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.

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.

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.