The man who Brought us the free messaging service.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton co-founded WhatsApp. It was Initially incorporated by Juan Koum on 24 February 2009 And after 9 month
Beta stage, it was eventually launched in November 2009.

Koum was raised in a small village outside of Kiev, Ukraine, in a house with no hot water. His parents also rarely used their phones, out of fear that the government was listening in. That suspicion of government power and the corresponding appreciation for privacy apparently runs deep in Koum's veins: Throughout WhatsApp's history, he has been protective of users' privacy and opposed integrating advertising into the app.

An indifferent student, Koum, who didn't have a computer until age 19, taught himself computer networking from a manual he bought at a used bookstore and later returned.
Jan Koum was a teenager living in Fastiv, Ukraine, when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. He had little to his name when he left for the United States a year later.
He and his mother moved into a small apartment in Mountain View, Calif., where he attended high school and swept the floors of a local grocery store to earn extra money. They relied on government assistance to get by.

Koum attended San Jose State University and worked part-time as a security tester for accounting firm Ernst & Young. Later-Part of the work involved inspecting Yahoo's advertising system, a task that prompted Koum to cross paths with Brian Acton, who was employee No. 44 at Yahoo.

The name of the app, WhatsApp, was chosen because it sounded like "what's up".On his birthday in 2009, Koum incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. At that time, the app was not even written yet.
Koum's passion to create the app was partially inspired by his memories of how difficult and costly it had been for him and his family to stay in touch with relatives back in Ukraine. Koum provided an example of his mission when a young woman in 2010 begged him for access to the then-unreleased beta version of the BlackBerry version of the software, because she was alone in Australia and couldn't afford the tariffs to call home to relatives. That impressed upon him the importance of connecting people.

Jan Koum's idea began when he wanted to create something that ease communication, enhancing people to connect without any gimmicks. Based on making the world more open and connected, Koum and Acton wanted to make a simple alternative to texting. The idea was to create a service where people could reach friends and family anywhere in the world on any type of smartphone without having to pay for each message.

Today the 38-year-old co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile-messaging company that Facebook acquired a year ago for $21.8-billion, has a net worth pegged at $7.6-billion. He gave nearly $556-million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation last year to set up a donor-advised fund.

To know more about the inside story of WhatsApp (And CoFounders), check out this article by Forbes

Exclusive: The Rags-To-Riches Tale Of How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp Into Facebook's New $19 Billion Baby

SOURCES/REFERENCES
Anuraag Linga wrote The man who Brought us the free messaging service. on Yuva. 27 Jul

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