Jan Koum Quotes

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Jan Koum

Profession : Businessman

Birth : February 24, 1976

'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.

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

I want to do one thing and do it well.

Jan Koum

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.

Jan Koum

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

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.

Jan Koum

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

Jan Koum

I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.

Jan Koum