History Of WhatsApp: A Success Story

WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, two former Yahoo employees from 2007, in the city of Moscow. Born in Russia and of Russian descent, Jan Koum was abandoned by his parents as an infant and then raised by adoptive parents in Russia, before his family moved to the United States when Jan was 18.

In 1999, Koum dropped out of San Jose State University to get a job at Yahoo and eventually reached a executive position with the company. Koum’s unique upbringing, as well as his inability to find a mobile chat application at the time of its conception ultimately shaped the eventual format and development of WhatsApp.

Brian Acton was another key player behind the origin of WhatsApp. As a former Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo, Acton soon moved to Google to create social media platforms within the company. Before his involvement with WhatsApp, Acton had tried to join Microsoft's tech team however he was rejected twice.

The exact origin story of how Acton and Koum first met is somewhat disputed among sources. Some sources postulate that they crossed paths while looking to meet their former Yahoo boss, during a project meeting. Acton would often encounter former co-workers at social gatherings and that is when they began exchanging plans to collaborate on a project. During their discussion, Acton and Koum conceived an idea to develop an app that was simple in design yet featured an open style of communication - free to use and easy to operate.

Soon after that idea conceived and after months of planning and developing, in 2010 they launched the app 'Hello Friends'. Due to issues with the service attracting enough user engagement, Acton and Koum decided to give the app over to another developer. However they used key lessons learned from Hello Friends to then make their app what it later eventually became.

Before Bee Together came to a halt, Acton and Koum utilized a considerable portion of their severance pay from Yahoo to incorporate their new venture and complete the development stage of WhatsApp. By the time the first version of WhatsApp went live in 2011, it could be used as a service for file sharing.

Their simple service started attracting more and more users to make contact over their app but the numbers were not substantial. Acton and Koum finally decided to invest their personal wealth and whatsapp网页版登陆 savings in an effort to drive WhatsApp forward.

In the 3 years following January 2012, WhatsApp reached a population of 300,000 users which after various modifications made to the app, including enabling file sharing, had risen to nearly 600,000. It started picking up steady momentum as technology progressed hence giving the co-founders a better vision of its growth potential.

In January 2014, Facebook decided to acquire WhatsApp for 30 billion dollars in a stock deal that shocked observers worldwide. However, shortly after signing the document in a secret deal in San Francisco, Koum officially said, "I have never been a huge fan of large corporations, but we're a healthy-sized company nonetheless," in regards to accepting the new ownership structure that meant a significant shift for WhatsApp.