When was whatsapp introduced

When panel moderator Michael Malone asked Koum what he remembered most about the day he agreed to sell the company in early , Koum drew a blank. I don't remember any of that except being in a room with lawyers for three days straight," he said. Malone asked him why he still goes to work, since it's like Koum "won the lottery. We want to convince them," Koum replied.

At 16, Koum and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, a result of the troubling political and anti-Semitic environment, and got a small two-bedroom apartment though government assistance. His dad never made it over. She took up babysitting and Koum swept the floor of a grocery store to help make ends meet.

When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they lived off her disability allowance. Koum spoke English well enough but disliked the casual, flighty nature of American high-school friendships; in Ukraine you went through ten years with the same, small group of friends at school.

Koum was a troublemaker at school but by 18 had also taught himself computer networking by purchasing manuals from a used book store and returning them when he was done.

He joined a hacker group called w00w00 on the Efnet internet relay chat network, squirreled into the servers of Silicon Graphics and chatted with Napster co-founder Sean Fanning. Six months later Koum interviewed at Yahoo and got a job as an infrastructure engineer. Yahoo cofounder David Filo called his mobile for help. He dropped out. He credits Acton with reaching out and offering support.

The two went skiing and played soccer and ultimate Frisbee. Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the bust. In September Koum and Acton finally left Yahoo and took a year to decompress, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee.

Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. Then in January , he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited the home of Alex Fishman, a Russian friend who would invite the local Russian community to his place in West San Jose for weekly pizza and movie nights.

Up to 40 people sometimes showed up. Photo courtesy of Jan Koum. Koum spent days creating the backend code to synch his app with any phone number in the world, poring over a Wikipedia entry that listed international dialing prefixes — he would spend many infuriating months updating it for the hundreds of regional nuances.

Early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck, and when Fishman installed it on his phone, only a handful of the hundreds numbers on his address book - mostly local Russian friends - had also downloaded it. Jan capitalised on this update and did some alterations to Whatsapp, which sent push notifications to friends whenever a user changed his status on the application. Jan recognised this accidental opportunity at his town-house in Santa Clara and soon realised the need for upgrading the operating model of the status app to an internet-based instant messaging application.

This is how version 2. Soon after realising the demand for an instant messaging application, WhatsApp 2. People loved the idea of logging in with just a phone number and sending messages to contacts using the internet instead of operator SMS plans. This made WhatsApp an app with high utility, and its users increased to a whopping , within just a few months. The same version was submitted to the App Store on 27th August This version, however, was limited to just sending texts and not media files.

Brian Acton was not an active member of the WhatsApp team until he convinced five ex-Yahoo! It was in October Before this, he was actively looking for some other startup idea to work with until Jan came to him with his WhatsApp 2.

This was a huge boost to WhatsApp as it not only got good funding but also a very experienced cofounder. The beta stage ended, and the application was exclusively launched on the App Store for iPhone in November It stood out as a perfect alternative to sending SMS within the country and even internationally for free. As soon as the application was launched, the founding pair was flooded with emails from iPhone users asking about the future prospects of the application and if it was being launched for Nokia and BlackBerry as well, as they were the market players at that time.

Jan soon hired one of his friends, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version of the application, which they launched two months later. Even during , flat rates for SMS and free minutes were offered by almost every mobile operator, and there was almost no incentive for people in the USA to shift to WhatsApp. The USA, in fact, is the worst-performing market for Whatsapp till now. Even though Chris still had doubts, he joined the team by being fascinated by the eye-popping user growth.

The main work started in a converted warehouse on Evelyn Ave, where the founders subleased some cubicles. The staff worked off cheap Ikea tables and wore blankets for warmth.

It saved a lot of costs. Moreover, Koum and Acton also worked for free for the first few years, and the only high costs during the initial days were sending verification texts to users. A new feature of sending photos was added to the application and the numbers of users sky-rocketed even when the application was paid. So the pair decided to keep it paid for some more time. Besides marketing, the founding pair was also dusting away all the meeting requests from VCs interested in investing. They believed it to be a bailout as most venture capitalists were inclined towards the advertising business model they hated.

According to him, the fact that the startup was already paying corporate income taxes was what made it stand out. He eventually succeeded in meeting them and proposed the deal of being a strategic advisor and investing around 8 million dollars for more than 15 percent of the firm. The team agreed as he promised not to push advertising models on them.

Just two years later, in February , the number of users rose to a surprising million, and staff increased to