A biography for Jan Koumhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like.”
“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.”
“What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.”
“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.”
“The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.”
“Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.”
“A lot of companies are global.”
“On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.”
“People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible.”
“I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.”
“As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip, and at some point, people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp.”
“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.”
“The F-word here is focus.”
“We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.”
“We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.”
“The encryption genie is out of the bottle.”
“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.”
“Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.”
“I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.”