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.”

“Our team has always believed that neither cost and distance should ever prevent people from connecting with their friends and loved ones, and won't rest until everyone, everywhere is empowered with that opportunity.”

“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.”

“We continue to grow, and, just like with countries like China or other countries where we are not doing particularly well, we take a really long-term approach.”

“Users get unlimited 'WhatsApp'. We get happy users who don't have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans.”

“We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.”

“Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn't because you don't know where things are going to go in the future.”

“I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.”

“We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.”

“I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.”

“If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.”

“In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.”

“We want to do one thing and do it really well. For us, that's communications between people who are friends and relatives.”

“Anybody can build a company and sell the company the next day. That doesn't make you special, it doesn't make you unique, it doesn't make you all that great.”

“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.”