Jan Koum

“In terms of security and privacy, what people care about the most is the privacy of their messages.”

“Everybody I meet who uses 'WhatsApp', I ask them a question: 'How did you hear about it?' And they say, 'My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.' We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.”

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

“There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.”

“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.”

“The message growth rate in Brazil - it's not like a hockey stick: it's like a vertical line.”

“In Russia, you really learn about a person.”

“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.”

“I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer'. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.”

“'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.”

“People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.”

“We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.”

“Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.”

“Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don't want to be interrupted by ads when you're chatting with your loved ones.”

“I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.”

“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.”

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

“We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.”

“We hear lots of stories where grandparents go to a store and buy a smartphone so they can keep in touch with kids and grandkids.”

“Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.”