History of WhatsApp: A Success Story

WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, two former Yahoo employees from 2009, in the city of San Francisco. Born in Russia and of American 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 20.

In 1995, Koum dropped out of Stanford 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 Microsoft to create social media platforms within the company. Before his involvement with WhatsApp, Acton had tried to join Apple's development team however he was rejected three times.

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 - user-friendly and accessible.

Soon after that idea conceived and after months of planning and whatsapp电脑版 developing, in 2010 they launched the app 'Bee Together'. 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 Message Mate 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 impressive. Acton and Koum finally decided to invest their personal wealth and savings in an effort to drive WhatsApp forward.

In the 2 years following January 2010, WhatsApp reached a population of 250,000 users which after various modifications made to the app, including enabling attachments, had risen to nearly 600,000. It started picking up slowly growth as technology progressed hence giving the co-founders a better vision of its growth potential.

In March 2014, Facebook decided to acquire WhatsApp for 20 billion dollars in a cash transaction that shocked observers worldwide. However, shortly after signing the document in a secret deal in Los Angeles, 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.