Jan Koum

Jan Koum
Jan Koum (left) with Brian Acton
Native name	Ян Кум
Born	(1976-02-24) February 24, 1976 (age 41) Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	San Jose State University (dropped out)
Occupation	CEO of WhatsApp & Managing Director in Facebook, Inc.
Years active	2009 - present
Organization	WhatsApp Inc.
Known for	Co-founded WhatsApp
Home town	Fastiv, Ukraine
Net worth	US$9.7 billion (May 2016)

Jan Koum (Ukrainian: Ян Кум; born February 24, 1976) is a Ukrainian-American internet inventor and computer programmer. He is the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp (with Brian Acton), a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion.

In 2014, he entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 62, with an estimated worth of more than seven and half billion dollars. He was the highest-ranked newcomer to the list that year.

Koum was born in Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). He is of Jewish origin. He grew up in Fastiv, outside Kiev, and moved with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California in 1992, where a social support program helped the family to get a small two-bedroom apartment, at the age of 16. His father had intended to join the family later, but finally remained in Ukraine. At first Koum's mother worked as a babysitter, while he himself worked as a cleaner at a grocery. By the age of 18 he became interested in programming. He enrolled at San Jose State University and simultaneously worked at Ernst & Young as a security tester.

In February 1996, a restraining order was granted against Koum in state court in San Jose, California. An ex-girlfriend detailed incidents in which she said Koum verbally and physically threatened her. In October 2014, Koum said about the restraining order, "I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action".

In 1997, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Brian Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the then-seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum's idea for an app over tea at Fishman's kitchen counter. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.