He signed the multibillion-dollar contract in the same place where he had once received welfare assistance 👀
Jan Koum was 16 when he arrived in Mountain View, California, in 1992, fleeing Soviet Ukraine with his mother. His father stayed behind and was never able to reunite with them.
At the time, the family survived thanks to food stamps and government assistance, while his mother worked cleaning houses to support them.
No one would have imagined that the teenager who learned to program from a used book would end up founding one of the most widely used apps on the planet.
Koum and his friend Brian Acton, whom he met while working in computer security, spent nine years together at Yahoo before daring to create something of their own. Facebook would not even hire them when they tried in 2007.
In 2009, with just an iPhone and an idea, WhatsApp was born. Five years later, Mark Zuckerberg offered them nearly $20 billion for the company. Koum signed the deal in the same building where he had once stood in line for free food. Sometimes the distance between scarcity and abundance is measured in a single signature.
