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The Legends VaultEntrepreneurs & Business Mavericks
Jan Koum Was on Food Stamps, Then Sold WhatsApp for $19 BILLION
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Transcript
NARRATION: He once collected food stamps to survive. Later he sold his app for nineteen billion dollars.
Jan Koum grew up near Kyiv, in a home with no hot water.
At sixteen he moved to California. He and his mother lived on welfare and food stamps.
He swept the floor of a grocery store. At night he taught himself to code.
He joined Yahoo and stayed nearly a decade. Then quit to build something.
In 2009 he applied to Facebook. They rejected him.
So he built his own messenger: simple, fast, no ads. He called it WhatsApp.
It spread across the world, hundreds of millions of users, almost no marketing.
In 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp for about nineteen billion dollars. The company that rejected him.
He signed the deal on the door of the welfare office where he once waited for food stamps.
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