Founder of WhatsApp

Founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum in the year 2009, the journey of WhatsApp is not a usual one. The WhatsApp founders were not college students but they were the people in their 30s who just took a shot and created the most popular application in the world. They showed everyone that without any advertisements, or games, applications can run and people can earn profit from them. Let’s get to know more about the founder of WhatsApp in this article. 

What is WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is a simple, secure messaging application, which allows people to share images, audio, or videos on a single platform. Launched in the year 2009, WhatsApp lets the user, do many things just with a stable internet connection. From 2009 to 2022, WhatsApp has seen many changes and has been developed for the better. The founders of WhatsApp have made it very appealing and easy to use that it can be downloaded on every phone be it Android or iPhone, even on computers, Mac, or windows, thus allowing users to continue their conversations anytime, anywhere, without interruptions. With the help of cellular data or Wifi, WhatsApp supports all be it group video calls or voice calls, making groups, sharing pictures, location, etc. The application was made keeping in mind the connection among people and the ease of things, which people wanted, hence the founders tried to provide all of it in one place only.

Founders of WhatsApp

One of the largest messaging applications in the world- WhatsApp was created by Brian Acton an internet entrepreneur and Jan Koum an American internet inventor and computer programmer who just set a perfect example of innovation in technology and founded an application that was way ahead of time. They completely changed the way of communication and brought people much closer. 

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, ex-Yahoo employees who developed WhatsApp after purchasing iPhone as they realized that the Apple App store will be growing very rapidly. They both left Yahoo in the year 2007 and started a world tour and when all of their saving started to vanish, they decided to apply to Facebook but got rejected by the tech giant thus leading to disappointment. But lesser did they know that this failure will lead them to start a tremendous journey of WHATSAPP! 

In January 2009 Jan Koum bought an iPhone and after a few months of exploring, he understood that Apple phones have much space and potential for messaging applications and decided to build one. Koum shared his idea with Brian Acton and then both of them visited Alex Fisherman, an old friend, and told him about the new application, that they wanted to create.

Since that day the journey began when Fisherman introduced them to an iOS developer and all of them started to work on the application while sitting at the coffee shops or at home. Eventually, they succeeded in creating the basic application for the iOS developer and then incorporated ‘WhatsApp Inc.’ on 24th February 2009 in California. Koum had the basic idea of people updating their statuses along with photos and wanted to sound it like ‘whats up’ thus, the app was named WhatsApp. 

However, in the initial stage, the WhatsApp founders had to face failures due to which Jan Koum was disheartened, hence decided to give up, but eventually, with Brian Acton’s motivation they started to work again, and finally after months of Beta testing the app was launching in November 2009 for iPhones. After its huge success within two months, they also released a BlackBerry version. 

After running the application successfully for almost a decade, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, in February 2014 for a whopping amount of $19 billion, which came out to be the largest acquisition to date. Since, then Meta, the parent company of Facebook is running WhatsApp and added more features thus making it more business-friendly.