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I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.
Jan Koum -
We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.
Jan Koum
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We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.
Jan Koum -
People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible.
Jan Koum -
We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.
Jan Koum -
We want to do one thing and do it really well. For us, that's communications between people who are friends and relatives.
Jan Koum -
It's important for people to have freedom to use whatever product they want. We have no problems with other people using other apps, so long as they keep using 'WhatsApp'.
Jan Koum -
Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.
Jan Koum
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Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.
Jan Koum -
I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.
Jan Koum -
I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.
Jan Koum -
I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.
Jan Koum -
I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.
Jan Koum -
We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.
Jan Koum
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Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don't want to be interrupted by ads when you're chatting with your loved ones.
Jan Koum -
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.
Jan Koum -
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.
Jan Koum -
The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.
Jan Koum -
If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.
Jan Koum -
WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.
Jan Koum