{"id":2391,"date":"2014-02-20T10:11:28","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T01:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2014-02-20\/2391"},"modified":"2014-02-20T10:11:28","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T01:11:28","slug":"congrats-to-jan-and-brian-from-zero-to-19-billion-in-five-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2014-02-20\/2391","title":{"rendered":"Congrats to Jan and Brian: From Zero to $19 Billion in Five Years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n\nWhatsApp Messenger<\/a><\/small><\/div>\n

A couple of ultimate-Frisbee friends<\/a>\nfrom my days at Yahoo!, Jan Koum and<\/span> Brian Acton, went on to make a little<\/span> messaging app with\nthe silly name “<\/span>WhatsApp<\/a>”<\/span> that I've been running on my phone for a few<\/span>\nyears. It's quite<\/span> convenient for communicating with friends while on the\ngo.<\/p>\n\n

It's much nicer than the traditional SMS phone messaging. “<\/span>Frictionless\nmessaging”<\/span>. That's why 320 million<\/i> people actually use it every day. I last used<\/span> it an hour ago to chat with my brother.<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, I just found out that these friends sold<\/a> their little messaging app to Facebook for $19,000,000,000.<\/p>\n\n

I'm so thrilled for them.<\/p>\n\n

It's particularly sweet for Brian because early on while he was “<\/span>helping Jan on his app”<\/span>, Brian applied for a job<\/span> at Facebook. He was turned<\/span> down:<\/p>\n\n

<\/a><\/div>\n\n

So he went full-in with Jan on WhatsApp. Quite the adventure, indeed!<\/p>\n\n

By the way, the “<\/span>WhatsApp”<\/span> name comes from their original idea for their\napp... when I first<\/span> started testing it for them\nin early 2009, its intent was merely a\ncurrent<\/span>-status tool, so your friends could see what you were doing\nat the moment (“<\/span>At the gym”<\/span>, “<\/span>in a meeting<\/span>; don't bother me”<\/span>, etc.). I tried<\/span> to be\nhelpful in testing, but practically speaking I\ndidn't<\/span> think it would be useful; who's going to go to the trouble to\nkeep the status updated all the time on the off chance that a friend<\/span> will find the information useful?<\/p>\n\n

I'm glad that they moved the focus to messaging.<\/p>\n\n

Congrats to Jan, Brian, and their small team! Unlike winning the\nlottery, this was earned<\/i>, building something from scratch that\ncreates real value for others. WhatsApp spawned a slew<\/span> of copycats (the\nmost popular being LINE, which appeals to the early-teen crowd, and\nFacebook's own Messenger), but WhatsApp remains the Gold Standard for\nmobile messaging. Simple. Clean. Fast. No ads. cross-platform. A dollar<\/span> a year.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Finally, a little tidbit about Jan from the early days at Yahoo!  Jan used to be the\nmost hated person at Yahoo! among the engineers, because when he joined as\nthe first person with a clue<\/span> about Internet security, he forced us all to\nstart using secure tools for communicating among our back-end machines. We had been<\/span> used to an easy free (but decidedly insecure) world, and Jan's changes were\ninconvenient and disruptive. We all hated<\/span> him for it. Of course, he was\nabsolutely right, and over time he earned the respect he was due.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of ultimate-Frisbee friends from my days at Yahoo!, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, went on to make a little messaging app with the silly name \"WhatsApp\" that I've been running on my phone for a few years. It's quite convenient for communicating with friends while on the go.<\/p>

It's much nicer than the traditional SMS phone messaging. \"Frictionless messaging\". That's why 320 million people actually use it every day. I last used it an hour ago to chat with my brother.<\/p>

Anyway, I just found out that these friends sold their little messaging app to Facebook for $19,000,000,000.<\/p> [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}