Zitat des Tages von 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.
I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.
We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.
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.
Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.
As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip, and at some point, people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp.
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.
What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.
We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.
The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn't because you don't know where things are going to go in the future.
The encryption genie is out of the bottle.
Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.
A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in Whatsapp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.
We continue to grow, and, just like with countries like China or other countries where we are not doing particularly well, we take a really long-term approach.
The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.
On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.
Ironically, I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood. I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer;' I watched it some 20 times as a kid.
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.
A lot of my time, effort, and focus is spent on 'WhatsApp'. And that, to me, is more valuable and rewarding than to work on anything else.
We're obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones.
Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.
We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.
We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.
Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.
Users get unlimited 'WhatsApp'. We get happy users who don't have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans.
I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
