Ukraine police may have shaped WhatsApp's privacy

Co-founder Jan Kuom's childhood in Ukraine made him value communication that wasn't monitored

The $19 billion deal to sell WhatsApp Inc to Facebook Inc started at Yahoo! Inc more than five years ago, when Jan Koum became disillusioned at the way Internet companies were fixated on advertising.

He left Yahoo in 2007 with one of the company's other engineers, Brian Acton, and started a company by 2009 that shuns advertising altogether. The strategy allowed them to concentrate on creating an easy-to-use messaging product instead of developing new ways to glean customer information for their marketing pitches, Koum said in a 2012 blog post.

"No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow," Koum said in the post. A hand-written note on his desk reads: 'No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!'

Their approach paid off. WhatsApp amassed 450 million monthly users - twice as many as Twitter Inc - who send billions of messages a day. Yesterday, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg bought their five-year-old company in the largest Internet deal since Time Warner's $124 billion merger with AOL in 2001, a deal that will almost certainly make Koum and Acton billionaires several times over.

For Koum, 38, the windfall would stand in stark contrast to his years as a teenager, when his family relied on food stamps after emigrating from Ukraine. The experience of living in a country where phone lines were often tapped, instilled the importance of privacy in him, says Jim Goetz, a partner with Sequoia Capital, WhatsApp's lone venture capital investor.

Contrarian Approach

WhatsApp doesn't collect information like name, gender, address or age. Instead, users are approved after their phone numbers are authenticated.

"It's a decidedly contrarian approach shaped by Jan's experience growing up in a communist country with a secret police," said Goetz in a blog post yesterday on Sequoia's website. "Jan's childhood made him appreciate communication that was not bugged or taped."

Koum will join Facebook's board of directors once the deal goes through. Facebook declined to make him or Acton available for an interview.

The partners are old enough to remember the first dot-com bust. Acton, 42, grew up in Michigan and was employee number 44 at Yahoo, working on advertising, shopping and travel services, according to Wired. He invested during the boom and lost millions of dollars when the market imploded, according to Forbes.

Facebook Reject

He later hired Koum at Yahoo and served as his mentor, inviting him over to his house and taking him skiing, Forbes said. After exiting Yahoo, Acton said on Twitter that he was turned down for a job at Facebook in 2009.

The two founded WhatsApp later that year with the idea that smartphone users should be able to easily message each other without incurring fees from phone carriers. The service is free for a year, then costs 99 cents per year after that.

They eschewed marketing and didn't employ a public relations person, relying on the word-of-mouth recommendations of its users instead. The service became popular with friends and family communicating in different countries, especially in Europe, because it circumvents the fees charged by phone carriers.

"While others sought attention, Jan and Brian shunned the spotlight, refusing even to hang a sign outside the WhatsApp offices in Mountain View," Goetz said in his blog post. "As competitors promoted games and rushed to build platforms, Jan and Brian remained devoted to a clean, lightning fast communications service that works flawlessly."

Koum's aversion to advertising contrasts with Facebook's efforts to make more money from people using its service on mobile devices. He said in a statement on the company's website that WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently.

"There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product," he said.

Mark Zuckerberg

MERGING OVER COFFEE AND DINNER

The relationship between Facebook Inc. and WhatsApp Inc. started in spring 2012 over coffee at a German bakery. It was consummated on Valentine's Day with chocolate-covered strawberries, after just five days of talks.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive officer, first reached out to WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum in early 2012, inviting him for coffee at the bakery in Los Altos, California. They ended up talking for more than two hours, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The two became friends, meeting frequently for dinners and hiking together.

On Feb. 9, Koum, 38, went to Zuckerberg's house in Palo Alto, California, for dinner. That's when the conversation about a possible deal became serious, the person says. The two first talked about how they could work together more closely on Zuckerberg's Internet.org initiative for connecting the world on mobile devices.

Zuckerberg, 29, then proposed that their companies join together and that Koum join Facebook's board. Koum took a few days to think it over. Five days later, on Feb. 14, Zuckerberg was having dinner with his wife at home when Koum showed up, strawberries in hand. They then negotiated a price.