Jan Koum Quotes

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.

Be simple and reliable

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.

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 didnt have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.

We focus a lot on the quality of experience, speed, reliability. It’s not sexy from a lot of people’s perspective, it’s not glitzy in the feature set, but it’s what people come to rely on.

Advertising isnt 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.

I want to do one thing, and do it well.

A lot of times people start out with a lot of good ideas, but then they don't execute. They lose the purity of their vision. You end up running around in circles.

You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address. We don't know your birthday. We don't know your home address. We don't know where you work. We don't know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that.