America’s Most Successful Immigrants

Jan Koum

Jan Koum was born in Soviet Russia and now lives in the United States. He is worth $9.7 billion and co-founded WhatsApp, of which he is also CEO. In 1992, his mother and grandmother took him to California where the family got a two-bedroom apartment. His father ended up staying in Ukraine and Koum worked at a grocery store.

After high school, he went to San Jose State University where he later received a restraining order because an ex-girlfriend said Koum physically and verbally threatened her. Koum basically admitted this saying “I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action.”

Inventing WhatsApp

Koum started working at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He then went to play ultimate Frisbee for a year while traveling South America after working for nine years. After he got back, he tried to work for Facebook but was denied. He incorporated WhatsApp and created the app, which caught Mark Zuckerberg’s attention in 2012.

WhatsApp was eventually acquired by Facebook for $19 billion. Koum sold about half of his Facebook stock in 2016, which was worth about $2.4 billion, the same as the Facebook stock he still holds. Koum does not have a formal college degree, but he was part of the group of hackers called w00w00, where the founders of Napster were also a part of the group.