Jan Koum, the Ukrainian cleaner who becomes a billionaire

Jan Koum, an American entrepreneur and software engineer, who is the founder of WhatsApp, whose success story embodies the importance of vision and innovation in the business world, and proves that small ideas, with creative thinking and hard work, can turn into huge projects that are very successful

Jan Koum was born on 24 February 1976 in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, in the middle of a poor family, despite being the only son of his parents

His life in Ukraine did not last long, as he emigrated with his mother to the United States at the age of 16, and he lived his life in this period on the government subsidy coupon he was receiving from social services, and these difficult conditions paid his mother to work as a babysitter, while he had to work at a young age by cleaning shop floors.

Despite the challenges he faced, he was able to pass high school and join Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Koum started his work in software in 1998 through his work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. There he identified Brian Acton. As the years passed, Jan and his friend had the biggest aspirations to join in Facebook, and applied for it. However, he refused, and they accepted it without realizing that one day they would force Mark Zuckerberg to look for them.

Two years after their rejection on Facebook, both friends had gained extensive experience in the world of marketing technology, they decided to launch a free chat app and free instant messaging, and work began on the development of the app, until they launched it on the market as WhatsApp.

Koum and Acton enable the development of a simple and intuitive app that allows users to send text messages and multimedia such as photos, videos, and audio easily and at low cost. The app interface was easy to use and relied on phone numbers to recognize users, making the communication process more easy and convenient

In just five years of launching WhatsApp, the number of WhatsApp users has risen to more than 450 million worldwide, with a market value of more than $7 billion, prompting Facebook to want to acquire the company, which has already happened, with Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014 worth $19 billion.