7 ms·

Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

271 points by sama 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
a_d 9y ago
Jan is the entrepreneur that I admire the most. Here are some of the reasons: 1. He was so focused on building the product that he just ignored all emails from carriers and investors. Sequoia partners had to hunt down Whatsapp's office just to get in touch with him. Most entrepreneurs would be easily distracted by investor attention. 2. He didn't care about the press (despite a ton of inbound interest). I don't know how or why he could resist the temptation, but he did for a long time. In fact at one point he tried to consciously stay out of press because he wanted to "manage" growth and didn't want competitors to get wind. 3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone. 4. Focus on infrastructure and reliability. 5. Focus on being "lean". For a long time the team was quite small - but the thing I find most telling is the fact that he didn't have "business people" for a long time - anyone who didn't build the product. At acquisiton I think they had a GC and a business operations guy. It it amazing to be able to resist the temptation to build an empire. Whichever way you look at it, he comes across as someone who is able to resist common temptations and had a great balanced head on his shoulder. There is Lot to learn from Jan
- mahyarm 9y ago
  He's pretty lucky that he was able to just focus on product and not really worry about the actual business much. Many builders just build in obscurity and the world never knows what they made. I'm jealous.
- zaatar 9y ago
  Not to take any credit away from Jan, it is however worth noting that his background (and that of many of the early employees) is in Infrastructure / Backend at Yahoo! The side-effect of that is that reliability/uptime is already in his DNA, as also, just "getting things done without enjoying any of the limelight", and he's done a great job carrying over lessons/behaviors learnt in that previous life over to WhatsApp.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- zeusk 9y ago
  > 3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone. This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phones!! which was unlike any other messaging platform and I have a good reason to believe it was instrumental in their success given how many of my friends switched to whatsapp just because everyone in the group could use it (we had WP, Android and iOS users and one oddball BB10 user [me]).
  - ohstopitu 9y ago
    And that is why they succeeded imo. Because Facebook bought Whatsapp for it's 1 Billion users, and Whatsapp would never have hit that mark had it not been for the fact that they focused on market outside the US (where cheaper phones with android, candybar and other OSes were more popular). While Whatsapp is still not as big in the US, it's literally the defacto mode of communication in countries like India, Brazil etc. to the point where "Msg me" would automatically mean "Msg me on Whatsapp" That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius. I for a thousand years would not have though too much about Global Market (because I'd be focused on revenue and users in 1st world countries would be generally the ones with spending cash for messaging apps).
    - thirdsun 9y ago
      > That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius. This is an important aspect. Having accounts and contacts based on phone numbers allowed my mother and her friends to use the service in no time - those are the kind of people that don't know their own email address (if they have one at all) and would never register for an account on their own. Phone numbers, however, is the system they already knew since using SMS.
  - amygdyl 9y ago
    Did not early WhatsApp use a covert channel in sms signalling, just like you can get 2.4kb/s across the x.25 "D" channel of ISDN? I've no idea if true or not, my memory unreliably tells me I found some kind of confirmation, but common sense tells me not to rely on such recollections.. but I often pondered if such channels exist in the GSM spec, back in the day, when I was shocked to receive a sms, the service having been given free to early subscribers in the UK, I literally had the first (edit)model Nokia GSM handset, and was most sceptical :D
- mbesto 9y ago
  I hate to sound cynical, but these are only admirable if these features are the most valuable to users/customers. I see way too many entrepreneurs enamored by technology to find a year later there's no one using their software. I know this might feel sad for software engineers to hear, but there's a lot more Benioff's than there are Jan's in the world.
- throw2016 9y ago
  I agree about Jan. I do admire what he and his small team did with Whatsapp and the sheer mind boggling scale they achieved. But this is also success bias. If he didn't succeed the same points would be used against him. Winners make their own rules and hindsight is a bad teacher. These same points he avoided for instance partnerships and press may have worked for other successful founders.
- tschellenbach 9y ago
  WhatsApp launched at a time when SMS was a paid feature in Europe. It's pretty rare to have such a massive virality in your product. Not only is there a large network effect, your competitor is also charging a large amount compared to your free and superior product.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    SMS is still paid in many countries of Europe and even more across world, so unlimited sms are still exception, not rule
- cpach 9y ago
  Regarding #5, Whatsapp ought to have one of the most impressive employee:user rates ever.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  In other words, he passed the marshmallow test.
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  WhatsApp and Netflix are the only companies who actually have interesting performance engineering solutions instead of throwing incredible sums of money at Yak shaving shenanigans that actually amount to digging themselves deeper.
ssimoni 9y ago
It is very nice to have first mover advantage. Many web and mobile application companies today do not have first mover advantage. This was a good talk to listen to if you have quietly stumbled on something that people want before the rest of the product builders find out.
- samfisher83 9y ago
  There were a lot messaging apps before whatsapp so they weren't first. I think the smartest thing they did was use the phone number as the user ID. It really reduced the friction for a lot of people.
- hboon 9y ago
  But they didn't have first mover advantage. There was ping and a few other similar apps on the iOS app store. WhatsApp focused (correctly) on distribution over several platforms.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    BBM had huge potential as well in the early days. Blackberry practically invented this "SMS-alternative" type of chat application. It was being quickly adopted in emerging markets as a replacement for SMS, which was much more expensive. However, Blackberry screwed that up by keeping BBM Blackberry-only for so long. The BBM should have been available on the iOS and Android stores (and probably on Symbian/Java) since 2009 at the latest (basically when Whatsapp was launched), and it would've dominated.
    - hboon 9y ago
      Possibly. On hindsight, RIM totally underestimated the onslaught on mobile started by iOS and later also by Android. They never thought those platforms could take off, so their decision is understandable (but totally wrong of course).
    - jankoum 9y ago
      yes of course - because having a random 8 digit hex pin was so user friendly, easy and intuitive :)
NavyDish 9y ago
Can you please post a reddit-AMA style proof to assure users that it really is you. It is unbelievable that you weren't aware of HN and that the profile was created just a few hours ago. Thanks. :)
- jankoum 9y ago
  i have no idea what is reddit-AMA style proof is... sorry i didn't get around to making HN account before today.
  - cryodesign 9y ago
    AMA = Ask Me Anything And people doing these AMAs on reddit usually post a picture of themselves with a sign, see https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=reddit+ama+proof&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=reddit+ama+proof&source=ln...
  - zaatar 9y ago
    A simple tweet from your verified twitter account @jankoum to indicate that your "HN username = jankoum" should suffice.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sctb 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14251471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14251471 and marked it off-topic.
Phlow 9y ago
I honestly don't even want to watch this, out of spite. Whatsapp is so damn frustrating to me and the people I talk to. The microphone button is so finicky that I lose hours of my week to trashed messages. I don't know if it's the size of the button being so tiny that a man's thumb easily hangs over the edges, triggering the trash feature with the slightest movement, or some other strange bug. A call comes in, message trashed. An alarm, message trashed. I've literally recorded a 10 minute message and lost it, condensed it to 5 minutes and lost it, condensed it to an angry 2 minutes and lost it and then just given up... Then there's the volume. Why do I have to crank Whatsapp up so high in my car that EVERY OTHER audio event blows my ears out? How are these huge usability problems not being fixed with the amount of money that was thrown at it? I can't find anyone or anywhere to complain about it either. The Contact Us area of the application REQUIRES you to give them your full contact list before you proceed.
- tidmutt 9y ago
  This!!! I would upvote 1000 times if I could. I appreciate Whatsapp's features but voice recording is just broken. I experience this same frustration... I tried submitting feedback through the app and it failed and lost what I wrote due to the default mail client not being configured. Oh the irony. Please fix. These are minor changes.
ryandrake 9y ago
Super congratulations for successfully reading the "messaging" tea leaves and capitalizing on the trend. I admire the vision. I would have never in my wildest imagination predicted the extent to which text messaging became a killer app on mobile--to the point where we have dozens (hundreds?) of different apps to choose from. I still don't see the appeal of messaging apps, but their popularity is undeniable. People don't even seem to mind the fact that all of these apps do fundamentally the same thing yet are largely incompatible with each other.
- iopq 9y ago
  We had XMPP, but Google and Facebook decided to kill it.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    i just don't understand why we don't replace it with universal email, everyone has it and it is certainly possible to build chat on top of it
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dirtyaura 9y ago
The talk raised interesting points about hiring. Jan said that most of the early hires were people from their own networks that currently were "unemployed" or goofing around and that's why it was easy to hire them. So it sounds that they hired people that they knew and trusted but who, for an outsider, would look like were not great at execution. And yet, Whatsapp is clearly a startup that excelled especially at the execution. They successfully build multiplatform product that included OSes that were traditionally seen as cumbersome to build for (Symbian, Java ME). Many, many companies have struggled and failed to do that. It also seems that they scaled really well (compared to e.g. Twitter)
- plinkplonk 9y ago
  (without reading the article/listening to the talk) I suspect "unemployed" meant something like "worked at yahoo for double digit years, cashed out shares, and so don't have to take dumb jobs for eating money, so free to tackle new challenges" not "so bad at programming they couldn't find a job in a hot market"
  - dirtyaura 9y ago
    Yes, I understood that, I tried to indicate that by writing "unemployed" - i.e. they were talented but taking it easy by their own choice (one guy apparently for 10 years). However, for a person who hadn't worked with these guys, it wouldn't be obvious that they would efficient in the execution, as many times people err to use a filled/gapless CV as a proxy for execution capability.
ramblerman 9y ago
This was interesting, and well presented. So my beef isn't with Jan but more so with the startupschool initiative. (focus on school) How do you learn anything tangible from this? It's just a bunch of successful people talking about what they did. Without more context this is just survivorship bias, most of these aren't even serial entrepreneurs.
- tim333 9y ago
  Dunno - I think there's a lot you could learn. They've had about 7 people on talking about the startups they did, a few were serial, some of them had failures. I'm not sure what better way you'd learn lecture wise?
- garysieling 9y ago
  I find that seeing about how someone else thinks about / breaks down a complex problem is helpful. Sometimes you can also see where the speaker has a blind spot - an interesting thought experiment is to consider how you'd compete with their company.
- anubisresources 9y ago
  It's the reason business schools teach through case studies and is the reason Warren Buffett mainly reads biographies. Learning what other people did or did not do and why can help you in your decision making processes.
adgasf 9y ago
How did WhatsApp survive between idea -> first charging users?
alexkon 9y ago
Why did they avoid any media attention?
MrGrillet 9y ago
I enjoyed this talk and took away something slightly different to others on the talk... For me, what was clear is that they listened to feedback and took action relatively quickly. I remember when they first launched the Blackberry version and emailing the team about bugs - I think I got a response the following day and they clearly implemented something by the following release. It wasn't about being devoted to a vision of a particular product they were passionate about. They saw a market/ problem and solved it using their technical ability. Yes, they had a lot of luck on their side - being in the market early enough to gain the visibility. Also, people naturally promoted the app so they didn't need to spend much on marketing. Other apps that came after it, weren't so lucky. Being well connected and having cash to provide initial runway probably made this easier for him than it would be for most but I think it's fair to say he built up his rep at Yahoo - which probably helped when he needed to raise cash.

271 points by sama 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

a_d 9y ago

Jan is the entrepreneur that I admire the most. Here are some of the reasons: 1. He was so focused on building the product that he just ignored all emails from carriers and investors. Sequoia partners had to hunt down Whatsapp's office just to get in touch with him. Most entrepreneurs would be easily distracted by investor attention. 2. He didn't care about the press (despite a ton of inbound interest). I don't know how or why he could resist the temptation, but he did for a long time. In fact at one point he tried to consciously stay out of press because he wanted to "manage" growth and didn't want competitors to get wind. 3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone. 4. Focus on infrastructure and reliability. 5. Focus on being "lean". For a long time the team was quite small - but the thing I find most telling is the fact that he didn't have "business people" for a long time - anyone who didn't build the product. At acquisiton I think they had a GC and a business operations guy. It it amazing to be able to resist the temptation to build an empire. Whichever way you look at it, he comes across as someone who is able to resist common temptations and had a great balanced head on his shoulder. There is Lot to learn from Jan

mahyarm 9y ago
He's pretty lucky that he was able to just focus on product and not really worry about the actual business much. Many builders just build in obscurity and the world never knows what they made. I'm jealous.
zaatar 9y ago
Not to take any credit away from Jan, it is however worth noting that his background (and that of many of the early employees) is in Infrastructure / Backend at Yahoo! The side-effect of that is that reliability/uptime is already in his DNA, as also, just "getting things done without enjoying any of the limelight", and he's done a great job carrying over lessons/behaviors learnt in that previous life over to WhatsApp.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
zeusk 9y ago
> 3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone. This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phones!! which was unlike any other messaging platform and I have a good reason to believe it was instrumental in their success given how many of my friends switched to whatsapp just because everyone in the group could use it (we had WP, Android and iOS users and one oddball BB10 user [me]).
- ohstopitu 9y ago
  And that is why they succeeded imo. Because Facebook bought Whatsapp for it's 1 Billion users, and Whatsapp would never have hit that mark had it not been for the fact that they focused on market outside the US (where cheaper phones with android, candybar and other OSes were more popular). While Whatsapp is still not as big in the US, it's literally the defacto mode of communication in countries like India, Brazil etc. to the point where "Msg me" would automatically mean "Msg me on Whatsapp" That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius. I for a thousand years would not have though too much about Global Market (because I'd be focused on revenue and users in 1st world countries would be generally the ones with spending cash for messaging apps).
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    > That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius. This is an important aspect. Having accounts and contacts based on phone numbers allowed my mother and her friends to use the service in no time - those are the kind of people that don't know their own email address (if they have one at all) and would never register for an account on their own. Phone numbers, however, is the system they already knew since using SMS.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  Did not early WhatsApp use a covert channel in sms signalling, just like you can get 2.4kb/s across the x.25 "D" channel of ISDN? I've no idea if true or not, my memory unreliably tells me I found some kind of confirmation, but common sense tells me not to rely on such recollections.. but I often pondered if such channels exist in the GSM spec, back in the day, when I was shocked to receive a sms, the service having been given free to early subscribers in the UK, I literally had the first (edit)model Nokia GSM handset, and was most sceptical :D
mbesto 9y ago
I hate to sound cynical, but these are only admirable if these features are the most valuable to users/customers. I see way too many entrepreneurs enamored by technology to find a year later there's no one using their software. I know this might feel sad for software engineers to hear, but there's a lot more Benioff's than there are Jan's in the world.
throw2016 9y ago
I agree about Jan. I do admire what he and his small team did with Whatsapp and the sheer mind boggling scale they achieved. But this is also success bias. If he didn't succeed the same points would be used against him. Winners make their own rules and hindsight is a bad teacher. These same points he avoided for instance partnerships and press may have worked for other successful founders.
tschellenbach 9y ago
WhatsApp launched at a time when SMS was a paid feature in Europe. It's pretty rare to have such a massive virality in your product. Not only is there a large network effect, your competitor is also charging a large amount compared to your free and superior product.
- Markoff 9y ago
  SMS is still paid in many countries of Europe and even more across world, so unlimited sms are still exception, not rule
cpach 9y ago
Regarding #5, Whatsapp ought to have one of the most impressive employee:user rates ever.
perseusprime11 9y ago
In other words, he passed the marshmallow test.
_pmf_ 9y ago
WhatsApp and Netflix are the only companies who actually have interesting performance engineering solutions instead of throwing incredible sums of money at Yak shaving shenanigans that actually amount to digging themselves deeper.

ssimoni 9y ago

It is very nice to have first mover advantage. Many web and mobile application companies today do not have first mover advantage. This was a good talk to listen to if you have quietly stumbled on something that people want before the rest of the product builders find out.

samfisher83 9y ago
There were a lot messaging apps before whatsapp so they weren't first. I think the smartest thing they did was use the phone number as the user ID. It really reduced the friction for a lot of people.
hboon 9y ago
But they didn't have first mover advantage. There was ping and a few other similar apps on the iOS app store. WhatsApp focused (correctly) on distribution over several platforms.
- mtgx 9y ago
  BBM had huge potential as well in the early days. Blackberry practically invented this "SMS-alternative" type of chat application. It was being quickly adopted in emerging markets as a replacement for SMS, which was much more expensive. However, Blackberry screwed that up by keeping BBM Blackberry-only for so long. The BBM should have been available on the iOS and Android stores (and probably on Symbian/Java) since 2009 at the latest (basically when Whatsapp was launched), and it would've dominated.
  - hboon 9y ago
    Possibly. On hindsight, RIM totally underestimated the onslaught on mobile started by iOS and later also by Android. They never thought those platforms could take off, so their decision is understandable (but totally wrong of course).
  - jankoum 9y ago
    yes of course - because having a random 8 digit hex pin was so user friendly, easy and intuitive :)

NavyDish 9y ago

Can you please post a reddit-AMA style proof to assure users that it really is you. It is unbelievable that you weren't aware of HN and that the profile was created just a few hours ago. Thanks. :)

jankoum 9y ago
i have no idea what is reddit-AMA style proof is... sorry i didn't get around to making HN account before today.
- cryodesign 9y ago
  AMA = Ask Me Anything And people doing these AMAs on reddit usually post a picture of themselves with a sign, see https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=reddit+ama+proof&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=reddit+ama+proof&source=ln...
- zaatar 9y ago
  A simple tweet from your verified twitter account @jankoum to indicate that your "HN username = jankoum" should suffice.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sctb 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14251471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14251471 and marked it off-topic.

Phlow 9y ago

I honestly don't even want to watch this, out of spite. Whatsapp is so damn frustrating to me and the people I talk to. The microphone button is so finicky that I lose hours of my week to trashed messages. I don't know if it's the size of the button being so tiny that a man's thumb easily hangs over the edges, triggering the trash feature with the slightest movement, or some other strange bug. A call comes in, message trashed. An alarm, message trashed. I've literally recorded a 10 minute message and lost it, condensed it to 5 minutes and lost it, condensed it to an angry 2 minutes and lost it and then just given up... Then there's the volume. Why do I have to crank Whatsapp up so high in my car that EVERY OTHER audio event blows my ears out? How are these huge usability problems not being fixed with the amount of money that was thrown at it? I can't find anyone or anywhere to complain about it either. The Contact Us area of the application REQUIRES you to give them your full contact list before you proceed.

tidmutt 9y ago
This!!! I would upvote 1000 times if I could. I appreciate Whatsapp's features but voice recording is just broken. I experience this same frustration... I tried submitting feedback through the app and it failed and lost what I wrote due to the default mail client not being configured. Oh the irony. Please fix. These are minor changes.

ryandrake 9y ago

Super congratulations for successfully reading the "messaging" tea leaves and capitalizing on the trend. I admire the vision. I would have never in my wildest imagination predicted the extent to which text messaging became a killer app on mobile--to the point where we have dozens (hundreds?) of different apps to choose from. I still don't see the appeal of messaging apps, but their popularity is undeniable. People don't even seem to mind the fact that all of these apps do fundamentally the same thing yet are largely incompatible with each other.

iopq 9y ago
We had XMPP, but Google and Facebook decided to kill it.
- Markoff 9y ago
  i just don't understand why we don't replace it with universal email, everyone has it and it is certainly possible to build chat on top of it

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dirtyaura 9y ago

The talk raised interesting points about hiring. Jan said that most of the early hires were people from their own networks that currently were "unemployed" or goofing around and that's why it was easy to hire them. So it sounds that they hired people that they knew and trusted but who, for an outsider, would look like were not great at execution. And yet, Whatsapp is clearly a startup that excelled especially at the execution. They successfully build multiplatform product that included OSes that were traditionally seen as cumbersome to build for (Symbian, Java ME). Many, many companies have struggled and failed to do that. It also seems that they scaled really well (compared to e.g. Twitter)

plinkplonk 9y ago
(without reading the article/listening to the talk) I suspect "unemployed" meant something like "worked at yahoo for double digit years, cashed out shares, and so don't have to take dumb jobs for eating money, so free to tackle new challenges" not "so bad at programming they couldn't find a job in a hot market"
- dirtyaura 9y ago
  Yes, I understood that, I tried to indicate that by writing "unemployed" - i.e. they were talented but taking it easy by their own choice (one guy apparently for 10 years). However, for a person who hadn't worked with these guys, it wouldn't be obvious that they would efficient in the execution, as many times people err to use a filled/gapless CV as a proxy for execution capability.

ramblerman 9y ago

This was interesting, and well presented. So my beef isn't with Jan but more so with the startupschool initiative. (focus on school) How do you learn anything tangible from this? It's just a bunch of successful people talking about what they did. Without more context this is just survivorship bias, most of these aren't even serial entrepreneurs.

tim333 9y ago
Dunno - I think there's a lot you could learn. They've had about 7 people on talking about the startups they did, a few were serial, some of them had failures. I'm not sure what better way you'd learn lecture wise?
garysieling 9y ago
I find that seeing about how someone else thinks about / breaks down a complex problem is helpful. Sometimes you can also see where the speaker has a blind spot - an interesting thought experiment is to consider how you'd compete with their company.
anubisresources 9y ago
It's the reason business schools teach through case studies and is the reason Warren Buffett mainly reads biographies. Learning what other people did or did not do and why can help you in your decision making processes.

adgasf 9y ago

How did WhatsApp survive between idea -> first charging users?

alexkon 9y ago

Why did they avoid any media attention?

MrGrillet 9y ago

I enjoyed this talk and took away something slightly different to others on the talk... For me, what was clear is that they listened to feedback and took action relatively quickly. I remember when they first launched the Blackberry version and emailing the team about bugs - I think I got a response the following day and they clearly implemented something by the following release. It wasn't about being devoted to a vision of a particular product they were passionate about. They saw a market/ problem and solved it using their technical ability. Yes, they had a lot of luck on their side - being in the market early enough to gain the visibility. Also, people naturally promoted the app so they didn't need to spend much on marketing. Other apps that came after it, weren't so lucky. Being well connected and having cash to provide initial runway probably made this easier for him than it would be for most but I think it's fair to say he built up his rep at Yahoo - which probably helped when he needed to raise cash.