Jan Koum's Net Worth (2024), Wiki And More Facts
Occupation: CEO of WhatsApp Inc.
Find out how much money Jan Koum makes and how much money he has!
Stay on this page to discover many other interesting facts about the Ukrainian billionaire and his family.
Jan Koum's net worth:
11,500,000,000 USDEarnings: How does Jan Koum make his money and how much he makes?
Although he is now a billionaire, Jan Koum wasn't always rich. In fact, his family was struggling financially when they came to the United States as immigrants in 1992.
Jan's mother worked as a babysitter and he worked as a cleaner at a grocery store.
In 1995 Jan bought his first computer and started learning programming.
Three years later he got a job at Yahoo! where he was in charge of security and operations engineering.
Jan worked for Yahoo! for nine years and then he left the job in 2007 to travel the world for one year.
After the year off, Jan and his friend Brian Acton both applied for a job at Facebook and both got rejected.
During February 2009 Jan got an idea to create a mobile app that would make it possible for everyone to communicate with anybody for free, no matter the distance.
So he created the WhatsApp and his friend Brian joined him as a co-founder and helped him to get $250,000 in seed funding.
The founders were very passionate about their product and they did everything they could to make the app work faster and to be more reliable.
They didn't invest any money in advertising. Their company's growth relied only on word-of-mouth marketing.
Given that SMS marketing stats tell us that the mobile messaging marketing is very effective it would be logical that Jan and Brian decided to sell ads in WhatsApp when it became popular, but they did not.
Actually, WhatsApp founders hate ads so they decided not to monetize their app through ads, but to charge their users a $1 per year fee.
After five years of hard work WhatsApp had over 450 million monthly active users, so they got attention from some of the biggest tech companies in the US.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, invited Jan Koum one night to a dinner and offered him to buy his app.
Just a few days later, it was revealed that Facebook will buy WhatsApp for $19 billion!
At the time, Jan Koum owned 45% of WhatsApp, so he got around $8 billion.
His current wealth is estimated at $11.5 billion in 2022.
What would you like to know about Jan Koum?
Content overview
You can find much more stuff about Jan Koum on this page!
- Earnings: How does Jan Koum make his money and how much he makes?
- Jan Koum's net worth over the years
- Age: How old is Jan Koum? Where was he born?
- Jan Koum's height and weight
- What is his real/full name?
- Is Jan Koum married? Does he have a girlfriend?
- Family: Does Jan Koum have any brothers, sisters or kids?
- Friends and associates
- Jan Koum's house photos
- Which car Jan Koum owns?
- Tattoos
- Jan Koum's quotes
- Education: Did Jan Koum go to college?
- Jan Koum on social media
- Trivia: Did you know these facts about Jan Koum?
Jan Koum's net worth over the years
| Year | Net worth |
|---|---|
| 2022 | $11.5 billion |
| 2021 | $11 billion |
| 2020 | $10.2 billion |
| 2019 | $9.7 billion |
Age: How old is Jan Koum? Where was he born?
Age: Jan Koum is 45 years old now. Nationality: Ukrainian American Ethnicity: White Sign of the Zodiac: Pisces
Jan Koum's height and weight
- Height in cm and feet: 186 cm / 6 ft 1 in
- Weight in kg and lbs: 81 kg / 179 lbs
What is his real/full name?
Jan Koum's real/full name is Jan Koum.
Is Jan Koum married? Does he have a girlfriend or wife?
Jan Koum is not married yet.
Girlfriend: There are some rumors that Jan Koum is in a relationship with Evelina Mambetova, who is an Ukrainian model and actress.
Evelina Mambetova was born on February 28, 1991 in Crimea, Ukraine.
Family: Does Jan Koum have any brothers, sisters or kids?
Jan Koum's parents were from Ukraine and of Jewish origin.
Jan moved with his mother and grandmother to California, USA in 1992 when he was 16 years old.
His father wanted to join them later, but he died in Ukraine in 1997.
Jan's mother passed away only three years later from cancer.
Jan has no brothers or sisters.
Friends and associates
Find out who are Jan Koum's friends and associates:
- Brian Acton (WhatsApp co-founder)
- Jim Goetz (Sequouia Capital)
- David Filo (Yahoo! co-founder)
- Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder)
- Priscilla Chan
- Igor Solomennikov
- Alex Fishman
Jan Koum's house photos
The founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, lives in Mountain View, California, but photos of his house are not available to the public.
Which cars Jan Koum owns?
Jan Koum is a collector of rare Porsches. He has more than ten Porsches, but he also has some other cars, like Ferrari F12tdf which has a V12 engine and costs over $500,000!
Here is what Jan said in an interview while talking about his Ferraris:
I feel like Ferrari is my Italian mistress. When I drive a Ferrari I feel like I'm cheating on my other cars.
Tattoos
Jan Koum has no tattoos.
Jan Koum's quotes
We handpicked Jan Koum's best inspirational quotes for you:
Do one thing, and do it well. I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.
Be simple and reliable.
Communication is at the very core of our society. That’s what makes us human.
The F-word here is focus.
Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.
We’ve taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.
It was so run-down that our school didn't even have an inside bathroom. Imagine the Ukrainian winter, -20°C, where little kids have to stroll across the parking lot to use the bathroom. ...I didn't have a computer until I was 19–but I did have an abacus.
I grew up in a country where advertising doesn’t exist.
It’s not hard to sell a company, but if you look at [leading online] companies today like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter, they didn’t sell. They stuck around and built a great offering for users.
I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.
A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in WhatsApp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.
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 isn't 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.
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.
I feel like Ferrari is my Italian mistress. When I drive a Ferrari I feel like I'm cheating on my other cars.
If you run a startup and your goal is to get on techcrunch, you are doing it wrong.
We’re the most atypical Silicon Valley company you’ll come across. We were founded by thirty-somethings; we focused on business sustainability and revenue rather than getting big fast, we’ve been incognito almost all the time, we’re mobile first, and we’re global first.
The message growth rate in Brazil – it’s not like a hockey stick: it’s like a vertical line.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don't need.
Our team has always believed that neither cost and distance should ever prevent people from connecting with their loved ones, and won’t rest until everyone, everywhere is empowered with that opportunity.
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.
Build a sustainable company that’s here for the next 100 years.
Education: Did Jan Koum go to college?
High School
- Mountain View High School (1995)
College
- San Jose State University (dropped out when he got a job at Yahoo!)
Languages
Jan Koum speaks two languages:
- Ukrainian
- English
Jan Koum on social media
Here is the list of all Jan Koum's social media accounts:
- Facebook profile: 92,180+ followers
- Facebook page: /
- Instagram: 380+ followers
- YouTube: /
- Twitch: /
- Google+: /
- Twitter: 57,000+ followers
- Snapchat: Jan Koum doesn't have a Snapchat account.
- LinkedIN: 500+ connections
- TikTok: /
- Musical.ly: /
- Vine: /
Trivia: Did you know these facts about Jan Koum?
- Jobs before the fame: When he was young, before he started working for Yahoo!, Jan Koum worked at a grocery store as a cleaner.
- Famous for: Jan Koum is famous for creating WhatsApp and later selling it to Facebook in 2014.
- Years active: Since 1998
- Nicknames: /
- Religious views / Religion: /
- Hobbies: Jan Koum's hobbies are poker, boxing, and ultimate frisbee.
- Eye color: Brown
- Hair color: Dark brown
- Sexual orientation: Straight
- Plastic surgeries: Jan Koum hasn't undergone any plastic surgeries.
- Phone number: Lots of people search for Jan Koum's phone number on Google each month, but he never posted it on the Internet. If you find his phone number somewhere on the web, that will probably be a fake number.
- E-mail address: Jan Koum's email address is [email protected]
- Favorite color: /
- Favorite number: /
- Favorite food: /
- Favorite celebrities: /
- Favorite rapper: Kanye West
- Favorite bands: /
- Favorite superhero: /
- Favorite movie: /
- YouTube views: Jan Koum doesn't have a YouTube channel.
- Pets: Jan Koum still didn't post any photos of his pets online.
