PEOPLE BRIAN ACTON AND JAN KOUM: THE FOUNDERS OF WHATSAPP The History of WhatsApp Brian Acton and Jan Koum founded WhatsApp in 2009. They were both in their thirties and had just left stable jobs with the renowned company Yahoo!. They had left their jobs to travel around the world and, when they had used up almost all their savings, they applied for jobs at Facebook, but that didn’t work out as expected. They were quite disappointed, but then they came up with the idea of WhatsApp. Jan Koum bought an iPhone and soon realised the potential of the few-months-old App Store. He wanted to build an app to show a ‘status’ next to the individual names of the users. Koum discussed the idea with Acton and decided to ask Igor Solomennikov, an iOS developer, for help. It was not easy at the beginning, but Koum succeeded in developing the iOS application and WhatsApp Inc. in California on 24th February 2009. He chose the name WhatsApp because it echoed “What’s up?”, the typical question we ask people when we ask how they are, or what they are doing. Koum created a demo, but none of his friends liked it. However, Acton encouraged him to keep going with the project. In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications to remind users when they were not using an installed application. Acton took inspiration from this and modified WhatsApp in order to send notifications to friends when users changed their status on the application. It was an immediate success. WhatsApp soon became a channel for instant messaging and users started to chat with each other. incorporated Brian Acton and Jan Koum