Quotes from Jan Koum

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.

We're obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones.

I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.

I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer'. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.

Ironically, I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood. I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer;' I watched it some 20 times as a kid.

I want to do one thing and do it well.

We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.

In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.

'WhatsApp' began as a simple idea: ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

A lot of my time, effort, and focus is spent on 'WhatsApp'. And that, to me, is more valuable and rewarding than to work on anything else.

Everybody I meet who uses 'WhatsApp', I ask them a question: 'How did you hear about it?' And they say, 'My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.' We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.

Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.

WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.

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.

Users get unlimited 'WhatsApp'. We get happy users who don't have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans.

It's important for people to have freedom to use whatever product they want. We have no problems with other people using other apps, so long as they keep using 'WhatsApp'.

As long as our user base continues to grow, at some point it will have critical mass, and at some point it will tip, and at some point, people will just have to use WhatsApp because their friends are using WhatsApp.

Our team has always believed that neither cost and distance should ever prevent people from connecting with their friends and loved ones, and won't rest until everyone, everywhere is empowered with that opportunity.

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.

If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.

People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.

We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.