Quotes from Jan Koum

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.

I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.

The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.

Our focus remains on delivering the promise of WhatsApp far and wide so that people around the world have the freedom to speak their mind without fear.

In terms of security and privacy, what people care about the most is the privacy of their messages.

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.

Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don't want to be interrupted by ads when you're chatting with your loved ones.

The encryption genie is out of the bottle.

What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.

I have many regrets and things I wish I could go back and change, but I have also worked hard and tried to improve myself.

We want to do one thing and do it really well. For us, that's communications between people who are friends and relatives.

In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like.

Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.

I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.

People need to differentiate us from companies like Yahoo! and Facebook that collect your data and have it sitting on their servers. We want to know as little about our users as possible.

I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.

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.

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.

Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out?

We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.

If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.

On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.

I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.