Jan Koum – Ukrainian entrepreneur

I want to start my new blog with a business SDS task about the famous Ukrainian entrepreneur who has succeeded in global markets. Firstly, i wanted to tell who is an entrepreneur.

  1. An entrepreneur is a starter. An entrepreneur is an initiator, a challenger and a driver. Someone that creates something new, either an initiative, a business or a company. He or she is the beginning (and sometimes the end) of a venture, project or activity. The entrepreneur might not be the ideator, but he or she is definitely the one that decides to make that idea a reality.
  2. An entrepreneur is the driver. The entrepreneur is the person in charge, the leader and the person to look to for leadership. He or she is the one that pushes forward and inspires a team to follow. The entrepreneur is the one that sits in the driver’s seat, and has the ability to change direction, accelerate, slow down or even stop a venture.  
  3. An entrepreneur is accountable and responsible. The entrepreneur is the ultimate responsible for the destiny of its venture, which can be a company, a project, or any other endeavor. The entrepreneur is the one that has the highest stakes at the venture, thus the one that needs to be empowered to fully direct the endeavor.

( Information was taken from: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245628 )

An amazing example is a Ukrainian legendary entrepreneur Jan Koum.

Jan Koum is possibly the most financially successful Ukraine-born tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.  Koum, who Forbes believes owns 45% of WhatsApp and thus is suddenly worth $6.8 billion (net of taxes) — was born and raised in a small village outside of Kiev, Ukraine, the only child of a housewife and a construction manager who built hospitals and schools. 

In 2009, he co-founded Whatsapp, which became the world’s biggest mobile messaging service. Before that, he worked at Yahoo! for almost 9 years. Koum had emigrated to the USA from Ukraine with his family in 1992 at age 16. Facebook bought Whatsapp in 2014 for $22 billion in cash and stock and he went to work for them. Although he no longer works at Facebook today, the Ukrainian-American is reportedly worth $9 billion. 

Jan Koum signs the $19 billion Facebook deal paperwork on the door of his old welfare office in Mountain View, Calif.

Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up,” and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. “He’s very thorough,” says Fishman. The app hadn’t even been written yet. Koum spent days creating the backend code to synch his app with any phone number in the world, poring over a Wikipedia entry that listed international dialing prefixes — he would spend many infuriating months updating it for the hundreds of regional nuances.

Brian Acton, Jan Koum and Sequouia Capital’s Jim Goetz pose for a photo after signing WhatsApp’s historic Facebook deal. (Photo courtesy of Jan Koum)

Reference list: https://www.uadn.net/2019/02/18/three-pioneers-new-breed-of-ukrainian-tech-entrepreneurs-seek-success-in-global-markets-part-2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/?sh=47cad0f2fa19 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245628

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