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Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

by sama on 5/2/17, 7:05 PM with 55 comments

• by a_d on 5/2/17, 7:44 PM

  Jan is the entrepreneur that I admire the most. Here are some of the reasons:

  1. He was so focused on building the product that he just ignored all emails from carriers and investors. Sequoia partners had to hunt down Whatsapp's office just to get in touch with him. Most entrepreneurs would be easily distracted by investor attention.

  2. He didn't care about the press (despite a ton of inbound interest). I don't know how or why he could resist the temptation, but he did for a long time. In fact at one point he tried to consciously stay out of press because he wanted to "manage" growth and didn't want competitors to get wind.

  3. Very balanced outlook towards global users - even though SV (or even US) didn't recognize their traction, he always understood that there is a big world out there where not everyone has an iPhone.

  4. Focus on infrastructure and reliability.

  5. Focus on being "lean". For a long time the team was quite small - but the thing I find most telling is the fact that he didn't have "business people" for a long time - anyone who didn't build the product. At acquisiton I think they had a GC and a business operations guy. It it amazing to be able to resist the temptation to build an empire.

  Whichever way you look at it, he comes across as someone who is able to resist common temptations and had a great balanced head on his shoulder.

  There is Lot to learn from Jan

• by ramblerman on 5/3/17, 9:01 AM

  This was interesting, and well presented. So my beef isn't with Jan but more so with the startupschool initiative. (focus on school)

  How do you learn anything tangible from this? It's just a bunch of successful people talking about what they did. Without more context this is just survivorship bias, most of these aren't even serial entrepreneurs.

• by dirtyaura on 5/3/17, 5:44 AM

  The talk raised interesting points about hiring. Jan said that most of the early hires were people from their own networks that currently were "unemployed" or goofing around and that's why it was easy to hire them. So it sounds that they hired people that they knew and trusted but who, for an outsider, would look like were not great at execution.

  And yet, Whatsapp is clearly a startup that excelled especially at the execution. They successfully build multiplatform product that included OSes that were traditionally seen as cumbersome to build for (Symbian, Java ME). Many, many companies have struggled and failed to do that. It also seems that they scaled really well (compared to e.g. Twitter)

• by ryandrake on 5/3/17, 2:40 AM

  Super congratulations for successfully reading the "messaging" tea leaves and capitalizing on the trend. I admire the vision. I would have never in my wildest imagination predicted the extent to which text messaging became a killer app on mobile--to the point where we have dozens (hundreds?) of different apps to choose from. I still don't see the appeal of messaging apps, but their popularity is undeniable. People don't even seem to mind the fact that all of these apps do fundamentally the same thing yet are largely incompatible with each other.

• by MrGrillet on 5/3/17, 12:40 PM

  I enjoyed this talk and took away something slightly different to others on the talk...

  For me, what was clear is that they listened to feedback and took action relatively quickly. I remember when they first launched the Blackberry version and emailing the team about bugs - I think I got a response the following day and they clearly implemented something by the following release.

  It wasn't about being devoted to a vision of a particular product they were passionate about. They saw a market/ problem and solved it using their technical ability.

  Yes, they had a lot of luck on their side - being in the market early enough to gain the visibility. Also, people naturally promoted the app so they didn't need to spend much on marketing. Other apps that came after it, weren't so lucky. Being well connected and having cash to provide initial runway probably made this easier for him than it would be for most but I think it's fair to say he built up his rep at Yahoo - which probably helped when he needed to raise cash.

• by adgasf on 5/3/17, 11:35 AM

  How did WhatsApp survive between idea -> first charging users?

• by alexkon on 5/3/17, 11:38 AM

  Why did they avoid any media attention?

• by NavyDish on 5/2/17, 11:22 PM

  Can you please post a reddit-AMA style proof to assure users that it really is you. It is unbelievable that you weren't aware of HN and that the profile was created just a few hours ago. Thanks. :)

• by Phlow on 5/3/17, 12:34 AM

  I honestly don't even want to watch this, out of spite.

  Whatsapp is so damn frustrating to me and the people I talk to.

  The microphone button is so finicky that I lose hours of my week to trashed messages. I don't know if it's the size of the button being so tiny that a man's thumb easily hangs over the edges, triggering the trash feature with the slightest movement, or some other strange bug. A call comes in, message trashed. An alarm, message trashed. I've literally recorded a 10 minute message and lost it, condensed it to 5 minutes and lost it, condensed it to an angry 2 minutes and lost it and then just given up...

  Then there's the volume. Why do I have to crank Whatsapp up so high in my car that EVERY OTHER audio event blows my ears out?

  How are these huge usability problems not being fixed with the amount of money that was thrown at it?

  I can't find anyone or anywhere to complain about it either. The Contact Us area of the application REQUIRES you to give them your full contact list before you proceed.

• by ssimoni on 5/2/17, 8:44 PM

  It is very nice to have first mover advantage. Many web and mobile application companies today do not have first mover advantage. This was a good talk to listen to if you have quietly stumbled on something that people want before the rest of the product builders find out.