The Founder Of WhatsApp Posted This Unassuming Note In A Forum Five Years Ago

March 11, 2014 Leave a comment

The Founder Of WhatsApp Posted This Unassuming Note In A Forum Five Years Ago

CAROLINE MOSS TECH  MAR. 7, 2014, 8:06 PM

A few weeks ago, Facebook rocked the tech world with news that it was buying popular chat app Whatsapp for an insane $19 billion dollars.

Whatsapp founder Jan Koum, who developed the chat platform in 2009, once lived on food stamps.

Now, he owns a 45% stake in the company, and is worth about $6.8 billion dollars.

Twitter account Brilliant Ads, which tweets out awesome ads from brands and companies, shared a note that Koum left on a forum five years ago.

Here it is:

image001

Twitter/Brilliant Ads

The full message says:

hi there,

my iphone app, the one i spent the last few months on, just went live in the app store. its free.. the idea is that the app lets you indicate your availability status to other before they call you. so for example, if you know you going on vacation, you can set your status to say “going on vacation, will not have cell phone connection, send email instead”..etc.

was curious if any of you want to give me feedback on what oyu think about the application? i spent an extra effort to make sure it works well with all the intl numbers and formats out there.

the app is called WhatsApp (clever, huh?:), our site is: http://www.whatsapp.com and you can grab it directly from itunes by following this link.

looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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