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.
— Jan Koum
We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.
In terms of security and privacy, what people care about the most is the privacy of their messages.
The encryption genie is out of the bottle.
We're not advertisement-driven, so we don't need personal databases.
The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.
A lot of companies are global.
WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.
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'.
'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.
People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works.
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.
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.
I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer'. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.
What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.
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.
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.
We continue to grow, and, just like with countries like China or other countries where we are not doing particularly well, we take a really long-term approach.
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 obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.
Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.
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.
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.
We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.
On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.
I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.
Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.
We're obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones.
In Russia, you really learn about a person.
The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn't because you don't know where things are going to go in the future.
The F-word here is focus.
We hear lots of stories where grandparents go to a store and buy a smartphone so they can keep in touch with kids and grandkids.
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.
I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.
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.
Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.
Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.
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.
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.
The message growth rate in Brazil - it's not like a hockey stick: it's like a vertical line.
We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.
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?
