2026-10-14
100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #29: Jan Koum
Co-founder of WhatsApp. Raised in Soviet Ukraine without hot water and surviving on US food stamps as a teenage immigrant, he developed a visceral hatred for surveillance and advertising. Guided by a note taped to his desk — "No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!" — he scaled WhatsApp to 450 million users with just 55 employees, sold it to Facebook for $19 billion, and later walked away from nearly $1 billion in unvested stock rather than compromise user privacy for targeted ads. Ranked
