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Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

startupschool.org

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Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#41

Post by thirdsun »

ohstopitu wrote: post #12
zeusk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phon…

And that is why they succeeded imo. Because Facebook bought Whatsapp for it's 1 Billion users, and Whatsapp would never have hit that mark had it not been for the fact that they focused on market outside the US (where cheaper phones with android, candybar and other OSes were more popular). While Whatsapp is still not as big in the US, it's literally the defacto mode of communication in countries like India, Brazil et…

> That + the fact that it was tied to your phone number was in my opinion genius.

This is an important aspect. Having accounts and contacts based on phone numbers allowed my mother and her friends to use the service in no time - those are the kind of people that don't know their own email address (if they have one at all) and would never register for an account on their own. Phone numbers, however, is the system they already knew since using SMS.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#43

Post by dirtyaura »

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)

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#44

Post by vezycash »

jankoum wrote: post #26
panabee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the cynics who will invariably pile on with "survivorship bias," would you mind sharing what choices you consciously made that were different from other messaging apps?

there were a few and i probably won't be able to list all of them, but here are some: - build for multiple platforms. most of our competitors did iOS and Android only and called it a day. - keep the app simple. most of our competitors complicated not only the sign up flow but also the in-app experience - look native. our thinking was that hundreds of millions of people use native apps thousands times a day and if we…

I remember a few years ago when people bought 10MB. And WhatsApp for a whole week.

In fact, till today, my dad doesn't subscribe for data. He uses WhatsApp on a PAYG basis which would be financial suicide with other apps or browsing the web.

For instance, Skype can eat 1mb+ just by launching it on Windows.

WhatsApp is fast and easy on resources. I know someone who still uses WhatsApp on blackberry bold!

Skype on the other hand takes forever to open and a few more to connect on a 1GB ram phone.

The only time skype beat WhatsApp on speed of launch was when it was baked into the bareboned SMS app on WP.

One area where WhatsApp stands heads above the rest for me is notification. It's timely, and doesnt get lost. Notification counts are accurate unlike skype which always displays (1) pending even if you have 10 new messages - even On desktop.

WhatsApp understands the market better than the rest who mistakenly believe that the rest of the world has similar high, reliable, cheap network speed/ fast devices.

It makes me wonder why they all collect usage, device info, network data... at all.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#45

Post by _pmf_ »

a_d wrote: post #3

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…

WhatsApp and Netflix are the only companies who actually have interesting performance engineering solutions instead of throwing incredible sums of money at Yak shaving shenanigans that actually amount to digging themselves deeper.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#46

Post by Matthias247 »

amygdyl wrote: post #38
zeusk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This impressed me the most, because at the time whatsapp went mainstream globally - it was available on all platforms including the old BlackberryOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian (S60), Windows Phone and even some candy phon…

Did not early WhatsApp use a covert channel in sms signalling, just like you can get 2.4kb/s across the x.25 "D" channel of ISDN? I've no idea if true or not, my memory unreliably tells me I found some kind of confirmation, but common sense tells me not to rely on such recollections.. but I often pondered if such channels exist in the GSM spec, back in the day, when I was shocked to receive a sms, the service having…

I think you are mixing that up: SMS uses a signaling channel of GSM. It was originally not intended to become that big and just used otherwise unused resources. Therefore it could have been given out for free or very cheap. Later on telecom providers saw that people like text messages and that it has an enormous business potential, so they started to make huge charges for it.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#47

Post by ramblerman »

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.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#48

Post by Markoff »

tschellenbach wrote: post #16
a_d wrote: post #3

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…

WhatsApp launched at a time when SMS was a paid feature in Europe. It's pretty rare to have such a massive virality in your product. Not only is there a large network effect, your competitor is also charging a large amount compared to your free and superior product.

SMS is still paid in many countries of Europe and even more across world, so unlimited sms are still exception, not rule

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#49

Post by iopq »

ryandrake wrote: post #36

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 do…

We had XMPP, but Google and Facebook decided to kill it.

Re: Startup School 8: Jan Koum of WhatsApp

#50

Post by tim333 »

ramblerman wrote: post #47

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.

Dunno - I think there's a lot you could learn. They've had about 7 people on talking about the startups they did, a few were serial, some of them had failures. I'm not sure what better way you'd learn lecture wise?
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