Jim Goetz and Jan Koum at Startup School SV 2014

So this is really cool. Uh, this is the first time we have had uh a founder and a board member up here together, and I think it'll be a really interesting talk for that. It's also the first time these two guys have ever spoken together and potentially last, hopefully not.

Um, so there is a lot to talk about here. This is, you know, one of the most exciting startups of the last many years. Um, but before we jump into what happened with WhatsApp, I want to talk a little bit about Yan's background. Um, uh, so maybe you could talk about sort of growing up in Ukraine and how that influenced your thoughts about coming to Silicon Valley and startups and WhatsApp?

Sure. So, uh, thanks for having me. Thank you for coming here. It's exciting to see so many people here. Um, yeah, I grew up in Ukraine and I came to the United States in 1992. Uh, I was 16 at the time, and I've left, you know, my dad stayed in Ukraine, and I've left a lot of friends and people I went to school with.

And so, uh, part of it, part of what I experienced was it was really hard to kind of keep in touch with people. You know, back then, like think back to 1992, there was no internet, there were no emails, there were no Skypes, there was nothing. You just, you just had a phone. You didn't even have a cell phone for the most part. You just had like this landline, and you know, to call somebody you had to like sign up with MCI or AT&T, and it was just like all this kind of like weird, weird international dialing stuff you had to do.

And, uh, I think part of it is part of that influenced me. And then I think also growing up in a country where um education was really valuable and there was a lot of kind of focus on just learning and studying influenced me. Like I came here and I was able to quickly start learning about computers and pick up computer science.

Um