Jan Koum, CEO and founder of WhatsApp, took to the stage earlier today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In an interview with entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky at 4 Years From Now, an event that runs parallel to the MWC, Koum talked about the humble beginnings of the multi-billion dollar messaging app. “I couldn’t find a job ,” he joked. Downplaying the scope of his initial intentions for WhatsApp, culminating last week with its acquisition by Facebook for $19 billion, Koum simply said, “I just wanted to do something cool.”
The camera-shy Koum spoke about the beginnings of mobile chat communication and its evolution over the past 20 years. Koum also talked about the evolution of messaging services into what will soon be the future of WhatsApp: the integration of voice services. “We’ve already introduced the ability to send voice messages, but we realized that this wasn’t enough, and we began to look for new functions.” This comes as a confirmation from Koum about the introduction of voice calls within WhatsApp, which was announced yesterday.
Koum also responded to concerns about the security of user data being shared after its acquisition by Facebook. “We do not store your messages, and we have no personal information about you. We do not store sensitive data, such as age, race, address… and we won’t be changing this policy. We try to know as little about our customers as possible.”
Koum also talked about the outage that hit WhatsApp last Saturday: “We had a problem with our backup server and had to transfer to another provider.”
When asked about any plans for integration with Facebook, Koum confirmed that there is no intention to integrate the popular social network into the messaging app: “WhatsApp will remain independent.”
