In 1997, he found himself sitting across a desk from Acton, Yahoo employee 44, to inspect the company’s advertising system. “You could tell he was a bit different,” recalls Acton. He enrolled at San Jose State University and moonlighted at Ernst & Young as a security tester. He joined a hacker group called w00w00 on the Efnet internet relay chat network, squirreled into the servers of Silicon Graphics and chatted with Napster co-founder Sean Fanning. Koum was a troublemaker at school but by 18 had also taught himself computer networking by purchasing manuals from a used book store and returning them when he was done.

“In Russia you really learn about a person.” Koum spoke English well enough but disliked the casual, flighty nature of American high-school friendships in Ukraine you went through ten years with the same, small group of friends at school. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they lived off her disability allowance. She took up babysitting and Koum swept the floor of a grocery store to help make ends meet. Koum’s mother had stuffed their suitcases with pens and a stack of 20 Soviet-issued notebooks to avoid paying for school supplies in the U.S. It sounds bad, but Koum still pines for the rural life he once lived, and it’s one of the main reasons he’s so vehemently against the hurly-burly of advertising.Īt 16, Koum and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, a result of the troubling political and anti-Semitic environment, and got a small two-bedroom apartment though government assistance. His house had no hot water, and his parents rarely talked on the phone in case it was tapped by the state.

Koum, who Forbes believes owns 45% of WhatsApp and thus is suddenly worth $6.8 billion (net of taxes) - was born and raised in a small village outside of Kiev, Ukraine, the only child of a housewife and a construction manager who built hospitals and schools.

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