Jan Koum quotes:

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.

When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.

A lot of times, people start out with a lot of good ideas, but then they don't execute. They lose the purity of their vision. You end up running around in circles.

A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in Whatsapp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.

Ironically, I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood. I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer;' I watched it some 20 times as a kid.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

I want to do one thing and do it well.

Utilities get out of the way. Can you imagine if you flipped a light switch and had to watch an ad before you got electricity? Can you imagine if you turned on a faucet and had to watch an ad before the water came out?

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.

I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.

Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.

I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.

I want to do one thing, and do it well.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.

I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.

I didnt have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus.

Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don't want to be interrupted by ads when you're chatting with your loved ones.

Be simple and reliable

We focus a lot on the quality of experience, speed, reliability. It's not sexy from a lot of people's perspective, it's not glitzy in the feature set, but it's what people come to rely on.

Advertising isnt just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads theyll see tomorrow.

You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address. We don't know your birthday. We don't know your home address. We don't know where you work. We don't know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that.