Meet Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp

New Delhi: Facebook Inc, the world's largest social network, has agreed to acquire mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp Inc for $19 billion in cash and stock, seeking to further expand its reach among wireless users. And with this acquisition, one of Silicon Valley's more private CEOs, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, is now facing the limelight. Following the deal, Koum will join Facebook's board of directors, but WhatsApp will remain autonomous and independent from the social network, much like Instagram. An estimate by Forbes suggests that Koum who owns 45 per cent stake in WhatsApp, will earn $6.8 billion in FB deal. At the same time, his co-founder Brian Acton's stake is estimated at over 20 per cent, which would make Acton at least $3 billion as of Facebook's closing share price on Wednesday.The story behind WhatsApps goes like this. In 2009, when WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, came up with the idea for his company after his gym banned the use of cell phones. Getting annoyed with the missed calls during his workout, he decided to create a solution. In this journey he was assisted by his former colleague at Yahoo, Brian Acton.38-year-old Jan Koum was born and raised in a small village outside of Kiev, Ukraine, and arrived in the U.S. when he was just 16-years-old. His family struggled and they lived on food stamps, which was revealed by venture capitalist Jim Goetz in a blog post. In his schooldays, Koum taught himself computer networking by purchasing manuals from a used book store and returning them after completing them. After spending few years at San Jose State University, he got a job at Yahoo and worked there for nine years at first in systems security and then in infrastructure engineering. It was in Yahoo that Koum met Acton. In 2007, the two left Yahoo; and in 2009, they launched WhatsApp.The simple idea behind the messaging service was to offer people a simple alternative to texting and reach friends and family anywhere in the world on any type of smartphone without having to pay for each message. WhatsApp costs 99 cents for iOS and is free on Android for the first year, and then costs 99 cents. Over the past few years, WhatsApp has achieved phenomenal growth as it now relays billions of messages a day and has 450 million monthly active users. The growth of the messaging service in such a short period of time has even exceeded those of major social networks and messaging services, like Skype, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter.Besides its founders, the Facebook-WhatsApp deal also means a lot to Sequoia Capital, which invested $8 million into the service in 2011. The deal was led by Jim Goetz, who also invested in AdMob and Palo Alto Networks. To date, Sequoia is the only venture partner in WhatsApp. The holding is valued at about $3.5 billion after Facebook offered as much as $19 billion for the company, said the people, who asked not to be identified because details of the investment are private. A stake of 15 per cent would yield about $3.5 for the venture capitalist firm. Koum believes the acquisition of WhatsApp will change the things too much. "This will give WhatsApp the flexibility to grow and expand, while giving me, Brian, and the rest of our team more time to focus on building a communications service that's as fast, affordable and personal as possible," he wrote. "And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product."