![]() The app is particularly popular in India, where it has more than 160 million users, as well as in Europe, South America and Africa.īecause it’s free, has a relatively good record on privacy and security, and is popular in so many parts of the world, WhatsApp has cultivated an unusual audience: It has become the lingua franca among people who, whether by choice or by force, have left their homes for the unknown. More than a billion people regularly use WhatsApp, which lets users send text messages and make phone calls free over the internet. ![]() Koum’s story carries greater resonance because his app has quietly become a mainstay of immigrant life. Tales of immigrant woe are not unusual in Silicon Valley. ![]() Koum later told Forbes, his mother worked as a babysitter and swept floors at a grocery store to survive in the new country when she was found to have cancer, the family lived off her disability payments. He was a teenager when he and his mother moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s, in part to escape the anti-Semitic tide then sweeping his native Ukraine. Koum, like many in the tech industry, is an immigrant. ![]() When Facebook bought WhatsApp for more than $19 billion in 2014, Jan Koum, a founder of the messaging company, arranged to sign a part of the deal outside the suburban social services center where he had once waited in line to collect food stamps. ![]()
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