We want to do one thing and do it really well. For us, that's communications between people who are friends and relatives.
In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.
We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.
The difficult part for us is adding features without making the product more complicated.
The message growth rate in Brazil - it's not like a hockey stick: it's like a vertical line.
Anybody can build a company and sell the company the next day. That doesn't make you special, it doesn't make you unique, it doesn't make you all that great.
Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.
We're obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones.
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.
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.
It's important for people to have freedom to use whatever product they want. We have no problems with other people using other apps, so long as they keep using 'WhatsApp'.
The F-word here is focus.
People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.
We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.
We've taken SMS technology for consumers and improved it.
I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.
When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.
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 grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.
