People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works.
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.
I grew up in a country where advertising doesn't exist.
We hear lots of stories where grandparents go to a store and buy a smartphone so they can keep in touch with kids and grandkids.
In Russia, you really learn about a person.
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 had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.
The encryption genie is out of the bottle.
'WhatsApp' began as a simple idea: ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.
The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn't because you don't know where things are going to go in the future.
I grew up watching 'Disco Dancer'. I watched it some 20 times as a kid.
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.
Everybody I meet who uses 'WhatsApp', I ask them a question: 'How did you hear about it?' And they say, 'My friends, my sister or my brother, somebody I know hounded me to install WhatsApp.' We think there is more power to the network when it grows organically.
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.
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.
What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.
If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.
Our focus remains on delivering the promise of WhatsApp far and wide so that people around the world have the freedom to speak their mind without fear.
If you look at firms like General Electric or other large companies, they don't just do one thing; they do many different things to generate sources of revenue.
On my iPhone 3GS, I use 'Instagram', 'Twitter' and 'Touch'.
