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Jim Goetz and Jan Koum at Startup School SV 2014

Y Combinator · 38.3K views · 2014-10-14 · 29:13

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Overview

A Startup School SV 2014 conversation between Sequoia's Jim Goetz and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. They discuss how Sequoia pursued WhatsApp, its tiny engineering team, and how it handled growth and support.

From the video description

Jim Goetz and Jan Koum at Startup School Silicon Valley 2014

On Hacker News

HN mines it for WhatsApp facts, such as pricing used to slow growth, a 7-8 person backend team and late hiring of customer service.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2025

Topics

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What people said

ignoramous · 2025-06 · Reference

> ... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter ... Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0]. On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee. [0] [VIDEO]

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sah2ed · 2018-08 · Reference

Here is Jan Koum, at Startup School SV 2014 [0]: "... our iPhone app was paid and our other platforms were free." Other platforms being Nokia and Blackberry. He further explained that it may sound somewhat counter-intuitive: the reason why they made the app paid for some users was to slow their growth (similar to Facebook's college-only focus) so they could properly build out infrastructure and improve on the user-experience [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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boto3 · 2017-09 · Reference

Sorry for the harsh words, but this looks like a solution looking for a problem. Any CEO of a company that's lucky enough to have customers contacting them would spend a not trivial amount of their time reading and replying to the contacts. For example, Jan Koum, Whatsapp founder said that they only started hiring dedicated customer service staff when they reach 150M users [0]. [0] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Y Combinator, played through YouTube.

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