How to Build a Product IV - Jan Koum, Co-founder of WhatsApp - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

[@hotvision]

You wouldn't know that this guy has 9 billion dollars by watching this lecture. Incredibly humble and kind. Great lecture.

[@MJC69800]

Refresh it $16billions now ! That’s incredible

[@tcsiwula]

This is my favorite startup school lecture so far. So much valuable information. Great speaker!

[@William_Clinton_Muguai]

Sure...It demystifies so much on how WhatsApp was created and what it's really like to start a startup...Most of us have these vague ideas on what it's really like. We even assume that the app was always the way it appears upon installation from the stores.

[@chapterme]

Chapters (Powered by ChapterMe) - 00:00 - Introduction 01:45 - WhatsApp History 04:48 - First version 10:01 - Sending one-on-one messaging 15:29 - Features 18:22 - Heads down building the product 19:17 - Q & A 19:41 - How did we think about iMessage and other platforms? 25:02 - What you would do differently today? 26:20 - Thoughts on Messenger 27:28 - How do you determine if an app has a potential? 28:57 - How did you build the culture to think about users around the world? 30:25 - Business - Incorporation, equity, and raising money 36:35 - Internal psychology and confidence 39:14 - Why did we partner with Sequoia? 41:36 - How did you get your first few thousand users back in the day? 43:00 - Scale into different countries 44:21 - How did you convince early employees to join you? 48:12 - Decision on what features to build 50:10 - Security issue

[@Anshuman044]

lol you are startup?

[@pushkarmandot4426]

One of the most ground to earth person I have seen. He literally gives credit to his experience at Yahoo. Amazing guy.

[@Anshuman044]

Btw this guys had 10 billion+ but still looks a normal guy

[@andreybakalenko2378]

Sweet! Jan is so sincere. He sounds like it has almost could not NOT happen

[@yuanhuihuang1531]

Wow what a storyteller! I am feeling like have gone through what he went through. Great!

[@iamhammadnasir]

What an amazing timing Jan and Brian had while coming up with WhatsApp. Like everything was sort of in there favour!

[@unboxmuseumm]

Hammad Nasir You can say that about every other successful company.

[@SERGE_Tech]

Stikkar it’s true but not all companies will be successful on the same level. Certainly skill matters but luck and timing can also matter.

[@unboxmuseumm]

We could all get by without majority of the apps on our phone, but WhatsApp is one of those apps that's become part of your everyday life. Very few startups manage to build an app that is essential to a user like food.

[@AcharyaChanakya108]

Extremely valuable real-world insights! Thanks!

[@tshev]

Greetings from Ukraine!

[@afa1515]

Whoa the guy introducing him is the CEO of OpenAI

[@sunchozzle]

I don't feel like these "How to Build a Product" videos are really about how to build a product. They're mostly just stories from founders about how they started their startups. The stories are interesting and contain some potentially useful lessons, but "How to Build a Product" seemed to imply that there would be more direct advice about something. I'm honestly not at all sure what I was expecting. "How to Build a Product" is somewhat vague. Perhaps anecdotes from various different startups actually is the best way to address such a question. Even so, I think a title like "Startup Stories" or something similar would be a more suitable title for this series. Anyway, I liked this video and I liked the story. It's important to remember that not everyone has an iPhone.

[@Aer0xander]

"How they build a product" would be better, to begin with :p

[@KeebRocks]

Alex Howlett I feel that anecdotes are probably better than "direct advice" though. The reason I think this is because it gives more of an insight into how successful entrepreneurs think about problems, tackle problems and generally give us an insight into how their thought processes work. Direct advice would be less useful because each business has very different challenges and therefore wouldn't be very applicable to a wide audience.

[@devinlovato481]

Whatsapp is his product. His pivot from status to messaging to accommodate his users more effectively describes the product development process. I think your definition of a product is too narrow.

[@StevenCymatics]

lol glad you feel that way, i'll keep all the gems for myself :)

[@ooohhh4178]

@@KeebRocks Hay there! I Totally agree With this! Every situation is Different (From what I encountered..)

[@WhisperingWinds0]

as guy from argentina,he really nails it, the codes,preferences and dial number from place to place or international from here are fucked up,the whole system of comunications is fucked up,Im glad he built a good replacement

[@rahul-sn3gr]

Great video

[@petkish]

Interesting, how much of their old source code for Backend is still in service.

[@CrashMza]

3:12 q raro q el aire Argentino no te inspirara a crear algo revolucionario jajajaa, vamos Argentina carajo :)

[@antonioalejandrogonzalezca8691]

Crash Raid lionel messi

[@marcoscarlomagno3065]

Mi pais, mi paais!

[@chon_chollasit]

27:00 How to determinant potential idea

[@onebigbreakpod]

“Could you do it again?” He ended up creating signal I think

[@HashimAziz1]

No, that's Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton.

[@ucefkh]

What's up? :D

[@ssharonin]

Nothing interesting at all. Except story of what was and never will happen again.

[@stachowi]

Lot of being in the right place at the right time with this outlier stories… it’s not common, one in a million start up story

[@VaderandRodaregoatedfr]

​@stachowi Not at all. If a product or an app is good enough then people will definitely get attracted towards it.

[@HashimAziz1]

If that's what you took from it then that's on you, on the contrary it's a story that has happened many times before and will happen many times again - the key is knowing what exactly "it" is. The lessons I see here are: a) be ready to launch a killer app for the Next Big Platform and b) get your head down and release as early as possible. And I say this as someone who doesn't like the guy.