A Floor Sweeper Who Sold to Facebook for $19 Billion

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]A floor sweeper, who sold to Facebook for $19 billion, Jan Koum grew up in a village in Ukraine with no hot water. He swept floors at a grocery store to survive. In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg handed him a check for $19 billion.

[00:00:14]Koum immigrated to California at 16. He and his mother lived on food stamps. He taught himself computer programming using stolen manuals from a used bookstore. He applied for a job at Facebook, they rejected him. He applied at Twitter, rejected again.

[00:00:26]In 2009, he and his friend Brian Acton launched WhatsApp with a simple idea.

[00:00:30]Free messaging without the ridiculous SMS fees carriers were charging.

[00:00:34]WhatsApp had almost no marketing budget.

[00:00:36]It grew entirely through word of mouth.

[00:00:37]By 2013, it had 400 million users. By early 2014, 600 million. Zuckerberg saw the threat of messaging platform he didn't own growing faster than anything Facebook had ever seen. He flew to Koum's house personally. They negotiated the $19 billion deal a kitchen table.

[00:00:53]When the deal closed, Koum signed the paperwork at the door of the San Jose welfare office where he once collected food stamps.