WhatsApp founder Jan Koum: “We always had competition… But we said our destiny is in our hands”

We always had competition from, like, day one. There was actually a point in time where there was a new messaging app popping up, like, every month. And every month there was an article on TechCrunch, how this awesome new messaging app is going to, like, take down all other messaging apps. And I don't know if they paid TechCrunch to write it or what, but.

We would just read this and we would go like, they have no users. How can you write that story in TechCrunch? It just, like, makes no sense.

And obviously we didn't want to say anything because we don't want to draw attention to ourselves. We actually, on purpose, like, try to stay under the radar, but it was just, like, kind of funny to see this from the sidelines. All this kind of, like, dog and pony show that happened with all these apps. I mean, there was ping me, there was Message me, there was Group me, there was Kig. There were, like, 10 different messaging apps at some point, which kept getting all this publicity. And we were like, good for you. Have the publicity you want. We'll just send her the radar and not get. Not have any attention drawn to us. So we always had competition, be it big guys like iMessage or Facebook messenger, be it little guys like Kik, we always had competition. Even today, we still have apps like Telegram out there and Line and Kakao. But what we said that our destiny is really in our hands. Like, we can't worry too much about competition. We have to worry about our product and our users. And if we spend a lot of time thinking about competition or looking at competition, we're going to fail. Yeah.