Jan Koum promoting WhatsApp in the Flyertalk forum (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Jan Koum promoting WhatsApp in the Flyertalk forum (2009)

flyertalk.com

126 pointstakinola24 comments

A post by him from after the deal was signed: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/22387891-post72.html

Jan Koum seems like a genuinely nice guy. I am glad he is tech's most visible billionaire this boom cycle.

(Created a throwaway account just to post this)

When he was at Yahoo, he was considered a bit of dick by the way he parked his shiny BMW M5; he would take two spots, and then argue with people who complained. Parking at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus is a bit tight, so seeing him park like that rubbed people the wrong way; and despite being called out on it, his attitude was "so, what are you gonna do about it? I'll park as I see fit".

Go to Flickr and look up "ycantpark" tag from those days.

Just offering another data point thats all.

Wow, is this common at other companies, or are Yahoo employees particularly bad at parking?

Heh! I didn't work at the SNV campus, but in my time at Yahoo they had a daily email threads about bad parking jobs. Y! Cant Park or something...

Makes him sympathetic to me. Arguing with "but you can't park over the line" people is always entertaining. Its some form of real life trolling. Almost like walking across red lights and smiling at the faces on the other side of the road.

> Makes him sympathetic to me. Arguing with "but you can't park over the line" people is always entertaining. Its some form of real life trolling. Almost like walking across red lights and smiling at the faces on the other side of the road.

Yes I love doing troll things too like playing music really loud at 4am, blocking my neighbor's driveway and blocking the stairs when my elderly neighbor comes back from grocery shopping. So entertaining.

very much agreed.

I can't imagine a more humble and down to earth newly minted billionaire. What a cool guy.

Money don't spoil a person right away, it takes time. ;-)

Money doesn't spoil, money reveals.

Yeah, in the case of billg, he turned out to be a great person.

Funny to see this.

Posting to subject area forums (particularly communities using the familiar vBulletin) to gain your first 100 users, is a great way to get started. Posted this suggestion to the first 100 users thread recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7250358

He has some IM profiles listed on his flyertalk profile: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/jkb76.html Hasn't gotten round to adding whatsapp yet!

Since having a WhatsApp contact is equivalent to sharing a mobile phone number, that makes a certain amount of sense. It's intentionally more intimate.

But he can buy a Porsche now :)

Flyertalk is basically everything that was ever good about HN, Reddit, Slashdot, without the negatives. I don't understand how it has remained so awesome for so long.

FT has a huge and very strong mod team. Anything off-topic gets killed or moved to Omni pretty fast. Some of the individual forums are more heavily modded than others (United Airlines forum compared to Travelbuzz).

Flyertalkers also talk in code. "(23 Feb) UA 574 ord to ewr upgraded to 767 3 class" is a pretty typical thread title. The barrier to joining the conversation is high. That's nothing to compared to this gem from the trick-it thread (up to 31,000 posts):

> Were you guys aware that you can FD half by C1-C2 via northern star and then returning on the neutral longhorns that are the wholly owned sub of the airline named after me? Just discovered that today by accident. Pretty cool at times.

The trick it folks intentionally talk in vague terms to avoid anything being spread around. Most of the easy FD deals have been killed over the last few years because of this. The time/value tradeoff for those is now above my threshhold, but back in 2009 when they were much easier I flew SFO-SYD for ~$570.

It's interesting to see that he promotes the app by mentioning the status feature, which is rarely used nowadays (at least in my experience).

Back then, that's all it had. At the start, you could update your current status and see all your contacts' statuses. When iOS added push notifications, it got updated so you could get notifications of friends' status updates without opening the app. It wasn't until version 2.0 (at least a couple of months after the forum post linked here) that the messaging functionality was added.

Ah, I always thought "WhatsApp" was a weird name for a messaging app. Makes sense that the first version was just a status-update-sharer, a "what's up?" app. Nice.

Big things start small like a post in a forum.

The best deal on FlyerTalk, by far!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com