WhatsApp’s Founder Goes From Food Stamps to Billionaire
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I appreciate that he started WhatsApp from scratch but this picture that is being painted of him as some sort of homeless street person is rather warped, don't you think?
As if a former Yahoo technical engineer with a similarly qualified best buddy who has a crapload of cash, both of whom live in Silicon Valley, and have (I assume) plenty of other buddies in the industry, is somehow "starting from scratch from nothing".
The vast, vast majority of Americans should be so lucky to have the "nothing" that they had. Not to mention the rest of the earth's population.
The real truth isn't so much a story of "the poor getting rich" but really, "the rich getting super rich".
There are phenomenal obstacles to overcome when going from foodstamps to something resembling an upper-middle class life. Even more so when you're an immigrant. That's the real truth.
You're close to rock-bottom with foodstamps. Unless you've experienced poverty - not the "why can't I have $400,000 what makes this prick so special" meme that's pervading the comments on this post, but the kind of poverty that is inescapable, makes you feel hopeless about your circumstance, and constantly forces you to make stark choices about which of the basic necessities you'll have to do without for the month - then there really is no basis to calling Koum's story "warped".
An example of poverty here: http://qr.ae/tgPlq. Tl;dr - this guy went through bucketloads of shit, and still isn't out of the woods yet. Food stamps were of no use. Quote FTA: "... poverty can happen even to people you couldn't imagine it happening to, and when it does, it traps you like an ant lion." It's not the same story as Koum's, but what most people don't realize is how difficult it is to pull yourself out of poverty, especially when faced with mounting debts and health problems.
The fact that he went from virtually nothing to $400,000 in savings to the $19B exit is something that should be applauded, not derided.
I didn't mean to deride him at all. I was deriding the meme that is being promoted in the press that makes it sounds like someone with nothing suddenly created and released an app that suddenly sold for 19B.
His story is absolutely to be applauded. If he was on food stamps as a kid then indeed he "had nothing". For me the great success of his story is that initial bit nobody is talking about, going from a kid on food stamps, to an engineer at Yahoo. That is the amazing story I wish we would be talking about more. That's the story that real, everyday kids could actually have a hope of duplicating. Not the 19B sale to Zuck.
He didn't go from nothing -> 19B. He went from nothing -> Yahoo -> 19B...
The better story to tell is that he went from nothing -> Yahoo
The step from Yahoo to 19B, sadly, is more catchy for the newspapers because it's a "rare event". People don't really want to read about the "boring" stories, they want the dreams. It's human natures though. Which one do you think your kids like better: fairy tales/feel good movies or home works?
This is a very debilitating attitude, and it prevents people from doing what is necessary to get to the next step. It will take years, and possibly generations, but it will never happen if you are expecting it to be an overnight thing.
When I say (to non-Californians) that teacher's unions have too much power in California and am accused of being a right-wing wacko, I generally call this example out.
Unions have been responsible for much good (better working conditions, higher pay, etc...) but that doesn't give them a pass to screw students over.
It's generally accepted that smaller class sizes help with educational outcomes (as well as teacher morale/quality of life), so it's not only understandable that there would be some agreed-on class size limit, it's arguably professional.
From the accounts I've read, the class size limit was pretty far from the most significant tension involved. Local Garfield administration and politics seem to have been. The principal under which Escalante's program flourished (Henry Gradillas) was a big contributor to the success, but even so, he wasn't invited back after a sabbatical, and it's reasonable to speculate that he'd run afoul of the community which employed him when he'd prioritized academics over athletics. Later principals weren't anywhere near as supportive.
There was also the professional jealousy that came with Escalante's hollywood fame. You can argue that's petty, but I hope anyone who'd do so from the software world is equally circumspect about any kind of professional jealousy when it comes to the success of approaches you don't subscribe to in the software world.
So, yeah. Unions as The Devil is one easy narrative, but it doesn't sit comfortably with the details of the story I'm familiar with.
That's even more heartbreaking to hear. Everyone's opinion seemed to have matter, except that of the students, whose careers and educations were at stake.
It seems more Escalante was the one not prepared to compromise in this instance.
This is exactly the sort of thing unions should step in to solve, so you will have to find another example of why unions are not all good. There are plenty out there.
He grew up on food stamps. Even if it is only during your formative years, it is most definitely a different perspective than never having to rely on food stamps in your life.
Kind of hard to see how he values privacy without proper security.
This sounds like poor->rich to me.
i.e., the American Dream, post-1998 edition. I suspect the jump from "Nazis might kill me" to "poor in America" was roughly the same jump as "poor in America to working in technology" and from "Yahoo! to founding my own company". The founding-my-own-company to sold-to-Facebook was probably the smallest actual jump in subjective quality of life.
From personal experience, the first was _far greater_. To quote my brother (who became quite successful as well), I'd rather clean streets in US than live in former USSR again.
Being poor in America is by no means pleasant, but the change from being middle-class but 1) from a wrong ethnic group 2) (in my personal case) with a heavily individualistic orientation in former USSR was _far_ worse (one word: "conscription").
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
"Koum was eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo, and drifting."
Sure it's a lot of money. But the guy didn't win the lottery. He earned it.
According to TFA, he grew up in Ukraine in a house with no hot water, immigrated to the US without his father, stashed 20 notebooks in his suitcase so he would avoid paying for school supplies, was on food stamps and then on disability assistance when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
What kind of sad world would draw a the conclusion that he wasn't "conscious of the general socio-economic issues at hand to know that's still a large sum of money"?
But, in terms of Koum, he comes from an immigrant family that was lucky enough to have the ability to move to the US, this alone hints to me while they might have been poor by our standards they must have been doing well enough to make such a big move and afford it, people who do that are usually more well off then the general population they are immigrating from. Clearly he suffered some hardship when he was young and moved through it, that's commendable. But at 18 he got what seems like a pretty good gig at Ernst & Young and post that a good job at Yahoo, enough of a good job to save up almost half million dollars over 9 years, enough to basically take a year off from working and get to travel around a bit ... not too shabby. I'm sure plenty of people wish they had the ability to do this, but probably never will.
I'm not trying to detract from what he earned, and he certainly had a humble background and hardships while young with his mother being sick, but the idea he went from rags to riches really rubs me the wrong way. There are people who live in rags and I have a feeling most of them haven't had the opportunities Koum had. Whether the man himself is humble about it I don't know, I can't say because I never met him and I don't know his views, but I do know that the media portrayal of his background seems over the top. Let's give up this false narrative, humble beginnings isn't the same as being dirt poor and he certainly was quite rich when he started WhatsApp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerball#2009_changes_include_...
This is a sort of silly question, but does one only 'win' the lottery if they get the jackpot?
We've got a bunch in North Carolina - the 'cash5' game has you pick 5 numbers. If you match any 2, you get $1 - I think that's the ticket price. The winnings for matching 3, 4 or 5 are dependent on how many tickets are sold and how many other matches there are. http://www.nc-educationlottery.org/faq_cash5.aspx That approach may be more common for lotteries - I'm no expert :)
Silicon Valley. Remember the guy talked about at the beginning of "The Social Network" who commits suicide because he exited with "only" 3 million?
1. The sort of universe where winning the lottery actually means winning multiple millions of dollars.
2. The sort of universe where having $400,000 is something to be proud of having earned.
I guarantee you that for the vast, vast majority of San Franciscans, suddenly having $400,000 would be a truly life-changing event.
The article missed a trick, should have said:
"Whatsapp founder goes from being penniless and naked (just being born) to a billionaire."
I don't think there is a single person painting the picture you describe.
You might argue that the time frame doesn't matter, but then you could make up all sorts of crazy headline with logic like that, such as "Man who could barely feed himself now a billionaire" ..and begin the story when the subject was an infant.
Silly and extreme I know, but clearly timeframe matters. It's still an impressive climb, even if he started with millions (as any amount to several billion is just huge). But I don't think being on food stamps as a kid, is the same as being on food stamps recently or as an adult.
Probably not important in the grand scheme of things, but really it's commentary about catchy/misleading headlines and news stories than it is about the specifics of this story.
"Founder Goes from Rags to Riches" is a better headline than "Upper Middle Class Yahoo! Engineer Makes Billions". Both are correct but in order to gain readers the former is chosen almost every time (for better or worse).
I'm going to do us both a favor and stop checking this thread and get back to making my own success story ;)
I get annoyed by this "rags-to-riches" narrative the press in America seems to like to push. It's never as simple as the articles make it seem and there's always something left out.
The movement wasn't food stamps to filthy rich, but food stamps, to upper middle class existence, and then from upper middle class existence to filthy rich.
"The experience of living in a country where phone lines were often tapped, instilled the importance of privacy in him, said Jim Goetz, a partner with Sequoia Capital Ltd., WhatsApp’s lone venture capital investor."
Unfortunately, these jokes were usually presented the other way around - with Soviet Union as the butt of jokes. Times change...
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/crypto-weaknesses-in...
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Super-Rich-Can-Save-Us/dp/B003JTH...
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
John Steinbeck
Seems like some of them could be billionaires, too.
I'm happy for the team at WhatsApp. All other things being equal, having money is much nicer than not having it.
We have Tom Perkins complaining that the desire to have the rich contribute fairly is a 'Progressive Kristallnacht', tech nutjob Tim Draper advocating a scheme to basically wall off Silicon Valley from the poors in the rest of the state, and various SF tech firms monopolizing public resources (like bus stops, for example) without paying anything resembling a fair market rate.
Less directly, we have people like Peter Shih and Greg Gopman spouting antisocial rants about how their lives are inconvenienced by the poor and disadvantaged, and how the world would be a better place without all these poor people (rephrased, obviously).
There are certainly level-headed silicon valley millionaires out there who just want to buy a quiet house somewhere and live a happy family life. As long as they pay their taxes and don't lobby to make the planet worse, I have no problem with those people.
The issue is that you can easily come up with as many bad examples as good ones, when it comes to these 'new money' types.
The money in SV obviously does not go directly to the most deserving; some people just get lucky, other people get their money through deceit and outright theft, and other people have the vast majority of their money siphoned off by outside forces like patent trolls. It would be unusual if all these millionaires WERE good people.
Bill Gates is one of the few who really seems to want to give back, so we read about him a lot. It's a better news story than "Shocking! Another Rich Guy Turns Out to be Greedy" or "Wealthy Person Still Not Giving a Lot of Money".
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
Quote: "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."
Buffett, Gates and many other super-rich people have decided to give most of their fortunes to charity, not to their children.
This may appear to be true at first glance, but compare using capital to set up a foundation versus using the same capital to grow one's fortune in equities and other investments. The latter choice is better overall when a combination of growth and tax issues are taken into account.
This means that people who set up foundations do it because they want to change the world, not because they want to avoid taxes.
Only if burning money in your yard counts as a tax dodge. Setting up a foundation doesn't allow the money to be redirected to the donor in any way, and the donor doesn't even get to specify how the money is spent, except in a broad philosophical sense (i.e. "The goal of my foundation is to help education", things like that).
> I don't know if he represents the average or if he's actually a positive outlier.
Even among well-known philanthropists, Gates is an outlier. His willingness to tackle polio, and his project to redesign condoms to make them more effective, are both wise and daring projects.
Unlike smallpox, polio only exhibits symptoms in a small minority of those infected, so it is very difficult to identify, control and eradicate. It's going to be much harder to eradicate polio than it was to eliminate smallpox, the first dramatic pathogen extinction that was based on simple human effort.
Not only that, but SMS is very cheap. In Australia at least, most mobile plans come with unlimited, or more than enough SMS messages included in the plan to satisfy most people. I send a lot of text messages and it never makes any dent on my monthly bill.
What I'm getting at is, I'm puzzled why the app is worth 19 billion.
the irony of moving from wiretapping ukraine to corporate wiretapping by facebook (and possibly NSA) is palpable though. pretty sure facebook just bought whatsapp to get the giant phonebook directory...
Even a broken clock is right sometimes.
Other people read the story and are inspired by the title and so they feel a connection with it.
Other people want to troll! :)