WhatsApp's extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.
Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
What makes our product work is the way we're tightly focused on messaging and being an SMS replacement.
We're not interested in bombarding our users with, 'Hey, play this game, play this game, play this game.' It gets annoying, it gets in the way of messaging, and it gets in the way of staying in touch with people who are important to you.
There were a lot of negatives, of course, but there were positives to living a life unfettered by possessions. It gave us the chance to focus on education, which was very important in the Soviet Union.
Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.
I hate spam, and that's what happens when you let businesses onto the network.
I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.
A lot of what I experienced growing up in the U.S.S.R. and coming to the U.S. as an immigrant actually reflects itself in Whatsapp. Experiences from our youth shape what we do later in life.
Users get unlimited 'WhatsApp'. We get happy users who don't have to worry about data. Carriers get people willing to sign up for data plans.
A lot of my time, effort, and focus is spent on 'WhatsApp'. And that, to me, is more valuable and rewarding than to work on anything else.
Everybody who wants to join 'WhatsApp', we'll go out of our way to build a really awesome client for them.
In some countries, WhatsApp is like oxygen.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.
