The $19 billion deal to sell WhatsApp Inc. to Facebook Inc. (FB) started at Yahoo! Inc. more than five years ago, when Jan Koum became disillusioned at the way Internet companies were fixated on advertising.
He left Yahoo in 2007 with one of the company’s other engineers, Brian Acton, and started a company by 2009 that shuns advertising altogether. The strategy allowed them to concentrate on creating an easy-to-use messaging product instead of developing new ways to glean customer information for their marketing pitches, Koum said in a 2012 blog post.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-20/whatsapp-s-founder-goes-from-food-stamps-to-billionaire.html
