#cofounder

“We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.”

Remembering the one and only Brian Wilson on what would have been his 83rd birthday (June 20th, 1942)🎸🎹🎼

Di dunia perusahaan rintisan, titel “co-founder” rasanya makin murah.

Asal gabung dari awal, bersedia ga digaji, maka Anda adalah seorang co-founder.

Tapi saya coba memaknai titel itu lebih dalam. Apakah ini tentang siapa yang duluan bergabung? Apakah ini tentang seberapa besar tanggung jawab? Atau seberapa jago seseorang dengan keahliannya?

Kayaknya semua itu masih belum tepat menghargai titel co-founder. Semua itu karakteristik yang menggambarkan seorang co-founder dari permukaan, tapi secara esensi saya ngerasa belum tergambarkan dengan akurat.

Yang lebih akurat menggambarkan siapa yang layak dihargai titel co-founder, menurut saya, adalah mereka yang secara proaktif mengambil tanggung jawab, sehingga ngga ada satu orang yang terlalu dominan memajukan tim/perusahaan. Beban dan kontribusinya relatif merata.

Dan tentu saja orang itu ngga proaktif mengambil tanggung jawab hanya karena rasa ngga enak sama founder. Harusnya lebih dari itu: co-founder bener-bener satu frekuensi, antusias, satu visi dengan founder. Dia tergerak karena gereget yang sama dengan founder.

Jadi, meskipun kita bikin sebuah tim dan menamai partner kita co-founder (atau kita yang di posisi co-founder), selama dorongan untuk menggapai visi ngga lahir dari dalam dirinyasendiri, maka titel hanyalah titel dan sang founder pada dasarnya adalah solo founder.

What's up, Jan Koum?

How would you feel if you have created something that 25% of the world uses, but not many people know about you?

This post is about a Ukrainian Jew, who, in 1992 at the age of 16, emigrates to USA with his mother, survives on social security, works as a cleaner, somehow gets into college, drops-out, fails to settle into a job, quits, creates an app, builds a company, makes history by being acquired for a record USD 19 billion and becomes a billionaire himself.

This post is about Jan Koum, the creator of WhatsApp!

Over 2 billion people the world over use WhatsApp, including my 65-75 year old parents and in-laws. Funnily, hardly anybody knows much about Jan Koum! So, here are a few facts about him.

His birthday is 24th February. Guess who else was born on 24th February? Yes, Steve Jobs. Guess who else? Yours truly!

At the age of 21, he drops out of college, joins Yahoo!, befriends Brian Acton (who co-founds WhatsApp with him in future), works in Yahoo!for 9 years, gets bored, takes an year off, travels to South America with Brian Acton, returns and applies to work for Facebook, gets rejected, buys an I Phone, is impressed with its new concept - App Store, and decides to create WhatsApp. He chose that name because it sounded like "What's up?"

WhatsApp was also born on 24th February, 2009. Wow!!

Within three months, WhatsApp looked like being a flop, with no takers. Then Apple came up with push notifications for all its apps. So, Koum changed WhatsApp to ping users when they receive a message. Soon, it became a hit. By December 2013, it had 400 million users.

In February 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, founder-CEO of Facebook, asked Koum to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed Koum a deal to join Facebook's board. 10 days later, on February 19th, Facebook announced that it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, a value about one-tenth that of Ukraine's GDP at that time!

So basically, Jan Koum, penniless immigrant at 16, jobless at 30, became a billionaire at 37. Today, he is worth USD 10 billion.