ONE
KYIV
INT. SMALL APARTMENT — KYIV, UKRAINE — 1990 — NIGHT
A Soviet-era apartment block. Bare walls. A single lamp. JAN KOUM, 14, sits at a kitchen table while his MOTHER packs a suitcase. Everything they own fits in two bags. Outside the window: the gray concrete landscape of a collapsing Soviet Union.
JAN'S MOTHER
(in Ukrainian, subtitled) We leave tomorrow. Your father will stay. America, Janichka. We are going to America.
YOUNG JAN
(in Ukrainian) Will it be different there?
JAN'S MOTHER
(pause) Everything will be different.
Jan looks around the apartment one last time. He is leaving behind everything he knows. He picks up a worn notebook — the only personal item he takes.
JAN (V.O.)
In Ukraine, the government listened to your phone calls. They read your mail. Privacy was not a right. It was something you did not have. When we left, I told myself: if I ever have the power to give people private communication, I will. I was fourteen. I did not know what that meant yet. But I meant it.
CUT TO:
EXT. MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — 1992 — DAY
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — 1992
A small apartment complex. Government-subsidized housing. JAN, now 16, and his MOTHER have been in America for two years. They are on food stamps. His mother cleans houses. Jan sweeps the floor of a small grocery store.
GROCERY STORE MANAGER
Jan, you missed the corner by the registers. Sweep it again.
Jan sweeps. He does not complain. After his shift, he walks to the Mountain View Public Library. He sits in front of a computer and opens a book on networking. He is teaching himself.
JAN (V.O.)
We had nothing. Food stamps. A government apartment. My mother cleaning other people's houses. I swept floors after school. But Mountain View had two things Ukraine did not — a public library and free internet access. I taught myself networking from library books and message boards. Nobody taught me. Nobody mentored me. I just read and practiced until I understood it.
INT. SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY — 1997 — NIGHT
JAN, 21, attends San Jose State while working as a security tester at Ernst & Young. He has become an exceptionally skilled network security engineer — self-taught from zero. He posts on hacker forums. His posts attract attention.
VOICE ON PHONE
Jan Koum? This is Yahoo. We have seen your work on the security lists. We would like to offer you a position as an infrastructure engineer.
Jan hangs up the phone. He sits in his small apartment. His mother is in the next room, sick. She has cancer. The Yahoo salary will cover her treatment.
CUT TO:
INT. YAHOO — SUNNYVALE — 2000 — DAY
YAHOO — 2000
JAN works at Yahoo. He is a talented infrastructure engineer but deeply uncomfortable with the company's advertising-driven model. He sits next to BRIAN ACTON, a senior engineer. They become friends — two quiet, principled engineers in a company increasingly driven by ad revenue.
ACTON
(looking at his screen) Another ad integration. They want us to track user behavior to target ads. Every click, every search, every page view.
KOUM
(disgusted) This is what I left Ukraine to escape. Surveillance. Tracking. Watching people. And now an American corporation does it voluntarily — and people celebrate it as innovation.
ACTON
It is how the internet makes money, Jan.
KOUM
It is how the internet loses its soul.
TWO
THE APP
INT. KOUM'S APARTMENT — MOUNTAIN VIEW — JANUARY 2009 — NIGHT
JANUARY 2009
JAN has left Yahoo. He bought an iPhone. He is sitting at his kitchen table, staring at the App Store. He has an idea.
KOUM
(to himself) Status updates. People want to know what their friends are doing. Not through a social network. Through their phone. Simple. Clean. Just a status next to their name.
He incorporates WhatsApp Inc. on his birthday — February 24, 2009. The name is a play on “What's up.” He begins building it alone.
KOUM (V.O.)
The first version was just status updates. It was not even messaging. But Apple released push notifications, and suddenly people started using their status to send messages to each other. The users told me what WhatsApp should be. I just listened.
INT. KOUM'S APARTMENT — MOUNTAIN VIEW — JUNE 2009 — NIGHT
KOUM calls ACTON.
KOUM
Brian. I am building a messaging app. No ads. No tracking. No data collection. Just messaging. I need your help.
ACTON
Jan, I just got rejected by Facebook and Twitter for engineering positions. I am available. But no ads? How do we make money?
KOUM
One dollar a year. After the first year is free. If we have a hundred million users paying one dollar a year, that is a hundred million dollars in revenue. No ads. No surveillance. No selling user data. Clean.
ACTON
Every investor in Silicon Valley will say you are insane.
KOUM
Good. Then they will leave us alone until we are too big to ignore.
I grew up in a country where the government tracked your every communication. I was not going to build a company that did the same thing. No ads meant no tracking. No tracking meant real privacy. A dollar a year was enough. It was the most radical idea in Silicon Valley — a technology company that respected its users. They called it naive. I called it basic decency.
CUT TO:
INT. WHATSAPP OFFICE — MOUNTAIN VIEW — 2011 — DAY
2011 — 200 MILLION USERS
A modest office. No foosball table. No snack bar. No colorful walls. Just desks and engineers. The entire company is about 30 people. KOUM has a piece of paper taped to his desk. It reads: “NO ADS. NO GAMES. NO GIMMICKS.”
ACTON
Two hundred million users. Thirty employees. That is seven million users per employee. Facebook has thousands of employees for a comparable user base.
KOUM
Because we do not build features no one asked for. We do not hire marketing teams. We do not run ads. We do one thing — messaging — and we do it well. Simplicity is not a limitation. It is a discipline.
INT. WHATSAPP OFFICE — 2013 — DAY
The user count ticks past 400 million. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on Earth. It is dominant in India, Brazil, Europe, Africa, the Middle East. Everywhere except the United States and China.
KOUM
(to the team) We are processing fifty billion messages a day. Fifty billion. More than the entire global SMS system. And we have fifty-five employees. That is what happens when you focus.
THREE
NINETEEN BILLION
INT. ZUCKERBERG'S HOME — PALO ALTO — FEBRUARY 2014 — NIGHT
FEBRUARY 2014
MARK ZUCKERBERG's living room. Casual, understated. ZUCKERBERG and KOUM sit across from each other. Zuckerberg has been courting Koum for months.
ZUCKERBERG
Nineteen billion dollars.
Silence. KOUM does not react. He has heard the number before.
KOUM
And WhatsApp operates independently. Its own brand. Its own team. No ads.
ZUCKERBERG
No ads. I promise. This is about connecting the next billion people. WhatsApp is how the developing world communicates. I want that in the Facebook family, but I do not want to change it.
KOUM
(studying Zuckerberg's face) If you ever put ads in WhatsApp, I walk.
ZUCKERBERG
Understood.
They shake hands.
EXT. SOCIAL SERVICES OFFICE — MOUNTAIN VIEW — FEBRUARY 19, 2014 — DAY
FEBRUARY 19, 2014 — DEAL ANNOUNCEMENT DAY
KOUM stands outside a nondescript government building. This is the social services office where he and his mother once stood in line for food stamps. He has chosen this location to sign the Facebook acquisition agreement. A small table has been set up. ACTON stands nearby. Cameras flash.
KOUM
(to Acton, quietly) My mother stood in this line. In this building. For food stamps. We had nothing. (beat) And now I am signing a nineteen-billion-dollar deal on the same doorstep.
He signs. The largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history.
ACTON
(looking at the building) America, man.
KOUM
(voice breaking, just barely) Yeah. America.
FOUR
THE PROMISE
INT. FACEBOOK HEADQUARTERS — MENLO PARK — 2017 — DAY
2017
WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users. But the promise of independence is eroding. Facebook executives are pushing for data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook. They want to use WhatsApp phone numbers for ad targeting. KOUM is in a conference room, visibly angry.
FACEBOOK EXECUTIVE
Jan, the integration is minimal. We are just connecting phone numbers to Facebook profiles for better ad targeting. The messages remain encrypted.
KOUM
You said no ads. You said independence. Connecting phone numbers to Facebook profiles IS ad targeting. It IS surveillance. It is exactly what I said I would never do.
FACEBOOK EXECUTIVE
The board needs monetization pathways —
KOUM
The board can find monetization pathways somewhere else. Not in my app. Not with my users.
INT. KOUM'S OFFICE — WHATSAPP — 2018 — DAY
APRIL 2018
KOUM sits alone. The piece of paper is still taped to his desk: “NO ADS. NO GAMES. NO GIMMICKS.” He removes it carefully, folds it, and puts it in his pocket. He opens his laptop and begins drafting a resignation.
KOUM (V.O.)
I told Mark — if you put ads in WhatsApp, I walk. He put ads in WhatsApp. I walked. I left nearly a billion dollars in unvested stock on the table. People said I was foolish. But some things cost more than money. My principles cost me a billion dollars. They were worth every penny.
CUT TO:
EXT. MOUNTAIN VIEW — PRESENT DAY — SUNSET
The small city where Jan Koum arrived as a sixteen-year-old immigrant with nothing. The grocery store where he swept floors is still there. The library where he taught himself programming. The social services office where he signed the biggest deal in tech history.
KOUM (V.O.)
My mother died of cancer in 2000. She never saw WhatsApp. She never saw the nineteen billion dollars. She never saw me sign that deal outside the food stamps office. But she saw something more important — she saw her son survive. She brought me to America with two suitcases and no English and no money and she gave me a chance. Everything after that was just work. The coding. The company. The billion users. The acquisition. It was all just work. She gave me the chance. That was the hard part.
The camera lingers on the social services building. The sun goes down over Mountain View. Somewhere, two billion people send messages to the people they love — private, encrypted, and free.
KOUM (V.O.)
No ads. No games. No gimmicks. I meant it then. I mean it now.
FADE TO BLACK.
Jan Koum immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine to Mountain View, California at age 16. He and his mother lived on food stamps. He taught himself computer networking at the public library and eventually joined Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He co-founded WhatsApp in 2009 with Brian Acton. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion — the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history. At the time of acquisition, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million users. Koum resigned from Facebook in 2018 over disagreements about user privacy and data sharing, forfeiting approximately $1 billion in unvested stock. WhatsApp now serves over 2 billion users worldwide. Koum's net worth is estimated at over $13 billion. Brian Acton left Facebook in 2017 and donated $50 million to the Signal Foundation, which develops the encrypted messaging app Signal.