David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…For a strong community. For a strong community. We are going to start in the mid-1970s, in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, in a little village just outside Kiev, where a boy named Jan Koum is born to a Jewish family in 1976, in this village, in the then Soviet Union, and this is a pretty not great time to be all of those things. A jewish child, in Ukraine, in the Soviet Union, under communism, in the mid 1970s. Jan actually later talks about this and he says, in his time in the school he attended there, “It was so rundown that our school didn't even have an inside bathroom. Imagine the Ukranian winter, negative 20 degrees celsius, where little kids have to stroll across the parking lot to use the bathroom. Society was extremely closed off. You can read 1984 (the book), but living there was experiencing it. I didn't own my own computer until I was 19, but I did have an abacus.” That was the reality that this young man (Jan Koum) was growing up in, and he would stay in Ukraine until he was 16 years old. This would have just such an impact on everything as to come this entire story. His dad worked for a state-run construction company in the village. It was really hard and it was a very anti-semitic environment. Finally, by the time Jan was 16, his mother, his grandmother, and he was able to escape. This was in 1992, the Berlin Wall had fallen at this point. They were able to get out of the country and come to America. The three of them moved to Mountain View, California, Jan is 16 year old, he barely speaks any English. When they arrived, his mom starts working as a nanny to support the family. But it's not enough. They live in government-assisted housing in Mountain View, they're on food stamps. Jan's dad never was able to leave the Ukraine. He very sadly passes away in 1997, never comes to America. Even more tragically to a few years after that, in 2000—we're going to talk much more about what happens before year 2000—Jan's mom is diagnosed with cancer and passed away in 2000. Here's this guy, now, at the end of the day, at the end of the story, Jan walks away with nearly $7 billion dollars after taxes from the WhatsApp sale. This man has been through a lot. Yeah, no kidding. I think you opened that chapter by saying, “It was pretty not a great time.” That is a very soft way to describe a very hard existence.…

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