![]() ![]() Napster Co-founder Shawn Fanning was one of several members still in high school. Koum was already a senior Yahoo Inc executive in his early 20s when he joined w00w00. The key to w00w00’s success, according to interviews with a dozen members, was that it brought together people with widely varying expertise and backgrounds in a meritocratic way that would be tough to replicate in today’s more complex and competitive world of security. ![]() The two most famous exceptions are WhatsApp, the messaging service that Koum co-founded, and Napster, the pioneering file-sharing company that was shut down by the music industry in 2001. The now defunct collective known as w00w00 (pronounced whoo whoo) had thrived on Internet Relay Chat channels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, between get-togethers at hacking conventions such as Def Con in Las Vegas, where a member said Koum “came across like a big, friendly kid.”Īlthough the elite group was not well known outside hacking circles, its members have spawned more than a dozen companies, mainly in security. Regis Hotel in San Francisco to celebrate with old friends, including CEOs, reformed hackers and a few people who fell into both those camps.Ĭonducted over snacks and beer, the late-night festivity was a spontaneous reunion of a security super-group that had come to Koum’s aid in 2000 as he grappled with a denial-of-service attack that knocked Yahoo offline when Koum was responsible for security there. ![]() SAN FRANCISCO, March 7 (Reuters) - A few days after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, Jan Koum stepped into a suite at the St. ![]()
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