New Employee Application 2007: Fill & Download for Free

Jan Koum is the founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $22 billion in 2014. He self-taught himself to code using a bunch of used books, and overcame enormous personal odds before he ever started WhatsApp. His story, which began on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, is a truly rags to riches tale.When Jan was growing up in Ukraine, his home had no hot water and little connection to the outside world. It did have a telephone, but his mother was afraid to use the phone because their family was Jewish, and Ukraine's secret police had a long history of antisemitic actions toward the jewish population.In 1992, Jan immigrated with his mother and grandmother to Mountain View, California. He was 16 at the time, and the family stayed in a government sponsored two-bedroom apartment. Today Mountain View is a booming tech center, but in those days housing was still low-cost and somewhat prevalent.To put together enough money to survive, Jan's mother babysat and Jan swept supermarket floors. It was a hard life in a new country, but things would only get more difficult from there...Jan's father - who was planning to join the family - fell ill before he could make the trip. He eventually died in 1997. Then Jan's mother was diagnosed with cancer (to which she would eventually succumb in 2000). The family was forced to rely on food stamps just to survive.Few people could fault Jan if his life began to unravel at this point. Immigrating to a new culture and country is hard enough, but when you lose your two parents in the span of 5 years, and you lift your head up and notice a world around you that doesn't add up... that's an unconceivable kind of pain.But Jan took the lumps as they came. When he was still in high school, he began to buy books from a used book store, and teach himself networking engineering. When he finished with the books, he'd return them and got his money back. He used his self-taught skills to land himself a job at Ernst & Young while still in university.One of his first clients was then-fledgling but soon-to-be Internet search giant, Yahoo. After a short time with Jan, their team was so impressed by him, that they too offered him a job. And before he knew it, he was working with - among other Yahoo stars - Brian Acton, one of Yahoo's earliest employees.Brian's earliest recollections of Jan impressed him the most: whereas Ernst & Young employees tended to be flowery speakers who knew how to tell you what you wanted to hear, Jan was blunt. He didn't have a penchant for bullsh**. He said it like it was and expected the same kind of bluntness back to him.For nine years Jan worked at Yahoo, through the enormous rise... and then through the slow, stuttering fall of the Internet giant. Eventually in 2007, he took a year off and travelled through south and central America. During this time, he applied for jobs both to Facebook and Twitter... and he was rejected.So he used about $400k in savings from Yahoo to start on a new Project: a messaging app that he called WhatsApp. He chose the name because he believed it was similar to the popular greeting, "What's up!" After building a base of about 250,000 active users, he brought old friend and colleague Brian Acton aboard as a cofounder.Together they took the journey to grow what is now one of the most captivating startup stories ever. Between 2009 and 2015 WhatsApp went from nonexistent to having over 900 million active users, and becoming the largest messaging app in the world. Additionally, it sold to Facebook for $22 billion in 2014.When Jan signed the papers that would make him one of the richest men in the world, he didn't do it in the Four Seasons or at Facebook Headquarters, and he didn't have camera lights glaring. Instead, he returned to the nondescript building where he once stood for hours waiting with his mother for food stamps.There, out of the limelight, Jan penned his signature. In that moment he completed a circle that was about so much more than teaching himself computer networking skills from used books or even building a successful business: it was about turning the tables in his life and offering purpose and meaning to even the hardest of times.

We won. It went from a crazy idea that the titans of industry said was impossible to DONE! I was the co-founder (heavy emphasis on co-, with founder Nicholas Negroponte) and the first CTO of OLPC, its only employee for the first full year. We created a small non-profit with a billion dollars of revenue that catalyzed $30 billion dollars of revenue for our for-profit partners. We transformed the lives of millions of children in the developing world and changed the equation of what a minister of education could do for the children in his/her country.People forget: at the time we started OLPC, laptops sold for $2,000 and up, and the good applications cost extra. It was infeasible to get computers for kids in schools by incrementing from that, it took a step function. We got industry to take it over and today we live in a world of $20 tablets that are being bought in mass by most countries in the developing world and distributed to all the children in these countries - as they are less expensive now than distributing textbooks.We designed a laptop to do this. Of course design is a weird word that mostly now means style and user experience. The group of people that style the housing of things… this isn’t what is needed for creation of a new kind of laptop that redefined what was possible. The laptop was the lowest power consumption laptop ever made, the lowest cost, had a retina-resolution display long before Apple, sunlight readable display, droppable, mesh networked. A real engineering breakthrough and a marvel still being produced a decade later with what was an all new user interface, new interaction methods. O, and the award-winning styling of the housing was cool too.The hardest part of the engineering design of the laptop wasn’t hitting the price, it was hitting low power consumption levels. About half of the world’s children live without steady ready access to electricity. The OLPC laptop from 2007 is still the lowest power laptop ever made - one watt average power consumption, charging from unconditioned power sources. Since then, Apple has single handedly driven power consumption higher. I say this not to insult Apple but to praise them, no one else is offering significant innovations in smartphones and laptops - everyone else follows what Apple does. Other companies should feel an urge to strike out of their comfort zones.

It’s hard to believe that the calendar has already flipped to 2019. In many ways, 2018 flew by at PowerObjects: new clients, new employees, new global offices, a new (to us) building in Minneapolis… good changes were all around us all the time. But there are a few things at PowerObjects that simply don’t change: our four pillars, our five Guiding Principles, our laser-focus on Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Business Applications, and certainly our commitment to publishing the number #1 Dynamics 365 Blog in the world.For the 11th year in a row, we blogged information, guidance, training, and helpful hints – all freely accessible and relevant to the entire Dynamics 365 user group community. Since the inception of our blog in late 2007, we’ve penned nearly 1,800 blogs, 227 of which were posted in 2018 alone! And as has been our tradition in recent years, we like to reshare the top ten most popular blogs from the previous year. So, without further ado, we present the ten most-read 2018 PowerObjects blogposts:10. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Configuration Migration ToolHere, readers learned about an often-overlooked option for migrating configuration data between environments. Indeed, the Dynamics 365 CRM Configuration Migration Tool assists in moving entity configuration data without the use of custom code. It’s a great no-cost, no-code tool!9. Using Virtual Entities with Dynamics 365Virtual entities allow Microsoft Dynamics 365 users to utilize record information from external data sources and view the information in fields, search results, and even Fetch XML-based reports within Dynamic 365. You can read all about it in this blogpost.8. How to Find the Object Type Code for Any EntityEach entity in your system has an Object Type code. For simplicity’s sake, think of it as a numbering system for all entities, including both out-of-the-box and custom. As a CRM expert, you could easily encounter a situation in which you need to identify the Object Type code for a given entity. We show you how!7. Authentication to Dynamics 365 using Azure AppsNeed to make a connection to Microsoft Dynamics 365 from an outside source like a single-page application, a mobile application, or other service? Typically, authenticating to Dynamics 365 can be pretty darn challenging – but not if you read this blogpost.6. How to Integrate Power BI with Dynamics 365 for Finance and OperationsPower BI is a suite of business analytics tools that allows users to analyze data and share insights. This robust tool provides extensive modeling capabilities, real-time analytics, and the option for custom development. Here you can read about how Power BI provides a great platform to create your own reports or simply tweak existing ones.