Everyone who has been turned down for a job has felt it once: "You'll regret this someday." For Brian Acton, that sentence was not a daydream but a documented fact. In 2009 Facebook didn't hire him. Five years later the same company announced a $19 billion deal for WhatsApp, which Acton co-founded.
The story sounds like a movie script, but the dates and the tweets are there. The nicest part is that what Acton wrote in those days is still on record for anyone to read. There's no angry or bitter tone, on the contrary, it's surprisingly calm.
Two rejections after Yahoo
Acton is a software engineer born in 1972. He joined Yahoo in 1996 and met Jan Koum there. After working together for about nine years, the two left Yahoo in September 2007. According to Wikipedia, both later applied for jobs at Facebook but weren't hired.
Acton's rejections are on record on social media. As BGR reports, on May 23, 2009 he wrote: "Got denied by Twitter HQ. That's ok. Would have been a long commute."
His tweet on August 3, 2009 read: "Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure."
The next adventure: WhatsApp
There is a small but important detail here. WhatsApp wasn't started from scratch after Acton's Facebook rejection. Jan Koum had already registered WhatsApp Inc. in California on February 24, 2009. Version 2.0 of the app, which added messaging, was released for iPhone in August 2009. According to Wikipedia, with this version the number of active users rose to about 250,000. So in the very month Acton was turned down by Facebook, his friend's app was just taking off.
Acton's role began in the autumn of that year. According to Wikipedia, in October 2009 he persuaded five former Yahoo friends to put in a $250,000 seed investment and received the co-founder title and shares. He officially joined the company on November 1, 2009. So the man Facebook turned down became, within a few months, a partner in one of the biggest messaging apps of the future.
February 19, 2014: $19 billion
On February 19, 2014 Facebook announced it had reached an agreement to acquire WhatsApp. The deal was worth $19 billion: $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook stock, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units (RSUs) for the founders Koum and Acton.
To understand the scale, it's enough to look at user numbers. WhatsApp's monthly active users were 400 million in December 2013 and passed 500 million in April 2014. By Forbes's estimate, Acton owned more than 20 percent of the company.
| 2009 | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Rejected by Twitter and Facebook | A $19 billion offer from Facebook |
| A $250,000 seed investment | More than 400 million monthly users |
| An engineer looking for a job | A partner in one of the world's biggest tech sales |
The rarely told end of the story
After the sale Acton stayed at Facebook for a while, but it wasn't a happy ending. In September 2017, by his own account over a disagreement about WhatsApp's monetization methods, he left and, because of that, gave up about $850 million in stock options that had not yet vested.
In February 2018 it was announced that he was backing Signal with $50 million. This support was structured as an interest-free, unsecured loan to the Signal Technology Foundation. According to Wikipedia, this loan reached $105,000,400 at the end of 2018, and its repayment date was set as February 28, 2068. So part of the money he made from WhatsApp went to keeping another encrypted messaging app alive. In March 2018 he tweeted open support for the #DeleteFacebook movement.
So the story is not as simple as "rejected, took revenge". The company that turned him down earned him a huge fortune, and in the end he stood against that company.
Do you think a job rejection really pushes a person onto the right path, or do we only tell these stories this way in hindsight?