Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder for job

It turned out to be an expensive mistake for Mark Zuckerberg. A $19bn one to be precise.

In the summer of 2009 Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton for a job.

Like any other dejected interviewee, he used Twitter to express his glass half full disappointment: “Facebook turned me down A looking forward to life’s next adventure.”

That adventure involved Mr Acton and partner Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant whose childhood experience of Soviet era surveillance inspired the WhatsApp messaging service. Now a blockbuster deal has turned them into multibillionaires.

While Mr Koum survived a tough schooling in a village outside Kiev and dropped out of San Jose State University, Mr Acton, a Stanford computer science graduate, whiled away his time playing golf in suburban Florida. Their paths crossed at Yahoo in the noughties and in 2009, two years after they had left, WhatsApp was launched.

The thinking behind WhatsApp is rooted in Koum’s memories of a country where phones were tapped and school friends were censured for their views. He told one interviewer: “I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech. Our goal is to protect it.”

(Guardian News and Media)