Facebook rejected him in 2009: 5 years later it paid $19 billion for his startup

In August 2009, a software engineer named Brian Acton posted a short, remarkably calm update after being turned down for a job at Facebook. He wrote that the interview process had let him meet ‘some fantastic people’ and that he was looking forward to ‘life’s next adventure.’ There was no bitterness in the post and no hint that the company passing on him would, within five years, hand over as much as $19 billion to acquire the business he was about to help build.

According to a Business Insider report on Acton’s Facebook rejection, he publicly revealed on August 3, 2009 that Facebook had turned him down, months after he had left Yahoo and begun looking for his next role. Facebook was not the only company to pass on him during that stretch: an earlier post from May 2009 shows he had also been rejected by Twitter.

Instead of landing at either company, Acton reconnected with Jan Koum, a former Yahoo colleague who was building a mobile messaging application. The product, which became WhatsApp, was built around a simple idea: messaging tied directly to a user’s phone number and contacts rather than a conventional social network profile. Acton joined Koum and helped grow the company as its user base expanded rapidly.

By early 2014, WhatsApp had scaled well beyond a small side project. According to Facebook’s official February 2014 announcement of the WhatsApp acquisition, the service had more than 450 million monthly users, 70 percent of whom used it on a given day, and it was adding over one million new registered users daily. Its messaging volume was approaching the total global volume of telecom SMS traffic. The same company that had rejected Acton as a job candidate was now negotiating to buy the business he had built.

On February 19, 2014, Facebook announced a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp. Per the acquisition press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the deal included roughly $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook shares, an initial value of about $16 billion, plus another $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp’s founders and employees vesting over four years. Combined, the widely reported potential value reached about $19 billion. That figure was never a personal payout to Acton; it represented the total transaction value distributed through cash, shares and restricted stock among the company’s shareholders, founders and employees.

Facebook’s SEC records show the acquisition formally closed on October 6, 2014, confirmed in the company’s official 8-K filing. Acton’s brief 2009 rejection post has stuck around precisely because hindsight rewrote its meaning: what read at the time as an optimistic line from a passed-over engineer became, five years on, a preview of the deal Facebook itself would come calling for.

Wikimedia Commons/by Dan Taylor