mobile messaging company so valuable that Facebook itself would return five years later with one of the largest technology acquisition deals of its era.
According to the Business Insider report on Acton’s Facebook rejection
, Acton publicly revealed on August 3, 2009, that Facebook had turned him down, months after the longtime Yahoo employee had begun looking for his next move. Facebook was not the only technology company to pass on Acton during this period, with an earlier post from May 2009 also indicating that he had been rejected by Twitter.
The rejected engineer joined a messaging startup instead
Acton’s next move eventually led him back to Jan Koum, a former Yahoo colleague who was developing the application that became WhatsApp. The timing mattered because smartphones were changing how people communicated, while WhatsApp was being built around a simple proposition: messaging tied to a user’s phone number and contacts rather than a traditional social network account. Acton joined Koum and helped build the company as its user base expanded at extraordinary speed.
By early 2014, WhatsApp was no longer a small mobile experiment. According to Facebook’s official February 2014 WhatsApp acquisition announcement, the messaging service had more than 450 million monthly users, 70 percent of whom were active on a given day, while its messaging volume was approaching the total global volume of telecom SMS messages. Facebook also said WhatsApp was adding more than one million new registered users every day. The company that had declined to hire Acton was now negotiating to acquire the business he had helped build.