Revenge:Brian makes WhatsApp
Though not exactly a Revenge Story, this story has one important ingredient of any such saga, Under Estimating the Ability of certain Individuals that went ahead and became a Threat to the very ones who put them down.
The Vice President of Engineering of Yahoo, Brian Acton quit his job and went looking for work at Twitter. He was rejected by Twitter right away. Apparently he wasn't so low when Twitter turned him down.
Next stop, Facebook, he really wanted a job here. But once again he was denied, and this time he felt it. Like many these days, he vented on the popular social platform.
Trying to keep himself positive, he worked with another fellow ex-Yahoo employee, Jan Koum, a Ukranian immigrant, a genius in programming, who also quit Yahoo around the same time when Brian Acton did.
The Vice President of Engineering of Yahoo, Brian Acton quit his job and went looking for work at Twitter. He was rejected by Twitter right away. Apparently he wasn't so low when Twitter turned him down.
Next stop, Facebook, he really wanted a job here. But once again he was denied, and this time he felt it. Like many these days, he vented on the popular social platform.
Trying to keep himself positive, he worked with another fellow ex-Yahoo employee, Jan Koum, a Ukranian immigrant, a genius in programming, who also quit Yahoo around the same time when Brian Acton did.
In January 2009, Jan Koum purchased an iPhone and realized that the seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. In West San Jose, the two (Brian and Jan) along with Koum’s friend Alex Fishman discussed "...having statuses next to individual names of the people,”. They shortlisted the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on February 24, 2009, they incorporatedWhatsApp Inc. in California.
WhatsApp became popular in just a small amount of time. By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swollen to about 200 million active users, the fastest for any social networking site. And this caught Facebook's attention. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg first contacted the founding members in the spring 2012. They began meeting at a coffee shop in Los Altos, California, then began a series of dinners and walks in the hills above Silicon Valley. On February 9, Zuckerberg asked the partners to have dinner at his home, and formally proposed a deal to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion.
The acquisition represented the biggest-ever price for a tech startup, trumping the $8.5 billion paid for Skype by Microsoft in 2011. It also marked the costliest acquisition for Facebook, resulting an expensive mistake for Mark Zuckerberg.
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