Brian Acton was the college dropout turned software engineer that no one wanted to hire.
After working as the Vice President of Engineering at Yahoo!, Acton applied to work at Twitter but got rejected in May 2009. Here’s his sad but optimistic tweet:
Got denied by Twitter HQ. That's ok. Would have been a long commute.— Brian Acton (@brianacton) May 23, 2009
Acton applied to Facebook a few months later and also got turned down. Here’s his sad but optimistic tweet:
Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure.— Brian Acton (@brianacton) August 3, 2009
After these harsh rejections, Acton decided to build a startup with his Yahoo! colleague Jan Koum, working for no salary.
After about 4 years their company WhatsApp sold for $19B to Facebook. At the time of getting acquired, WhatsApp had 600M MAU (monthly active users) and was generating $20M in Annual Revenue.
Source:
http://thehustle.co/whatsapp-founder-got-rejected-by-both-twitter-and-facebook-before-19-billion-buyout
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