Brian Acton
| Brian Acton | |
|---|---|
Brian Acton (right)
|
|
| Born |
February 17, 1972 Michigan |
| Residence | California |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stanford University (BS) |
| Occupation | Co-founder of WhatsApp |
| Organization | WhatsApp Inc. |
| Known for | Co-founded WhatsApp with Jan Koum in 2009 |
| Net worth |
 US$ 4.6 billion (September 2015) |
Brian Acton (born February 17, 1972) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder (with Jan Koum) of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion. He was formerly employed at Yahoo Inc.
Acton, born in Michigan, grew up in Central Florida, where he graduated from Lake Howell High School. He later graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a degree in computer science. In 1992, he became a systems administrator for Rockwell International, before becoming a product tester at Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems. In 1996, he became the 44th employee hired by Yahoo Inc.
In 1998, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. Shortly afterward he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. Acton invested in the dotcom boom and lost millions in the dot-com bubble of 2000. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and talked about developing an app. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up,” and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.
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