Twitter passed on him also. https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068
This is pretty hilarious. It's as if he knew what would happen.
“Facebook turned me down” (2009)
11–20 of 197 posts
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#12It's interesting how neither of the founders fit any of the stereotypical valley founder profiles. They don't look like Mark Zuckerberg, they are older, Brian Acton barely used twitter, and his tech background is more traditional (C, C++, Perl, etc).
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#13"We only hire the best engineers"
He only had a BSCS from Stanford and had been a VP of Engineering at Yahoo leading over 300 engineers. Facebook turned him away, and as someone else mentioned here, Twitter. It kind of puts in perspective that blog post from yesterday that claimed companies in Silicon Valley can't find rock star ninja engineers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7259845 ).
It almost makes him a folk hero for anyone else running up against the "cultural fit" barrier.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#14Just goes to show, on paper, founders aren't always the most appealing employees.
I think in many cases great founders would make terrible employees. Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do.
So if you're a giant company, hire them and don't tell them what to do. Let them run free on your dime. Own whatever they make.
(Not that Twitter was a giant company in 2009, and Facebook was just getting there)
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#15Turned me down in 07' after a handful of phone interviews, flying me across the country, and 8 hours of in person interviews with 3 separate departments... but not before I got their CTO so shitfaced drunk he botched a 2AM code push to production and helped convince Zuckerbergs little sister into riding a mechanical bull.
I regret nothing.
edit: Worth noting I was a 22 year old self taught programmer that hadn't experienced addressing O(log n) in a CS course, working with massive amounts of data, or large scale Linux sysadmin stuff. I wasn't fit for the ranks when compared against ex Yahoo! and Google people running for the same positions. So at least I made the most of it.
edit2: I got the interview after finding a bug in their authentication system that would allow a password hash collision to spit out the e-mail of the user that the collision occurred with. Meaning I type in a bogus email, and a password, after the post the login form would come back with the email pre-populated of the user that the hash collision had happened on, I type in the password again, and I was logged in as said user. It was a small bug I found by accident and then afterwards asked if they were hiring...
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#16Sweet victory. They didn't hire so he built it anyways.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in many cases great founders would make terrible employees. Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do.
So if you're a giant company, hire them and don't tell them what to do. Let them run free on your dime. Own whatever they make. (Not that Twitter was a giant company in 2009, and Facebook was just getting there)
That goes against everything engrained in big org culture.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#18"We only hire the best engineers"
He only had a BSCS from Stanford and had been a VP of Engineering at Yahoo leading over 300 engineers. Facebook turned him away, and as someone else mentioned here, Twitter. It kind of puts in perspective that blog post from yesterday that claimed companies in Silicon Valley can't find rock star ninja engineers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7259845 ).
"Stanford right across the street... that must be pretty handy for recruiting efforts." - Me
"Hah! Yeah, we hire them to answer our phones." - Them
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#19Just goes to show, on paper, founders aren't always the most appealing employees.
That's because successful founders are just lucky. That's it. Not qualitatively different from any of us. You'd have no better luck picking lottery winners by the looks of the guys entering the gas station.
You overplay your hand. There is a very large luck component to it, sure. But I mentor at entrepreneurship events, and there is a very wide distribution of people who want to start companies. Some of those people are obviously more suited to the work than others.
I think that's especially true for people who, like WhatsApp, do things that are different than the common wisdom [1]. I had dinner recently with a friend who worked for Jeff Bezos years ago. She remembered Bezos coming into a meeting in something like 1999 excited about eInk and how it was the future for electronic books. Everybody single person in the room thought he was crazy. They didn't get the Kindle out the door until 2007, and most people thought it was crazy then. But it worked.
You could call that pure luck, but I think that's only true in the most abstract sense, where everything we are is luck.
[1] http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#20Turned me down in 07' after a handful of phone interviews, flying me across the country, and 8 hours of in person interviews with 3 separate departments... but not before I got their CTO so shitfaced drunk he botched a 2AM code push to production and helped convince Zuckerbergs little sister into riding a mechanical bull. I regret nothing. edit: Worth noting I was a 22 year old self taught programmer that hadn't expe…
I don't remember seeing this in the movie.