Coincidental hindsight aside, just given his background as it stood in the 2009 timeframe I'd love to be a time traveling fly on the wall to see his interviews and/or the decision making process that had both Facebook and Twitter passing on him.
“Facebook turned me down” (2009)
31–40 of 197 posts
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Too high of a risk for companies. Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too. Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acqui…
> Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win.
Sorry, I can't help myself, but at a salary of $160k a year, payrolling "a hundred of them" per year would only cost 1/10th of what FB just paid for whatsapp.
It's too bad companies like FB and Twitter would rather let the 'founder' types slip by than to take more chances. When Facebook last tried to recruit me, they described themselves as "a bunch of startups that just happen to work under the same company." Yeah, right.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman in college again in 2014, what chances do you give him of creating a $170B company in the next decade? How about in his lifetime? How about a $1B company in his lifetime? I'd say on the order of 1. 1 in a billion 2. 1 in 100 million. 2. 1 in a million. Sure he is smart and driven and has had every opportunity available to the one guy on planet earth who will achieve what he has. But…
Pretty slim because Facebook exists in 2014 buddy. Your problem is that you're associating the biggest most overhyped entrepreneurs as being the typical entrepreneur. And they indeed do hit huge luck. So you're right there. What the media doesn't talk about -- are the thousands of founders running profitable companies in the tens of millions or even low hundreds of millions. If you do something of value to society, t…
No I agree completely there. I think we all have reasonably good chances of creating successful small businesses and extracting our fair value out of society of a few million or even 10 million. But to start something that grows to billions or tens or hundreds of billions that quickly--that isn't skill, that's luck. It takes being the kind of guy who can make the 5 million dollar successful small business to have a chance to play the lottery, but I'm saying that most HN readers are of opportunity to play that lottery. Zuck is much, much different than the typical member of planet earth, but not MUCH (a little better, I'll give him that) than the average silicon valley engineer.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#34It'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).
Any word on if either were married?
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he was hired by Facebook, he wouldn't have (co)developed WhatsApp. If Facebook hired him, he would most likely be worth (to Facebook) as much as any other random Facebook programmer. Unless he's the one who started WhatsApp, it would have been developed and successful anyway and Facebook would have to buy it for the same amount of money. The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than progr…
Is it his programming capabilities that make him so valuable? Or something else? Can those traits be identified and valued in the hiring process?
I would say that the reason he struck gold (which is different from being valuable) is because he's a good programmer who happened to work on a break away product.
There are much more good programmers out there than break away products like WhatsApp.
You can't create successes like WhatsApp just by hiring good programmers. There are plenty of great teams that didn't achieve product/market fit and failed.
There are plenty of great programmers at Facebook or Google that do important but not wealth creating work (not on the scale of WhatsApp wealth).
In cases like this most likely the reason why WhatsApp is popular is that there was a person in charge who had the right vision for the app and came up with just the right set of features and a little bit of luck.
But even that person isn't valuable per-se in the sense that you should hire him for your company at all costs hoping that he will create similar wealth for your company.
I'm sure I'm butchering the analogy, but those are Schrödinger's successes: you can only tell they're successful at the time of the exit, but not at any time before that.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#36And yet in both cases of being denied by Twitter and Facebook he aired the negative news and kept a positive outlook.
That's the sign of a smart person in my book.
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too high of a risk for companies. Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too. Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acqui…
> Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Sorry, I can't help myself, but at a salary of $160k a year, payrolling "a hundred of them" per year would only cost 1/10th of what FB just paid for whatsapp. It's too bad companies like FB and Twitter would rather let the 'founder' types slip by than to take more chances. When Facebook last tried to r…
I think you mean 1/1000th of what FB just paid... seems like it would be a good investment to me!
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Too high of a risk for companies. Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too. Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acqui…
> Too high of a risk for companies.
The problem with PARC and AT&T labs wasn't that having a bunch of really smart people doing interesting stuff failed to produce brilliant, world changing ideas, it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them (arguably for the better, in the case of Unix).
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#39"We only hire the best engineers"
That means "We would rather accidentally reject great engineers than accidentally hire bad ones. Our hiring process reflects this."
Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)
#40NYTimes actually pointed out another curiously-related Tweet [0] from the other co-founder, Jan Koum:
"totally agree with Vinod Khosla. people starting companies for a quick sale are a disgrace to the valley... 3:47 AM - 17 Jul 2012"
[0] https://twitter.com/jankoum/statuses/225134737285578752
edit: I am not criticizing Jan at all and would gladly do the same given the same position.