“Facebook turned me down” (2009)

https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

by zachlatta • 12 years ago

388 191 12 years ago

erict19• 12 years ago

Just goes to show, on paper, founders aren't always the most appealing employees.

greyshi• 12 years ago

Seems like he was pretty qualified on paper. Stanford grad and former VP of Engineering at Yahoo. With that in mind, maybe he just had a bad set of interviews. I think this would be more meaningful if we knew the position he was going for.

foobarqux2• 12 years ago

Some people are really bad interviewees. Forgivable because interviews are really bad at predicting fit and performance.

pyrrhotech3• 12 years ago

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.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

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...

paul• 12 years ago

I think in many cases great founders would make terrible employees. Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do.

waterlesscloud4• 12 years ago

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)

bryang• 12 years ago

I think this is the biggest thing. I'd love to do a data collection on founders and see what percentage of jobs they collectively got rejected for.

P.S. Care to hire me?

wslh• 12 years ago

Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do

Easy, do what you want.

firloop• 12 years ago

Twitter passed on him also.

https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068

psbp• 12 years ago

This is pretty hilarious. It's as if he knew what would happen.

hendzen• 12 years ago

"We only hire the best engineers"

Ologn• 12 years ago

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 ).

integraton2• 12 years ago

It almost makes him a folk hero for anyone else running up against the "cultural fit" barrier.

chadillac6• 12 years ago

"Stanford right across the street... that must be pretty handy for recruiting efforts." - Me

"Hah! Yeah, we hire them to answer our phones." - Them

throwwit• 12 years ago

I've known quite a few programmers that really should have access to the types of resources these big companies command; but just end up in situations simply paying the bills.

kkwok2• 12 years ago

To be fair, we don't know what position he was interviewing for at Facebook.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

It does sound difficult to find someone who has an engineering degree, a stadium-touring band and practices ninpo.

ChuckMcM3• 12 years ago

This isn't all that unusual. Most people realize that hiring processes are really random. In some ways just hiring anyone who applies, firing them after 90 days if they don't work out, and keeping track of who has been through once is probably a better system overall.

The recent work on how SAT scores don't predict college success is similar. There is a huge amount of influence around 'fit' and environment. Some people just "click" and some people don't. Genius rock star programmers that don't click are poor employees, and some times former washouts that do click are your key hires. Hard to predict.

pjscott• 12 years ago

That means "We would rather accidentally reject great engineers than accidentally hire bad ones. Our hiring process reflects this."

joesmo• 12 years ago

Hardly. There are way too many engineers fitting this description (and ones that don't) that apply to big companies than those companies can hire. Also, the hiring is done by people so it's bound to be imperfect like anything human. This is just marketing ploy. "We only try to hire the best" is the best anyone could really claim, however even that would be inaccurate as many of the best engineers are likely to not apply (already working, different area, don't want to put up with the interview, don't want to work for said company etc.).

prostoalex6• 12 years ago

You don't know if he applied as an engineer. He was VP of Engineering at Yahoo! by the time he left the company, it's somewhat unlikely he was probing for an individual contributor position.

TheSmoke• 12 years ago

"... others, we buy."

waterlesscloud4• 12 years ago

Turns out false negatives can be pretty costly too, it seems.

kkowalczyk2• 12 years ago

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 programming capabilities of any single engineer.

waterlesscloud4• 12 years ago

Is it his programming capabilities that make him so valuable?

Or something else?

Can those traits be identified and valued in the hiring process?

pajop• 12 years ago

"The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than programming capabilities of any single engineer." - kkowalczyk

I'll start using this quote! May I know your full name for proper attribution? :)

Are you Kacper Kowalczyk of https://github.com/kkowalczyk ?

LiweiZ• 12 years ago

+1 for having the big picture

marvin• 12 years ago

I think the real issue is that when Facebook didn't hire him, he went on to found a competing company which Facebook felt compelled to pay 16 billion for. That's a big cost.

balls1873• 12 years ago

Add 1 to that list. Wow!

kamaal2• 12 years ago

This makes a perfect HR case study.

Do you test a person's ability to mug up algorithm puzzles?

Do you test a person's ability to build a $16 billion company?

Sounds like the latter is a more result oriented goal.

gohrt3• 12 years ago

Do you test a person's ability to build a $16 billion company?

This is called "being a VC"

kldavenport• 12 years ago

Looks like he won't have to worry about working for a living anymore...

integraton2• 12 years ago

It'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).

lolwutf• 12 years ago

Any word on if either were married?

shutupalready3• 12 years ago

And if they were, I hope they were also smart enough to have prenups.

This brings up a question: Is it even possible to make a prenup that covers future windfills? E.g., a prenup that protects your wealth in a company that hasn't yet been founded.

prostoalex6• 12 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebooks-whatsapp-acquisit...

"I’m 42, essentially married with a kid. I don’t give a shit about this. I’m not sexting with random strangers."

oscargrouch2• 12 years ago

Thats good.. because stereotypes for people are a stupid thing.. human beings will break all of them..

Someday it will be a elderly woman, a kid, etc.. The Ocidental culture has a severe problem dealing with the impermanence and the unpredictable.. we need to get over it.. more zen-budhism, please?! :)

alexeisadeski33• 12 years ago

Last I checked, Buddhism was a caste religion.

gojomo2• 12 years ago

You may be getting your stereotypes from the wrong teen-beat outlets!

Koum: No-nonsense immigrant from group persecuted in home country, family emphasis on education, using computers since a teen, drops out of college when career responsibilities grow.

Acton: Early employee at one of the most-successful companies of an era, lots of deep systems experience, takes time to consider "next adventure", cofounds with prior coworker and leans on other colleagues for seed funding.

That's about as stereotypical as real Valley founders get.

alecco• 12 years ago

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."

http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon...

Over 30's programmers raise our glasses to Acton and Koum.

jaimebuelta• 12 years ago

Eh? What? Is that for real?

While it is true that GREAT developers can also be young, they are not magically getting dumber when they age. Also it may be easier to be disruptive if you're young (meaning you are naïve enough to think you can change stuff, most of the times you'll be wrong, though) but smarter? Really?

I find this a quite stupid statement, to be honest...

chadillac6• 12 years ago

Turned 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...

edit3: http://i.imgur.com/sePVdgI.png

jonalmeida• 12 years ago

I don't remember seeing this in the movie.

balls1873• 12 years ago

Get the extended edition on BluRay.

gscott2• 12 years ago

They won't hire you but are begging to get more H1b workers...

adoggman• 12 years ago

He didn't fit their needs. If he doesn't and H-1B workers do, they should get the job.

cenhyperion• 12 years ago

You're aware Jan, the CEO and other founder, is a Ukrainian immigrant, right?

graviboots• 12 years ago

I'll second this. I recently interviewed at a bunch of companies and couldn't get any offers. The interviews are getting ridiculous - we all know how pointless the coding questions are getting by now. Companies are too picky, in part because there's so much labor supply. I know there are loads of H1Bs around here, SV is like a third-world country.

JamesArgo• 12 years ago

Yeah, how awful it would be for America if the world's brightest become citizens.

shutupalready3• 12 years ago

Turned me down in 07

Telling the story now is an interesting historical anecdote, but you probably didn't blog or tweet about it in 2007, right?

I can't quite understand why Brian Acton was so public about the companies that turned him down. Isn't this bad for him if he's in a job search? Doesn't this send out a negative message (assuming any employer bothered to look)?

a_bonobo2• 12 years ago

You could see it as a badge of honor that Google or another large company, which purportedly hires only the best of the best, deemed you worthy of an interview. The mere fact that you have been considered for a position might raise your standing with potential employers [citation needed].

chadillac6• 12 years ago

Nah, I didn't announce it publicly, I was pretty ashamed of it at the time. Most people didn't even know I was up for it and I liked it that way. I'd rather surprise my friends with a "So I'm moving to Palo Alto!" message than a "Dang, apparently I'm not good enough." follow up/pity party.

flinty2• 12 years ago

humblebrag?

foobarqux2• 12 years ago

Where did you end up?

chadillac6• 12 years ago

Jumped around a bit, handful of companies you've probably never heard of but paid better than FB due to geography and talent shortage. Worked on a lot of fun projects for smaller and more adventurous groups that I wouldn't have ever gotten a chance to touch at a big corp like FB.

Everything from sneaking around pop-up blockers (sorry everyone) to video chat applications to real time messaging platforms to media conversion clusters to penetration testing (I use that term very lightly, but correctly... I wasn't cracking WPA or trashing stacks to pop boxes, just abusing poorly designed systems with permission and stuff with a touch of forensics and systems hardening).

I think back at the opportunity and I was devastated that I didn't make the cut, but honestly, I'm pretty happy I was left to find my own way... it's lead to a lot of great experiences over the past 7 years and I wasn't able to just slide by on resume fodder and has left me the freedom to live in MIA, NYC, and LA... cross the country via road trip multiple times (once on motorcycle!), and met a lot of very talented peers along the way. Not all of the best and brightest are in the Valley... just the chest thumpingist.

learningram• 12 years ago

Cannot see any picture there

herokusaki• 12 years ago

he botched a 2AM code push to production

I have come to think that pushing code to production when your person is noticeably compromised in some way should be prevented thorough technical means. Perhaps a CAPTCHA is an acceptable solution (which probably should also get more difficult the later the hour).

chadillac6• 12 years ago

Tailing syslog while under the influence and patching an error should be a senior developer right of passage.

;)

http://www.wired.com/business/2008/10/googles-mail-go/

edit: As an aside, it was entertaining watching a drunk man use Emacs under the gun.

aestra2• 12 years ago

If you're so drunk you can't solve a CAPTCHA then you also probably can't sit at a chair and type on a keyboard.

blueskin_5• 12 years ago

USB breathalyser?

drawkbox• 12 years ago

Sweet victory. They didn't hire so he built it anyways.

balls1873• 12 years ago

Seems like a pretty smart way to get a job at Facebook.

kimonos• 12 years ago

Cool! Haha!

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

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.

skyebook• 12 years ago

And 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.

datawander2• 12 years ago

NYTimes 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.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

Whatsapp may be many things, but one thing it isn't is a "quick sale" - it's something of lasting and useful value. I'm willing to wager 5 years from now, Whatsapp will still have a significant portion of the world's messaging traffic.

datawander2• 12 years ago

Wasn't criticizing the sale at all (edited to clarify tone), just found it interestingly related.

I use it myself, but not sure about the 5 years wager. One of the main reasons quite a few people I know use it is precisely because it wasn't Facebook. My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. But the FB app is probably too bandwidth-hungry for most WhatsApp users.

dreamdu5t• 12 years ago

Starting companies to sell them as soon as possible is not disgraceful. Haters gonna hate.

gojomo2• 12 years ago

Note that per Forbes [1], Brian Acton was Yahoo employee #44.

So it's not like Facebook (or Twitter) was overlooking a diamond-in-the-rough. More likely, it was some other key-role/compensation/fit mismatch.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...

Untit1ed• 12 years ago

If success is the best revenge, this guy is god-tier.

vagarwa• 12 years ago

Well he turned Surfmark down and decided to follow his gut :) (Some 'gut' that was!) https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1997180708

And I have 'immortalized' this using...surfmark http://www.surfmark.com/viewsm/GzFRmNKFeUqCGZBiZRzChw#page1

curiousDog• 12 years ago

In this case, he was probably rejected more for fit/pay/cultural reasons but this should be a reminder for candidates to never be dejected when they're turned down by these companies. I have a friend who tried to kill himself because he failed the Google interview. Rejection by the "smartest" engineers at this companies is by no means an invalidation of your abilities. At the end of the day, none of them are solving the grand unified theory.

Taurenking• 12 years ago

[ have a friend who tried to kill himself because he failed the Google interview.]

WHOA, talk about extremes

cmollis2• 12 years ago

"Google turned me down" (2008)

(have been calling me back in since 2012. Haven't gone (yet). Currently laughing all the way to the bank NOT rendering ads in every place imaginable).

staunch• 12 years ago

So, in the movie The Social Messenger I hope we see a scene in which Facebook made a Final and Best offer to acquire and this guy said "No. One more billion. Because you turned me down." :-)

ycmike• 12 years ago

I think this post now is rather appropriate http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html Imagine a world where he would of given up.

JeremyMorgan• 12 years ago

Fine! If you guys won't hire me I'll go out and start my own world dominating business you'll want to buy and then you'll have to.

See you in a few years suckers!

Kiro• 12 years ago

He was too expensive.

return0• 12 years ago

What's that latest tweet of him? Probably a misspelling ;)

NAFV_P2• 12 years ago

Ask Threaders:

What code does Zuckerberg write? I've seen the film and googled "mark zuckerberg". From what I gather, he did some programming in Atari BASIC, and he's just another perl hacker. Common sense would conclude that he is multi-lingual (yeah, I'm aware he was rusty a year or two ago), but does anyone know any specifics?

yungether• 12 years ago

He knows the language of love.

varenc• 12 years ago

PHP...

NAFV_P2• 12 years ago

So no, I don’t think it is deliberate that PHP gets very little press. PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?

Rasmus Lerdorf, http://www.sitepoint.com/phps-creator-rasmus-lerdorf/2/

tribe2012• 12 years ago

Just goes to show that the skills required to get a job are different than the skills required to start a company

mhartl2• 12 years ago

They still hired him. The only difference is they payed him a small signing bonus.

“Facebook turned me down” (2009)

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