Brian Acton

Brian Acton (born 1972 ) is an American programmer and entrepreneur. He is with Jan Koum founder of WhatsApp, a messaging application, which was acquired in February 2014 from Facebook Inc. for 19 billion U.S. dollars. Acton was once an employee at Yahoo! Inc.

Life and career

Acton graduated in 1994 from Stanford University in computer science. Previously, he studied at the University of Central Florida and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 Acton System Administrator at Rockwell International and later product testers at Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems.

In 1996 Acton 44 found employment with Yahoo! Inc.. Koum January 1998 was set as an infrastructure engineer at Yahoo, the Acton shortly afterwards, while he was working as a security tester at Ernst & Young, met. Both worked over the next nine years at Yahoo. In September 2007, left Acton and Koum Yahoo to a year off to take care of by traveling through South America and played Ultimate Frisbee. Both headed for a career with Facebook, but have not been set. In January 2009 Koum bought an Apple iPhone and found that the now seven months old App Store released a dozen new apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman, to talk about the release of an app. Koum decided quickly for the name WhatsApp because it sounded like " what's up " ( dt: How are you? ) And a week later, on Koums 's birthday, February 24, 2009, he founded WhatsApp Inc. in California.

In 2014, Acton and Koum agreed the sale of WhatsApp on Facebook for 19 billion U.S. dollars. Forbes Magazine estimates Acton's assets by shares in the company at about 3.8 billion U.S. dollars.