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“Facebook turned me down” (2009)
- erict19 13y agoJust goes to show, on paper, founders aren't always the most appealing employees.
- greyshi 13y agoSeems 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.
- foobarqux 13y agoSome people are really bad interviewees. Forgivable because interviews are really bad at predicting fit and performance.
- pyrrhotech 13y agoThat'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.
- wpietri 13y agoYou 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-numbers-that-explain-why-facebook-acquired http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
- pyrrhotech 13y agoIf 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 that doesn't mean he's qualitatively different than the millions of others equally intelligent and talented who didn't buy the winning ticket.
- adam419 13y agoPretty 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, the world will make you rich with a smile on its face.
- pyrrhotech 13y agoNo 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.
- enewc 13y ago> If you do something of value to society, the world will make you rich with a smile on its face. Said no teacher, cancer researcher, etc. ever
- paul 13y agoI think in many cases great founders would make terrible employees. Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoSo 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)
- mrtron 13y agoThat goes against everything engrained in big org culture.
- bduerst 13y agoToo 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 acquiring that company instead.
- scep12 13y ago> 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.
- technotony 13y agoI think you mean 1/1000th of what FB just paid... seems like it would be a good investment to me!
- firloop 13y agoTwitter passed on him also. https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068
- psbp 13y agoThis is pretty hilarious. It's as if he knew what would happen.
- hendzen 13y ago"We only hire the best engineers"
- Ologn 13y agoHe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7259845 ).
- integraton 13y agoIt almost makes him a folk hero for anyone else running up against the "cultural fit" barrier.
- flomo 13y agoI think that would be an incorrect way of reading it. At his level, he would be negotiating executive responsibility and a huge salary. I'm sure any of these companies would love to have had him as a "senior engineer".
- chadillac 13y 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 13y agoI'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.
- kkwok 13y agoTo be fair, we don't know what position he was interviewing for at Facebook.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoTurns out false negatives can be pretty costly too, it seems.
- kkowalczyk 13y agoIf 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.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoIs it his programming capabilities that make him so valuable? Or something else? Can those traits be identified and valued in the hiring process?
- kkowalczyk 13y agoI 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.
- kldavenport 13y agoLooks like he won't have to worry about working for a living anymore...
- integraton 13y agoIt'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 13y agoAny word on if either were married?
- shutupalready 13y agoAnd 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.
- craigvn 13y agoOf course you could just get married for life.
- sneak 13y agoThe tricky part of adhering to that doctrine is not the married part. It's the not getting married if it might not be for life part.
- techsupporter 13y agoBy definition, a prenuptial agreement only covers entering into the marriage. Future assets, especially in community property states, usually have to be specifically disclaimed by the other party in the marriage before they can be considered separate property. For example: A prenup can't specify that a house bought after marriage is separate property, but the non-owning spouse can voluntarily sign away rights to that property as a recorded instrument. This is why some deeds say "John A. Doe, Grantee, a married man as his sole and separate property." (Some states allow for property purchased with separate assets to remain separate inside the marriage but the paper trail on this better be meticulous if a divorce ever happens.) Editorializing: Why would a spouse be no less entitled to reap the rewards generated by the other spouse's start-up? A relationship, especially a marriage, is inherently two people acting as a unit, so just because one spouse didn't sling PHP and research lambdas all night doesn't mean that either spouse's contribution is more or less valuable. If my spouse accomplished something like this, I'd be thrilled at the success and genuinely looking forward to our life together with much less time and stress investment from both of us, since that means that I was also picking up a lot more of the "home life."
- chadillac 13y agoTurned 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 http://i.imgur.com/sePVdgI.png
- jonalmeida 13y agoI don't remember seeing this in the movie.
- balls187 13y agoGet the extended edition on BluRay.
- gscott 13y agoThey won't hire you but are begging to get more H1b workers...
- adoggman 13y agoHe didn't fit their needs. If he doesn't and H-1B workers do, they should get the job.
- deleted 13y ago
- drawkbox 13y agoSweet victory. They didn't hire so he built it anyways.
- balls187 13y agoSeems like a pretty smart way to get a job at Facebook.
- kimonos 13y agoCool! Haha!
- georgemcbay 13y agoCoincidental 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 13y agoAnd 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.
- datawander 13y agoNYTimes 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 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 13y agoWhatsapp 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.
- datawander 13y agoWasn'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.
- gohrt 13y ago> My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. http://instagram.com http://instagram.com Ctrl-F Facebook
- gohrt 13y ago> My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. http://instagram.com http://instagram.com Ctrl-F Facebook
- dreamdu5t 13y agoStarting companies to sell them as soon as possible is not disgraceful. Haters gonna hate.
- gojomo 13y agoNote 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-inside-story-how-jan-koum-built-whatsapp-into-facebooks-new-19-billion-baby/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
- Untit1ed 13y agoIf success is the best revenge, this guy is god-tier.
- vagarwa 13y agoWell he turned Surfmark down and decided to follow his gut :) (Some 'gut' that was!) https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1997180708 https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1997180708 And I have 'immortalized' this using...surfmark http://www.surfmark.com/viewsm/GzFRmNKFeUqCGZBiZRzChw#page1 http://www.surfmark.com/viewsm/GzFRmNKFeUqCGZBiZRzChw#page1
- curiousDog 13y agoIn 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 13y ago[ have a friend who tried to kill himself because he failed the Google interview.] WHOA, talk about extremes
- cmollis 13y 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).
- cmollis 13y agoI should add that I would love to work there (but I'm sure I'd fail the interview (again)).
- staunch 13y agoSo, 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 13y agoI think this post now is rather appropriate http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html Imagine a world where he would of given up.
- JeremyMorgan 13y agoFine! 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 13y agoHe was too expensive.
- return0 13y agoWhat's that latest tweet of him? Probably a misspelling ;)
- NAFV_P 13y agoAsk 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 13y agoHe knows the language of love.
- varenc 13y agoPHP...
- NAFV_P 13y agoSo 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/ http://www.sitepoint.com/phps-creator-rasmus-lerdorf/2/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tribe2012 13y agoJust goes to show that the skills required to get a job are different than the skills required to start a company
- mhartl 13y agoThey still hired him. The only difference is they payed him a small signing bonus.