Brian Acton

His wife, Tegan Acton, was the Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at Stanford and also served the Sundance Institute and Yahoo. The couple started a family foundation, ‘Sunlight Giving,’ in 2014. It is dedicated to aid families with low-income having kids between the age group 0–5 with basic services. While Acton serves as the secretary and treasurer of the foundation, Tegan acts as its President.

According to sources, Acton donated around $290 million worth Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook.

He had mentioned in one of his tweets that he was rejected by Facebook as well as Twitter in 2009.

He was born on February 17, 1972, in the US state of Michigan to a working middle class family. His mother who inspired him to start his own business ran a freight shipping firm.

He was raised in Central Florida where he attended comprehensive four-year high school called Lake Howell High School. He joined University of Pennsylvania after getting a full scholarship to study engineering, however left it a year later to attend Stanford University. In 1994, he completed his graduation and obtained a degree in computer science from Stanford.

He started his career in 1992 being inducted as a systems administrator in the now defunct American manufacturing conglomerate Rockwell International. He then went on to work as a product tester in the American multinational technology company Apple Inc. as well as in the American multinational computer software company Adobe Systems.

He joined Yahoo Inc. in 1996 as the 44th employee to be inducted in the company. For the next eleven years he worked for Yahoo where Jan Koum also joined as an infrastructure engineer in 1998. Meanwhile Acton went on to invest during the dotcom boom. He had to incur losses in millions at the time of the 2000 dot-com bubble.

In 2007 he received the Yahoo Super Star award. He along with Koum left Yahoo in September that year. They then took a hiatus for a year during which time they travelled across South America and played ultimate frisbee. The two also faced rejection after applying to work for Facebook.

After Koum purchased an iPhone in January 2009, he realised the potential of the seven-month-old App Store in spawning an entirely new apps industry in the near future. He began meeting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose and along with Acton the three would discuss on developing an app. The app was named ‘WhatsApp’ by Koum to make it sound more like "what's up".

Koum then incorporated WhatsApp Inc. on February 24, 2009, in California. At one point when Koum got fed up of versions of the app getting crashed or stuck, he thought of leaving it and search for a new job. At that time Acton advised him to give it a "few more months” time.