Brian Acton (WhatsApp)

• Phone number: 408-974-7127 (Source)

2014.06.04 - StartX - WhatsApp at StartX with Brian Acton

0:00 - - Intro'ing the venue and interviewer
3:20 - Introing Brian
- Programming since the 6th grade, started with the TRS-80 Model 4.
- Grew up in central Florida
- Graduated with a degree in CS.
- Spent ~10 years at Yahoo.
- 4:40 - He initally was at UPenn and transferred to Stanford.
- His preference was to go to an Ivey with an engineering program. He got to UPenn and ran into a bunch of Cali students who had applied to Stanford and hadn't gotten in, so he thought seriously about transferring.
- His mom told him he couldn't go because she hadn't heard of it. His next-door neighbors were from Cali and talked to his mom and told her that she really wanted him to go to Stanford.
- Dabbled in EE a little.
6:50 - Q: While you were at Stanford, what experiences really influenced what you did later on?
- The project classes had the best influence on him.
- He did really poorly in one class but really benefited from the experience. "What is the process of building an operating system from the ground up?"
- With hands-on learning he did the best. He enjoyed the applied classes more, because he could take what he learned and immediately apply them.
- He interned at Apple his junior year.
9:00 - Q: Were there any professors that you particularly appreciate?
- CS154, Rajeev
- David Dill
- CS107 with Nick Parlante; Nick was his advisor
- Maggie Johnson
- The CS profs were stellar teachers.
10:27 - Q: Can you talk about the guidance you got from your favorite professors?
- I don't know that there was any single piece of advice.
- The professors were patient with him, and would explain concepts in a way that he would understand them.
- He started programming in the 6th grade but he didn't have a good foundation.
- Really what he got from Stanford was a good foundation in computer science.
11:50 - Q: How important was the fundamental computer science theory? People now are saying they'll skip those classes.
- I'd say it's critically important, especially data structures and algorithms, big-O.
- First-order predicate logic is a little out there.
- NLP, and the scope of what languages can do, that's directly applicable.
13:00 - Q: Were you thinking of doing a start-up when you were in school?
- In '89 there was a crash, and it was a very different time, so we were pursuing industry jobs: Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Sun.
- Only one of my friends did a startup: Excite, the search engine.
- 14:40 - Over the last 10 years there's been a real change.
14:50 - Q: For the people who are starting companies right out of school, do you have advice for how the industry experience actually helped you?
- For me, having industry experience gave me a lot of confidence to tackle a lot of hard problems. It also got me comfortable with the business-side.
- When you start a company you have to worry about stock plans, paying bills on time, etc.
- So having worked on industry gave me a broad understanding of how business worked.
- 16:40 - I had some fantastic mentors during my career. I learned a lot of tech from the mentors I had at Apple.
- 17:10 - Jan and I got a lot of experience managing hundreds of servers during our ten years at Yahoo.
- You can have a lot of trouble scaling your company if you don't have that kind of experience.
17:50 - Q: Talk about how you got started at WhatsApp
- In 2007 I had just finished a big project at Yahoo and decided to leave after 11 years.
- We both quit Yahoo Nov 1st, 2007, basically by coincidence.
- I went to Antarctica, Argentina, New York.
- I wanted to take some time off.
- After a year, I wanted to be back.
- In 2008 I came back to the Bay Area, I did talk to Twitter and Facebook and didn't get hired.
- Jan had gotten the 1.0 version of WhatsApp.
- When he pivoted and started working on messaging, I jumped in.
- I put in my money and worked for free for several years.
20:00 - Q: What value do you think you got from taking time off? Would you suggest other people do it?
- I think it depends on where you are in life.
- If you're younger, taking 12 months off is a lot. It's a big drain on your savings.
- When you get older it gets harder to wake up in the middle of the night to fix servers.
- I would recommend people take 2-3 months off
21:20 - Q: Were there any lessons that you learned at Yahoo that were fundamentally important for WhatsApp?
- Large-scale server management.
- I worked with Chi Lu (he's at Bing / Microsoft) and learned a lot from him.
- It's hard to describe exactly what you learn but you learn a lot.
- I worked with David Filo for many years.
- You learn what's good and what works, and you learn what's bad and what doesn't work.
Q: 22:30 - In the early days of WhatsApp, how did you explain it to people who didn't get it?
- I think we had the hardest time explaining it to people in the United States.
- It resonated the earliest in Europe.
- WhatsApp essentially modernizes SMS and makes it cheap.
- In Europe, if you're in France and want to talk to Belgium, the telecom companies impose a cost on the users.
- We have more competition in the US.
Q: 24:50 - How did you grow so fast?
- In 2010 I set up some quick stats.
- I watched registrations and activity pretty closely.
- We knew if activity was growing it would lead to more registrations.
- We knew if we added new features, new platforms, and new languages, activity would grow.
Q: 26:00 - Regarding adding features, can you talk about how you think about that?
- I'd say Jan and I were pretty aligned; we're both pretty utility-driven. We want to build something that's useful, not something that interferes in their life.
- About a year and a half ago I wrote: no ads, no games, no gimmicks.
- We wanted to build a very simple, straightforward, USEFUL product.
- Sometimes we do disagree; we disagree on the order in which we do things.
Q: 27:30 - How do you resolve disagreements?
- We just talk it out.
- We're both pretty execution-driven; we don't want to stall and sit on a decision for two years.
Q: 28:20 - I've heard you have a no-meeting rule?
- For a long time we had no meetings, unfortunately once we got to a certain size some meetings started to creep in.
28:55 - Q: Regarding the early culture: did you think about the culture?
- There was less explicit decision-making and more implicit.
- We wanted a tech-driven environment, conducive to working, where people felt comfortable. We wanted a balanced environment, where people didn't work 80 weeks. We didn't want people working on weekends.
Q: 29:50 - How did you enforce people working hours?
- People were drawn to it. Some of our earliest recruits were parents.
Q: 30:30 - How'd you decide on the first employees?
- The first employees came out of our extended networks.
- I reconnected with a Stanford alum from my dorm. Jan found someone he'd worked with ten years prior.
- We pulled people we knew were smart, we knew were capable.
- We got one indirectly through a colleague.
- Getting referrals, getting recommendations.
- Finding people and bringing them onboard is extraordinarily hard. It's hard even for us today.
- We're still 60 people.
- All our hiring has been organic; we never put a huge budget into it.
- Some companies will say, "Hey let's hire 200 people"; we've hired very incrementally.
32:50 - Q: What are some potentially-viable options for scaling the business globally? Are mini-transfers an option?
- There's revenue growth and there's population growth.
- When you talk about population growth, you need to look at the different cultures of the world, and see what is making people not want to use the product. Is it that they don't want to exchange phone numbers? Do they not want their phone to buzz? So you need to look at each culture differently.
- What we do is employ people from around the world as part of the customer service team, and they teach us about that culture.
- Regarding financial growth, we've taken a very disciplined approach, and a lot of that's been driven by cost control.
- When your costs are very under control, you don't need a lot of revenue to break even. And when you're breaking even, you've got a thriving business.
- So we don't charge in India, and we're able to do that because we have a low cost structure.
35:00 - Q: I know you guys wanted to stay as just messaging, as opposed to what WeChat is doing. How'd you make that decision?
- I wouldn't say we've excluded an API; we've deprioritized it.
- We've focused on creating a great consumer experience.
- With an API can come spam, and we're very very cautious about introducing a third party.
- Providing good messaging experience in Africa is very different from the US; and so providing a good consumer experience across all of those different countries is very hard.
- Voice is useful; providing a hook-up service isn't exactly the most-useful thing.
Q: 37:40 - How'd it feel when you were acquired? What were the first things you did afterwards?
- Being a father honestly overshadows it.
- It hasn't closed yet; when it closed it there'll be a sense of relief.
- During that time, more than anything, you're somewhat numb. You have a flotilla of lawyers around you. It was 96 hours of being in conference rooms with lawyers nonstop. By the end of it you're just numb. I don't think I really do grasp it all just yet.
Q: 39:20 - How do you think about the fact that Facebook turned you down for a job?
- I wasn't the right person for the role that they were seeking. I was good friends with the people
Q: 40:30 - Talk about meeting Mark Zuckerberg.
- It was a great experience.
- I think he's quite insightful.
Q: 41:25 - How'd Zuckerberg reach out to you?
- Zuckerberg first had met with Jan.
Q: 42:00 - What's WhatsApp going to do to protect privacy?
- Jan and Mark have agreed to a model of independence.
- People don't really understand this, but we don't actually have much data on people.
Q: Were there any other activities you did at Stanford that helped you with WhatsApp?
- I tried to leverage my network connections.
- I tried to get alums to join.
- Stanford has been a good recruiting resource.
45:20 - Q: How do you choose how to position yourselves / how to choose what not to build?
- If you look at Line, there's a lot of cute iconography in the product. They put stickers into their product. It feels very Asian when you use it. We've tried to build something more useful.
- It's worked very well for us in the Middle-East.
- It may have hurt us a little in Asia.
47:10 - Q: Did any part of the culture from Stanford affect your policies or people that you brought in?
- Stanford life also resonates with Bay Area life. We start the day at 10am, not 8am like on the East Coast.
- So there's a pretty smooth transition from school to professional life.
- There's a culture of camaraderie; it leads to great teamwork.
Q: 49:00 - Do you have any mistakes that you made that you'd like to talk about and give advice to people?
- You will make mistakes. You'll make hiring mistakes.
- Don't get hung up on your mistakes. Acknowledge them and move on.
- You want to be able to course-correct and move on. By doing that you'll position yourselves better to move forward. It's a very tricky and competitive world.
Q: Anything specific?
- We're not as successful in China, Japan, and Taiwan.
- You can't dwell on it and focus on it. Adjusting to correct those mistakes may have led to deficiencies in other areas.
Q: 51:10 - How'd you deal with
- We tried to get customer support people in specific languages, and sometimes they didn't want to do it. They'd come in, answer emails, and we'd arrange for them to do other things.
- So now we just look for people who want to help people.
Q: 52:10 - How do you when an engineer isn't working out?
- You typically know within the first 6-12 months; there's too many mistakes, you need to manage them too closely. You know.
- We've been lucky because we've been able to hire top-notch engineers.
- Lowering the bar is usually a recipe for disaster.
Q: 53:00 - How do you feel about the super-high valuations?
- I saw Yahoo become a $100 billion company, and then become a $10 billion company.
- Valuations are a point-in-time measure.
Q: 54:00 - When do you anticipate rolling out voice to users?
- This year.
Q: 54:10 - You didn't have a lot of press before the acquisition.
- It was intentional. In 2010 the press started approaching us and we decided to ignore them. We knew if we spent time talking to the press we'd spend less time developing the product.
- This is actually my first speaking engagement ever.
- Jan and I prefer to be focused on building our product / company / service.
Q: 55:40 - A lot of companies are based in SF. Have you thought about moving to SF?
- Jan and I like Mountain View, we both have long histories there.
- We have a number of employees who live in SF and they commute down.
Q: 56:55 - What do you wish you would have known before starting WhatsApp?
- I wish I'd known more about the law. There's a lot of employment law, patent law, trademark law. There's a lot of areas to understand.
- I took an accounting class in college so I knew a decent amount of that.
- You can get yourself in trouble. You can't just categorically fire someone, for example; there's a process you need to follow.
Q: 58:05 - Any advice on leadership?
- I was very lucky to join Yahoo. I joined as employee #54, and left when they had 15,000 people.
Q: 58:45 - Was there anything you wanted to do differently from Yahoo?
- We wanted a heavier focus on tech.
- Yahoo had a media focus.
- We modeled ourselves on Google, Facebook, Craigslist.
Q: 59:30 - What's the status on WhatsApps integration with Facebook? What's the hardest part?
- The hardest thing is converting from cash-accounting to GAAP accounting. It required ~20 auditors to do it.
- We're going to stay fast and independent.
Q: 1:00:50 - Why'd you decide to not integrate with Facebook?
- Facebook has a very different network. I'm friends on Facebook with people I went to high school with, but they don't have my phone number. And vice versa.
- Being acquired is a 6-month process. Going public is an 18-month process. Mark already had gone through the process to go public. When going public, you go under a lot of scrutiny from Wall St., etc.
Q: 1:02:50 - We see a lot of people who choose the wrong cofounders. How'd you know to go with Jan? Some people say it's closer than a marriage.
- It is [closer than a marriage].
- Jan and I met in 1997.
- A big thing is knowing that we can depend on each other.
- Anecdote: I needed to make a flight and my taxi didn't show up, and Jan
Q: 1:04:30 - What differences do you have, and how did that help?
- On a particular issue, I might be more conservative, and he's more aggressive.
- He might want to build a more simple product, and I might want to build a more complex product.
Q: 1:05:10 - Do you ever feel that you got lucky?
- I feel very lucky. (he kind of dodges the question, which I think was essentially asking about whether they got lucky with their product-market fit. My guess is that the truthful answer to that particular question would be: "Yes, we did get kind of lucky to have quit our jobs just as the iPhone was coming out, and we did get kind of lucky to have come across such a huge untapped need before anyone else had, but if we hadn't spent years working in the industry we wouldn't have recognized the opportunity when it came along, and we could have easily flubbed the product at many points along our path to success, and so it wouldn't be fair to say we just 'got lucky'.")