In the summer of 2009 Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton for a job.
Like any other dejected interviewee, he used Twitter to express his glass half full disappointment: "Facebook turned me down … looking forward to life's next adventure."
That adventure helped inspire Acton and partner Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant whose childhood experience of Soviet era surveillance, to create the WhatsApp messaging service. Now a blockbuster deal with Zuckerberg's Facebook has turned them into multibillionaires.
In poignant nod to Koum's rags to riches success, the deal was signed in a now empty office block where his family once collected their food stamps.
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