SV Icons: Brian Acton, Co-founder of WhatsApp and Signal

WhatsApp was my rocketship. Signal is a labor of love at some cost.

This week we had a chance to grab dinner with Brian Acton, Co-Founder of Whatsapp and Signal. 

Brian picked two companies to co-found, and both became megahits with millions of users worldwide.

Here are some takeaways we learned from Brian.

Signal:

- Signal is the best advocate for privacy in the messaging communications space. Because it is a non-profit, its value proposition is a great customer experience (similar to WhatsApp and Telegram) but with privacy, not only of your data but also of your metadata;

- Signal only needs to bring in enough revenue to cover costs; Brian is currently the major donor of Signal, and a small donor model similar to Wikipedia is being launched;

- Signal still has a lot of room for growth: 50M users with Signal, 600M with Telegram, and 2B with WhatsApp. Signal is hardly known in many countries (i.e., Brazil) - but as privacy concerns are rising worldwide, signal provides the best in class experience for the users;

- Signal benefits from both good and bad things (i.e., Hong Kong protests, WhatsApp outages/changes to the terms of service, etc.). Brian believes tech itself is not responsible for the implications of the technology, but the human beings behind the tech are. 

WhatsApp:

- Jan and Brian worked together at Yahoo, and on Feb 24th, 2009, they met playing Frisbee. Jan mentioned to Brian that he had launched an App for people to tell each other what they were doing. Later, the notification system was launched, and people started using it as a messaging system, and WhatsApp shifted to a messaging platform. On Nov 1st, 2009, Brian joined WhatsApp because it was taking off and it was within his area of interest. Most startups start with a completely different value proposition - before they discover what people desperately want - and Whatsapp was the first who made this discovery;

- Success formula: Make WhatsApp international and ensure no messages are dropped while minimizing bandwidth consumption. WhatsApp allowed communications in a cheaper way than what was currently available (pictures in SMS cost 1 EUR in Europe). The smartphone adoption and the fact that WhatsApp supported six phone platforms at the time helped WhatsApp achieve viral growth;

- Always quite rational and frugal in spending. In the beginning, a Nigerian pilot helped test the App in different countries, and a man based in Kuwait that commuted (daily) to Saudi Arabia helped test the use case of border crossing;

- WhatsApp was built without an exit in mind. The acquisition from Facebook (now Meta) was an offer Jan and Brian could not refuse and was not solicited. Jan met with Mark Zuckerberg one week before the conversations with Facebook regarding the acquisition. The timing was good for Facebook since they were concerned that WhatsApp would grow larger, which meant that a WhatsApp acquisition could be very costly. It was a quick deal: they shook hands on Friday and signed the deal on a Tuesday morning;

- One cannot fight the adoption of the parent company, so he accepted Facebook's infrastructure.

Organizer: Georgi Koreli

Host: Chinghiz Dzhumanazarov

Editor: Jacky Lin

Contributor: Alba Rubio Rodriguez