Brian Acton Quotes
21 quotes from Brian Acton — Co-founder of WhatsApp, the messaging app acquired by Facebook for $19B in 2014..
“Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure.”
“My mom started an air-freight company; my grandmother built a golf course. I have a certain degree of entrepreneurial risk-taking in my family history. Maybe that eventually rubbed off on me a little bit.”
“When I joined 'WhatsApp,' I was 38 years old. Opportunity is available to us in all walks of life and at all ages.”
“The best part of working with Facebook has been the cross-fertilization of ideas, people, and technology.”
“Building secure products actually makes for a safer world; many people in law enforcement may not agree with that.”
“At Signal, we have a straightforward proposition of how we protect privacy and lay it out in clear terms. Signal is designed in a manner where we don't collect any data.”
“There's a global education that's happening. Today privacy is becoming a much more mainstream discussion. People are asking questions about privacy, and they want security and privacy built into the terms of service.”
“WhatsApp provides phone-number-based messaging, and people asked, 'Isn't that what SMS is?' Yes, but SMS is expensive, antiquated, and what WhatsApp did was modernize and level that playing field.”
“Switching to a new app comes at almost no cost, and the speed with which we have seen people switch to Signal is proof of how simple and easy it is.”
“At Signal, we have a straightforward proposition of how we protect privacy and lay it out in clear terms.”
“There's a global education that's happening. Today privacy is becoming a much more mainstream discussion.”
“People are asking questions about privacy, and they want security and privacy built into the terms of service.”
“What typically happens in these acquisition scenarios is that you do a dance, you think you have a meeting of the minds, you talk about how you would work together, and then you take a risk.”
“It just effing works. We don't have a lot of gimmickry. We don't collect messages or do anything with them. We respect our users.”
“We don't necessarily look at it from the perspective that we're going to get swallowed by the Borg.”
“We give them the power. That's the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?”
“At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. I live with that every day.”
“You go back to this Silicon Valley culture, and people say, 'Well, could you have not sold?' and the answer is no. I had 50 employees, and I had to think about them and the money they would make from this sale.”
“We as a people should be demanding more transparency. We should be asking where our data is, how is it stored, and getting more things talked about in the open.”
“I am incredibly excited to be launching the Signal Foundation with Moxie. The Signal Foundation's mission is to develop open source privacy technology that protects free expression and enables secure global communication.”
“Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.”
