In September 2007, Koum and Acton left Yahoo! and took a year off, travelling around South America. Acton invested in the dotcom boom and lost millions in the dot-com bubble of 2000. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo!. In 1998, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. In 1992, he became a systems administrator for Rockwell International, before becoming a product tester at Apple Inc. He graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a degree in computer science. Acton received a full scholarship to study engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, but left after a year to study at Stanford. Early life and education Īcton grew up in Michigan, later moving to Central Florida, where he graduated from Lake Howell High School. According to Forbes (2020), Acton is the 836th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $2.5 billion. Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017 to start the Signal Foundation.

He was formerly employed at Yahoo!, and co-founded WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for US$19 billion, with Jan Koum. As of January 10, 2022, Acton also serves as interim CEO of Signal Messenger LLC. Acton is the executive chairman of the Signal Technology Foundation, which he co-founded with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018. Co-founded Signal Foundation with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018īrian Acton is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur.Co-founded WhatsApp with Jan Koum in 2009.

Who created signal messenger