When WhatsApp was acquired a few days ago for $19 billion, it had a fairly small team.
55 people work for WhatsApp; 32 of them are engineers. The rest mostly handle customer support.
We rounded up some of the earliest WhatsApp's employees on LinkedIn. These people are responsible for creating the fastest growing social network ever. 450 million people use WhatsApp every month.
Many of the early employees were former Yahooers, just like WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton.
Which employees did we miss? Leave the names in the comments.
Jan Koum is the co-founder of WhatsApp. He's now a billionaire.
Co-founded WhatsApp in February 2009
Role: CEO and "Senior Tweet Manager"
Previous Job: Infrastructure Engineering for Yahoo
Igor Solomennikov was one of the first employees. He joined the same month WhatsApp launched.
Joined WhatsApp: February 2009 – Present
Role: Software Engineer
Previous Job: iPhone developer at Injoit
Julia Reznikov was only at WhatsApp for a handful of months so she might not have gotten WhatsApp stock. She joined Federated Media then Google
Joined WhatsApp: March 2009 – August 2009
Role: Marketing/PR Coordinator
Current Job: Platform Account Manager at Google
See the rest of the story at Business Insider