Steve Jennings
Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal, an instant messaging tool that suddenly became popular because of Elon Musk’s recommendation, actually had the idea of looking for a CEO successor. In his latest blog post, he also mentioned that he will officially step down next month, and that the vacancy will be temporarily taken by former WhatsApp founder Brian Acton until Signal can find a suitable candidate. You may be wondering why Acton is on a temporary basis? In fact, Acton is the one who contributed $50 million to support the operation of the Signal Foundation, and considering his background, it seems to be a very suitable candidate.
Before the Signal Foundation’s support, Marlinspike said he did the Android version of the entire app, server development and programming, and of course the painstaking debugging. Now with the support of the foundation, the team has grown to a size of 30 people in one go, each performing their duties. Seeing this stable growth of Signal will allow Marlinspike to let other people serve as CEOs, and he believes that this will be an important factor for Signal to expand.
Marlinspike will remain on the Signal board while focusing on the search for a new CEO.In addition to the pretty words, TechCrunch also estimates that the reason for Marlinspike’s resignation is related to another of his projects, Signal-integrated cryptocurrency MobileCoin, but in Marlinspike’s Twitter He only said that he would take a break first, without revealing too much.
