Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you have money and principles you believe in, its not that hard.
How many times have you walked away from 9 digit sums?
The same number of times i've received 10 digit sums
WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
181–190 of 413 posts
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#182You must be either the most naieve person on the planet or a complete moron to sell your company to an advertising company and not expect them to put advertising in your product. Of course he wasn’t noble enough to turn down the money in the first place and turn his product into a big buisness by himself. WhatsApp was literally just a user grab based on a ToDo list app idea released at the right time. Guy should spen…
Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN, and especially not indignant rants. I realize that's what the internet seems to be for, but we're trying to do better than that here.
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#183> At a meeting over the issue he said Zuckerberg also told him: “This is probably the last time you’ll ever talk to me.” I realize this was probably said in fruatration, but I think it paints a pretty clear picture of Zuckerberg's arrogance and entitlement.
I think that's a reasonable position in response from an employee trying to "activate a clause written into their contract to allow them to immediately get all their stock if the company began “implementing monetization initiatives” without their consent" . Now whether or not he was in the right to demand it, when actually doing so I doubt anyone expected to have a working relationship after that.
That's brutal and manichean, you can organize a soft transition, you can organize a change of role at the same company, you can try to convince the person to do something else than resigning, you can even discuss with the person what they want to do after they are gone and see if you can help.
Engaging instead of sending the thugs to empty the cubicle.
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#184I'm sure Acton and Koum told themselves they were also keeping the power to be in control. I'm sure they went into it thinking they could avoid this end. The brain is a powerful rationalizer when it sees generational wealth within reach. The indignant tone of the comments here make me laugh. There are very few things I can imagine readers of HN not doing for a billion dollars. People may say otherwise, but until they…
Not saying you're not mostly right, but there is the case of Jean-Baptiste Kempf, maintainer of VLC, who apparently turned down tens of millions to put ads into VLC. (I suppose that is two orders of magnitude smaller than a billion.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048
And if he chose to criticize the WhatsApp founders, it would carry a lot of weight with me. I didn't say altruism doesn't exist...I just don't believe it's in this comment thread. :)
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#185> At a meeting over the issue he said Zuckerberg also told him: “This is probably the last time you’ll ever talk to me.” I realize this was probably said in fruatration, but I think it paints a pretty clear picture of Zuckerberg's arrogance and entitlement.
It could also be empathizing with an angry person.
For example, an employee is rude to a client.
You call the client to do damage control, because you have a personal relationship, the client continues to be furious.
You say "Look, I know you're angry and I know this is probably the last time you'll ever talk to me, but if I can say one last thing, it will be that we have always tried to "
I don't know if that is always arrogance or entitlement, is it?
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is such a thing as business ethics. TL;DR version of which is "Make as much money as possible or become irrelevant note in history" Edit: Oh, please. Downvotes keep demonstrating a total disconnect between HN responses that require pushing a downvote button and say mass resignation from Google or Facebook or Whatsapp or Well Fargo or Equifax that might trigger a response. So yes, the only business ethics that…
No, the downvotes are for giving them a pass because they're trying to make money.
I may not like that if I go out in a rain I will get wet, but not acknowledging that as the fact won't keep me dry should I go out in a rain.
They sold the company. By selling the company they have become employees, not founders with control. If they did not like it, they should not have sold. If they are remorseful, they can donate 100% of all the money that they made from a sale of the company as well as all the interest that they have accumulated to some me-so-sorry non-profit. Not 10%. Not 50%. 100%. Otherwise those are just empty words, just like protests of HN crowd working for Google, Facebook, Equifax, etc.: empty words that make them feel better.
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#187This article seems a little unfair to the WhatsApp founders when it suggests they should have known that any assurances Facebook made to them as part of the acquisition were obviously lies. Sure in 2018 it might be obvious to most of us that nothing Facebook says or promises can be trusted but I don't think that was necessarily as obvious when the acquisition happened and they can be forgiven for thinking they weren'…
That, and I'm sure they thought they could still stay in control of their product. When it's your first buy-out, there's a lot of delusions about autonomy and power post-acquisition.
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come. On. You don’t get to that kind of valuation with a basically free product without ad targeting. An accelerated vesting clause is not an assurance. If they wanted assurances they could have made it a condition of the deal, ok? They didn’t. Accelerated vesting just means they were telegraphing that they wanted to leave before the shit hit the fan.
Pre-Facebook, WhatsApp's monetization strategy has been to charge users a nominal fee for usage ($1/year). And $1/yr with 1B users doesn't justify the price tag for Facebook. So Facebook wanted to introduce advertising. PS: I'd be happy to pay them $1/month because a significant part of my communication happens over WhatsApp. The challenge is $1/month is probably too pricey for most of their user base.
Facebook didn't want to die. Large and growing networks are a threat to FB. Buying up Instagram and WhatsApp was probably less expensive than building competitors and out-competing the upstarts.
The prospect of ad revenue is a bonus.
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#189I want to tell a story about Whatsapp that is unrelated to that, but incidental, and the reason why this seems too much to me. I don't like the company even if I use Whatsapp every days since the start, because when it started to spread in Europe, at the start of the iPhone and Apple store era, Whatsapp was the worst thing ever in the app store in terms of how strongly they advertised their platform, almost in a spam…
I remember that they false advertised it on App Stores as "WhatsApp - Free SMS".
Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and the only way you can “require” anything when doing business is through a written contract with clauses that specify what happens when the contract is breached and the jurisdiction where the breaches will be adjudicated.
> Yes and the only way you can “require” anything when doing business is through a written contract with clauses that specify what happens when the contract is breached and the jurisdiction where the breaches will be adjudicated. I expect/require that people not steal from me even though I don't have a contract or prior agreement with them, and I also predict that some people won't respect my property.
Most people would argue that you already do have a contract with people that requires they do not steal from you.