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WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

forbes.com

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Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#211

Post by jschwartzi »

notyourday wrote: post #57
cowpig wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is such a thing as business ethics. Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.

> 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…

There's a huge middle ground between being completely irrelevant that you're missing. Plenty of small and medium businesses abide by ethics and make ethical decisions every day. You just don't hear about them because it's not newsworthy that their management tries to do right by the employees or that they pay their bills on time.

They're not noteworthy because they're the norm, not the exception.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#212

Post by saas_sam »

madrox wrote: post #163

I'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…

Yeah seriously. I'd love for a trained philosopher to analyze this scenario. Surely letting WhatsApp become crappy would be worth a nice 9- or 8-figure donation to charity. I would feel like a selfish jerk for rejecting that kind of money so that, what, people see fewer ads? Talk about what a zeroth world problem ads are, good lord.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#213

Post by WillPostForFood »

beaconstudios wrote: post #23
cd_et_toss wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't been always true, historically, that for-profit companies seek only to enrich their shareholders at all cost. https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warr... "Warren attributes those problems to a shift, which she says dates back to the 1980s, in the obligations of corporations — from balancing responsibilities to all their stakeholders — including both employees and stock owners — to priori…

or in other words, we can thank the stock market and pressure on public companies to focus on quarterly growth at all costs over long-term sustainability and a balanced approach.

Philadelphia Stock Exchange was founded in 1790, NYSE in 1792. If something changed in the 1980s, it wasn’t the stock market.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#214

Post by sp527 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #173
sp527 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that even the friction alone of charging $1/yr isn't enough to shove the vast majority of users off the app, you haven't been paying attention to consumer expectations.

But that's what WhatsApp was doing before.

No they were not. This is a complete falsehood. They sold the company well before they could roll out their monetization plan widely enough for it to impact user retention. They were also much smaller at the time.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#215

Post by leothekim »

I can't help but go back to Mark Zuckerberg's letter when Facebook was preparing to IPO:

"... we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

"And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits." [1]

I mean, there was no way he was going to drop $22 billion dollars on something and not get a return. But I can't help but notice how the article depicts him as someone who is thinking more strategically, contractually, and businesslike (i.e. profit-driven) than someone who would write something like the quote above. Whatever he was then, he seems to have taken a step away from it and become... a CEO.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg%E2%80%99s-ipo-let...

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#218

Post by vasilipupkin »

abalone wrote: post #28
mattnewport wrote: post #7

This 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'…

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.

agree. This is just such complete bullshit. If you don't agree with someone's ethics or business practices, don't take 22 billion dollars from them. If you do take 22 billion, say thank you and stop acting like a 10 year old.

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#219

Post by ismail »

rchaud wrote: post #206
ozgune wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The $1/yr thing was BS. The app never actually took you to a payment screen; I think it was "free for 1 year, $1/yr afterwards". The only time I have ever paid for Whatsapp was in the Blackberry App Store back in 2009, when it cost $3.

I paid $1 on the App Store

Re: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind

#220

Post by nostrademons »

scarface74 wrote: post #61
icebraining wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "normalization" slur is too often thrown at those who just have their eyes wide open. Yes, we should require them. The WhatsApp founder didn't attempt that, he just hoped they wouldn't.

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.

IANAL, but my understanding is that this isn't true, and the whole subfield of tort law [1] is about the rights and obligations that firms have even in the absence of a contract. If you steal trade secrets from a competitor, even if you have no contract or business relationship with them, they can still sue you for a very large amount of money and possibly get an injunction against using that stolen information. Similarly for cases of patent/copyright infringement, libel, slander, price-fixing, antitrust, etc.

I suspect that a large class of these "business ethics" violations are actually torts, but the problem with enforcing them is that to do so you a.) need to know what your rights are b.) need to detect violations of them and c.) need to bring a lawsuit against the offender. I remember that on Google's invention disclosure form, one of the questions was "How easy would it be to detect if a competitor was using this invention in their product?", and if the answer was "We'd never know", we wouldn't patent the idea and would keep it as a trade secret instead, on the assumption that if a competitor could use the invention illegally without us knowing about it, they would, and so it was better to deny them knowledge of the invention entirely than to publish and try to enforce unenforceable rights.

When the aggrieved party is a consumer or worker, it's triply difficult, as most consumers a.) aren't aware of their rights b.) have no information about what's going on inside big corporations and c.) don't have money to sue even if they know. Many of the ethical problems in U.S. business today stem from the legal system not being able to scale up to 300M often poorly-informed citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort

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