Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

221–230 of 413 posts

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

#221

Earlier 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…

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.

Exactly. And those small and medium sized businesses are in the dust bin of history.

These are the same businesses that everyone at HN laughs at as they only pay $40k/year for senior software engineers.

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

#222
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, this would be a thing I'd get excited about - if a non-profit company gets behind developing it. It was a given that whoever bought Skype would milk it for the money. Imagine an App on every platform/device that forms a mesh amongst its users and communicates short messages in a P2P way. Perhaps some simple state could be stored in some special nodes that aid in co-ordination. The whole thing may come with a Wik…

matrix.org

Yep. Main issue with Matrix is that Riot.im, the main client, needs a lot of UI/UX work for it be a seemless as Whatsapp or Signal.

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

#223
post #86

> 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'd be careful about assuming that. A context switch can make anything sound like anything.

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

#224
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think of the day fb stock dropped 20% just over the course of few hours...

To be fair it had gone up by an irrational amount just prior to that...

Losses feels more violant than gains :)

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge me two dollars as a first world American, and give someone else the service for free. Infrastructure can be expensive, but not that expensive. Let's Encrypt, OpenStreetMap [1], and Wikipedia run on donations , and these are core internet properties. If you think you need tens of millions of dollars annually to run a chat client at scale, no. [1] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/9867/what-is-annual... (…

Let's encrypt and wikipedia are not-for-profit. If they charge americans $2/month and eastasians $0, then people will be outraged, and they'll find a way to get it for free anyway.

This is really a reply to "toomuchtodo," but I don't have a reply link under their post. They wrote:

> I would ask for proof people would be outraged. Google and Facebook have used their overwhelming first world profits to fund internet ventures in the third world, and no one is outraged over the actions except for the blatant colonialism the actions represent.

Well, obviously you can't prove a hypothetical, but the "outrage" suggested here isn't about for-profit companies funding charities. It's about being charged even minimal amounts for services. Google and Facebook do not charge users for their core services, so they are not good comparison points.

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

#226
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a vacuum, perhaps, but I think there's more to it than that. Another account yesterday mentioned plans to put Kevin Systrom under a different manager that would have given him "less access to Zuckerberg." Earlier accounts described them as friendly, always seen together, etc. It seems like Facebook is a company where access to the CEO is so tightly controlled that it's basically used as a political weapon.

> access to the CEO is so tightly controlled that it's basically used as a political weapon

This is true at almost any organization of scale. Access to top decision makers must be restricted. The people who make decisions about the restrictions, therefore, gain influence through that process. The power can be used properly or improperly. In this case, it appears to have been used properly: there was no further discussion on the matter, and the employee had shown themselves to be out of line with the CEO's strategy.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boycott them and don't purchase or use their products. If you feel strongly about it go further and organize more people to do the same. Try to convince people who don't feel the company is unethical that it is. But in the end you can't expect because you don't like a company that your feelings on what should happen to come to be. It's like so many people complaining on Twitter about Twitter not banning voices they d…

This is exactly what I do with Uber. I don't use it. I use Lyft. This is because I don't consider Uber an ethical company, nor do I particularly like their HR and other management practices. I don't know very much about Lyft but I have yet to hear anything bad about them which is pretty encouraging.

Peter Thiel is a major investor and board seat holder in Lyft. If your politics lead you to believe Uber is not an ethical company, that might also give you pause.

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

#228

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'…

Nah, 2014 makes no material difference. It's not the recent scandals that have somehow revealed Facebook to be the spiritual successor to Microsoft's "embrace and extend" strategy; this has been obvious for at least a decade. Maybe the public didn't realize it yet, but anyone in tech, especially a successful founding team would have been well aware. That said, I'm not going to demonize these guys. Brian Acton clearly…

I think demonizing the guys behind WhatsApp is entirely warranted. They built up a large userbase around promises of privacy and encryption, and then promptly sold those users to fucking Facebook. Whether they were just gullible and didn't do their due diligence, or if they were malignant, doesn't really make a big difference.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's encrypt and wikipedia are not-for-profit. If they charge americans $2/month and eastasians $0, then people will be outraged, and they'll find a way to get it for free anyway.

This is really a reply to "toomuchtodo," but I don't have a reply link under their post. They wrote: > I would ask for proof people would be outraged. Google and Facebook have used their overwhelming first world profits to fund internet ventures in the third world, and no one is outraged over the actions except for the blatant colonialism the actions represent. Well, obviously you can't prove a hypothetical, but the…

Odd that you couldn't reply to me, but HN is a strange beast.

Users were paying for Whatsapp [1]. I believe that data point illustrates that users would pay $1/year for a chat service, but this is just an opinion until someone decides to stand up a new service and charges for it.

[1] The evolution of WhatsApp - in rumours and revenues WhatsApp had dabbled with the subscription revenue model in 2014, which amounted to charging an annual $0.99 membership fee, and earned above $1 billion in the first nine months of instating this fee. But following their $19-billion acquisition by Facebook, they came to revoke these charges, and WhatsApp was a free ride for its one-billion-strong and counting user base again."

https://yourstory.com/2017/03/how-whatsapp-makes-money/

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

#230
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.

It has been the norm in Silicone Valley for many years, unfortunately. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be appalled by it anyway, but perhaps just more cynical.

Where can I get tickets to Silicone Valley? (Presumably Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or Houston ... possibly Atlanta)

I suspect it is very different from Silicon Valley.

Post reply on HN