WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by cowpig » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #221

jschwartzi wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything is dust in the end..

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

#232

Post by iagooar » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #8

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'…

What year would it be ok to be naive enough to think that any for profit company’s main motivation is not to make as much money possible?

Many companies take pride in serving their customers, more than making as much money as possible.

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

#233

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by dmix » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

saas_sam wrote: post #212

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.

At the very least, the $50 million dollars he gave to Signal could go a long way.

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

#235

Post by ThrustVectoring » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

leothekim wrote: post #215

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 bil…

>I mean, there was no way he was going to drop $22 billion dollars on something and not get a return.

There's plenty of valid business reasons to spend money on ventures that aren't "net present value of cash flow projections exceed costs". There can be indirect effects like maintaining a moat - buying WhatsApp can be worthwhile simply to ensure that other companies can't use it to compete with Facebook's core business. Or there can be real option considerations. Or it can drive down the price of the complements of your core product.

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

#236

Post by piker » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #150

Illniyar wrote: post #116

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.

But it was Mark & Co that went predatory and started implementing monetization initiatives, right? It still paints Mark in bad light, it's not like Koum & Co weren't entitled to that part of the contract and instead were the primary violators?

To be fair, I don't know if exploring/researching/soliciting input on monetization ahead of the "implementation" standstill is bad faith at all.

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

#237

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

WillPostForFood wrote: post #213

beaconstudios wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The doctrine of what the purpose of business is changed in the 1980s. During the post-WW2 era the prevailing view was that the purpose of business was to "create a customer", and as a result, corporations existed primarily for consumer benefit. Read Drucker for elaboration on this, and it's also still assumed in many economics textbooks of that period.

Starting in 1970, Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a corporation was to increase shareholder value, and all of its other activities - providing jobs, fighting pollution, enhancing social justice, even serving customers - were subservient to that, to be engaged in only if they also helped profits. It took a while for this view to catch on, but following Reagan's election, it gained a lot of popularity in political & legal circles, and was firmly entrenched among business leaders by the mid-80s.

The problem is that we've since discovered a number of ways that corporations can enhance shareholder value (as measured by stock price) without actually benefitting customers, and most of them involve strip-mining value built up over the long term at the expense of the future. And so a significant fraction of the population is just engaged in financial games while they get busy firing everyone who does actual work.

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

#238

Post by throwaway937 » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #228

dasil003 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WhatsApp didn’t even have encryption until well after Facebook bought them.

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

#239

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #220

scarface74 wrote: post #61

Earlier 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.

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. Simi…

And how well will a handshake - he said/she said agreement hold up in court? How easy is it for one party to “misremember” what was said? There is a reason almost every contract has an “entire agreements clause”

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

#240

Post by crispyambulance » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #228

dasil003 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like they secretly sold it Facebook. People knew what Facebook was about by the time of the acquisition and either didn't care, did a wait-and-see or switched to an alternative. Perfectly reasonable behavior by everyone involved. Your standard for "demon" is rather low ! :-)