291–300 of 413 posts
How an individual can leave $850M on the table to prove a point blows my mind. I'm in awe at that guy, but I can't help but think that with $850M he could have funded so many interesting projects/research.
I'm so sick of the self-righteous moralizing and bullshit by the tech elites and the news companies that help push that narrative. Brian Acton didn't create whatsapp to "do good". Facebook wasn't created to "do good". Google wasn't formed to "do good". People create companies to make money. Why is this so hard for people to understand? The guy spent 3 years creating a silly messaging app and growing a userbase and so…
Therefore, it’s always at least about money but probably more than that. And when you consider the time investment and risk associated with a startup, it might be a loss if you’re only considering the money.
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'…
This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions".
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What if the person who made the promise to you even in good faith later was overruled by the board/shareholders, etc? You should never “trust” anyone who you do business with outside of a contract.
If they don't have the support from their stakeholders they shouldn't give such a promise. In this specific case Mark Zuckerberg holds controlling amount of the stock.
I’ve had a manager before who supported everything I was doing but when he was let go, I was left hanging in the wind. I’ve slso had a manager who wouldn’t listen to me (I was the Dev lead), everything failed in just the way I warned it would and I could see he was going to blame me.
Never trust a company - and by extension your manager who represents the company to his reports.
That’s about like the people who trust HR.
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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…
I think of this as the conversion of social capital into financial. The monetisation of things that used to be personal relationships, such as becoming intermediaries what used to be direct interaction.
> At the end of the day, I sold my company. I am a sellout. I acknowledge that I think he's acknowledging that his company was un-monetizable and selling was obviously the best thing they could do. And 10 years later, it remains unmonetizable, that's sad.
Monetization is really hard. The ‘90s was filled with the wreckage of companies that couldn’t get it right, with debris spreading out into the early ‘00s. The ad monetization model is one way to do it, and it can be rolled out to a wide variety of products, but it is unlikely to be the only model. Business is hard, and it can take a long time and many failures to be truly innovative. I’m an engineer, but I’m a little…
The value attached to "I am going to absolutely lose my shit if I have to put up with this for another second" is underrated IMO.
He had FU money already. They tried to put more on him. He balked. QED. Mental health is a thing.
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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.
Contemporaneous to this was the rewrite of the privacy policy to allow sharing of metadata between FB and WhatsApp user accounts, which was a bit of a sell out.
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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.
I agree that $1/yr would shove off majority of users off the app. That said, I think WhatsApp could get to revenues of $1-3B per year because of the following: * I pay $60/mo for my AT&T line. I do the majority of my communication over WhatsApp. In that sense, WhatsApp adds more value to my life than AT&T. There are a group of users who'd be willing to pay more for that value. * For most users, WhatsApp is an integra…
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An app people actually use would be a more obvious choice.
This is anecdotal. Out of my 356 contacts only 46 are on Telegram and among them 11 were seen recently (let's assume they still have the app). In last few weeks only 8 of them replied to my messages or read them so I'd say only 8 are actively using it (I checked with the remaining :P). On Signal, there are just 13 and only 3 replied to me in last few weeks. All of those 3 were coerced by me into installing it on thei…
This reminds me of Viber, a local success in the Eastern Europe.