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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

#331

Post by underwater »

ozgune wrote: post #177
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.

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…

WhatsApp relies on network effects to be successful. If you get less than 100% of users continuing to pay and use the product then the utility goes down; the paid product is actually worse than the free version.

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

#332

Post by jschwartzi »

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.

Funny. Every one of those companies I've worked at paid market rate or better.

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

#333

Post by taormina »

xibalba wrote: post #167

Acton is being incredibly disingenuous and it is disappointing. When you sell your company to another for $19B, you should surely know that the expectations for monetization will be very heavy indeed. Well beyond Acton's suggested metered-user model. I'm certainly no great fan of Facebook, but anyone who thinks that they deserve to use a service free of charge and also avoid advertising is extremely entitled and disc…

Facebook could have tried innovating with new types of business models and set an example. Instead...

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

#334

Post by toast0 »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #319
toast0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralization was more or less required to do offline messaging. Not so much the selling bit (but note that Skype had already been sold twice before Microsoft bought it in 2011). I agree Microsoft hasn't done a good job with it, though.

You could cache encrypted messages on a P2P network until the offline party comes online. There is no money in that, but from a technical PoV it is very doable. Systems like the lightning network on Bitcoin or Raiden on Ethereum are working on something similar for outsourced channel monitoring (aka watchtowers).

You could, but in order to make that reliable, you have to use a lot of other people's space storing other people's messages... It's a lot simpler to keep it reliable if the service owner owns this (this is also part of the reason the Skype supernodes moved to be company hosted)

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

#335

Post by wand3r »

dasil003 wrote: post #38
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'…

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…

They were really the second big acquisition and they got a huge valuation. Instagram was running pretty autonomously at the time (2 years prior) so between talking to them and seeing the arrangement and the belief they would be valued as employees like their company; I get it. Also it was huge money that can give you rose colored glasses.

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

#336

Post by ac4tw »

I find the article interesting from a cryptographic perspective--specifically have they implemented searchable encryption or such a "encrypted environment" where they able to capture more than meta-data.

These quotes specifically:

The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

...

When Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, was asked by U.S. lawmakers in early September if WhatsApp still used end-to-end encryption, she avoided a straight yes or no, saying, “We are strong believers in encryption.” A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed that WhatsApp would begin placing ads in its Status feature next year, but added that even as more businesses start chatting to people on the platform, “messages will remain end-to-end encrypted. There are no plan

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

#337

Post by scarface74 »

nostrademons wrote: post #246
scarface74 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Torts aren't handshake agreements. They're duties that the state decides that all organizations owe to citizens or other organizations, by virtue of existing, but which should be enforced by the party who is actually wronged. (This is what distinguishes them from "crimes", which are forbidden actions that the state actively pursues.) In this case, Acton's not the aggrieved party. The consumer is - they could argue th…

So while in theory you are correct, in practice, usually whatever punishment is given in a company doesn’t usually amount to enough to change the company and individuals are usually shielded from the consequences of any malfeasance....

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

#338

Post by asveikau »

jschwartzi wrote: post #209
nemo44x wrote: post #136

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.

I started opting for Lyft after the Susan Fowler thing. But I was doing some travel this year and it was shocking to me that Lyft hasn't expanded outside the US as Uber has.

One of the Uber criticisms is that they don't respect local laws when they do such expansions, so maybe that is part of why Lyft might be more cautious. Still, non-US markets and global user bases are much more of a thing as time goes on, so it feels like they're very severely missing out.

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

#339

Post by Johnny555 »

throwaway5250 wrote: post #287
Johnny555 wrote: post #278

Why are people acting like this is a big deal? His net worth is $3.6B (not sure if that includes the $850M he walked away from). Giving up $850M when you already have $2B doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice, and is unlikely to change his life at all . Giving up $850K when you have $2M would be a bigger sacrifice than giving up $850M when you already have $2B.

I'd say it's a big deal because $850M donated to a worthy cause (e.g., GiveWell) could have made a big difference in the world. I've suffered far more for far less.

If you're going to call him out for not staying at FB long enough to get the $850M to donate it somewhere, why not also call him out for not donating most of his $3B fortune? Surely he could scrape by on even a paltry $1B.

What's the difference from telling someone to stick it out long enough to vest more stock versus telling him to just donate some portion of his already vast fortune?

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

#340

Post by intended »

josephjrobison wrote: post #307
mabbo wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a few billion dollars, it's pretty easy to see myself doing the same thing. We're entering a world of a widening disparity between rich and poor. A billion dollars puts you, your children, and their children in the very wealthy side of that line for their entire lives. That's hard to say no to.

True on the divide but at the same time the world has never been as rich, prosperous, or secure. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Goalkeepers?WT.mc_id=... Obviously a very ironic source but the others were more political.

Globally the pie has improved, there is traction in places where a penny was a healthy amount.

But overall, the gains of technology are being concentrated in a few hands.

The economists say that wealth is primarily created by tech change, everything else is just a functioning economy working as it would.

It seems that the low base effect makes every thing better off if you were terribly off. But if you were middle income you are worse off.

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