81–90 of 831 posts
At a rough guess, they put in $8m for 15% of the company in 2011, valuing it at around $53m.
A $16B sale is a 300x increase in value, so Sequoia's stake is worth $2.4bn. Their standard fund size is around $500m.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/16/us-sequoia-funds-i...
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Facebook has already showed his ability to ruin things instantly.
I'm no Facebook fan, but this isn't entirely true is it? I mean Instagram has pretty much stayed the same. It gained a video feature. Otherwise the same?
This seems insane. I love WhatsApp, but I recently switched to Google Hangouts because it also supports SMS and I don't really miss it. I don't understand how it can be worth this much when Google has already released a direct competitor to its product that is (and likely always will be) free.
That is a LOT of money. That being said, I use WhatsApp every day to chat with my friends around the world and it's really excellent. I know it's used a lot in other parts of the world even more, so I doubt this purchase is focused on US markets. It seems that every one of my Arab friends uses WhatsApp to talk to their families back home (and they use it at home, too). I don't know about other regions.
That is a LOT of money. That being said, I use WhatsApp every day to chat with my friends around the world and it's really excellent. I know it's used a lot in other parts of the world even more, so I doubt this purchase is focused on US markets. It seems that every one of my Arab friends uses WhatsApp to talk to their families back home (and they use it at home, too). I don't know about other regions.
WhassApp is the standard in Mexico. It replaced Windows Live (MSN) Messenger after they killed it by trying to make everybody switching to Skype and the interest of the people shifted to mobile.
The fact that FB chose to pay $12BN in stock for this tells you something about what they think of their current valuation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How'd you get your friends to move over to Telegram? I'm trying to get that ball moving with my circle of friends.
Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service. If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.