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Comment by apotheothesomai | Hacker News Reader

Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have believed in it strongly.

That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge, because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M?

Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the acquisition happened. Conversations took place, but I'm not going to quote anyone.

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As Scott McNealy has said; once you have investors, your company is for sale.

So not only would you have to deprive that engineer but you would also have to explain to Sequoia why you weren’t going to give them a gargantuan return on their investment.

Craigslist did it.

It is very possible to turn down money and avoid becoming a corporate animal.

Does it happen? Yes.

Does it happen very frequently? No.

Craigslist was self-bootstrapped, no?

No outside funding.

So you’re saying they believed in privacy strongly but believed in getting rich more. Got it.

Nothing wrong with that. I’d do the same.

He's saying there was social pressure both external and internal, but yeah - of the type you're talking about.

Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into. If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100% ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your shareholders.

Yes, within the institutional role, eg as CEO of a company, a person is obliged to make certain decisions. Eg a CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company, otherwise the shareholders will fire him.

So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.

> So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.

This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism. Any political or economical system that has institutionalized roles will have the same conflicts between duty and personal principles.

And history shows us, in fact, that capitalism has much fewer of such conflicts than any alternative.

> CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company

This is not even close to true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...

I wrote a draft of an essay: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-essa... I hasn't even mentioned Urchin/Google Analytics and Mozilla yet.

Supposing Signal had a larger userbase, and got offered a similar deal. Well, it basically did happen; Moxie's previous company Whipser Systems got bought by Twitter, Moxie left after a couple of years, losing his options in the process. I doubt it would happen again.

I get that it's hard to pass up on the money. Once you take it though it's hard to not look hypocritical. Especially since he gave them a large amount of the data that was abused.

Lot's of engineers work their asses off for far less than $100M.

What's the point of working hard if you aren't even going to be paid $100 million?

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