WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton on Why He Left $850M Behind
forbes.com
forbes.com
That said, I'm not going to demonize these guys. Brian Acton clearly is repentant and putting his money where his mouth is in terms of supporting Signal, and that's worth a lot more than some principled nobody who never has enough clout to further his own principles in society.
I am not convinced Brian learned the right lessons here.
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.
WhatsApp end-to-end encryption didn't actually begin until after the acquisition to Facebook had already gone through[0].
I am certain that, as of 2012-2013, WhatsApp wasn't even consistently using TLS to encrypt traffic. That's what made it so shocking when they suddenly leapt from some of the worst security practices of all messaging apps on the market to the best[1]. They built a massive userbase long before any efforts were made towards privacy and encryption.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2472340,00.asp
[1] Signal didn't exist at the time, and yes, TextSecure existed, but almost nobody was using it compared to WhatsApp or any other chat app on the market today.
I believe most users simply use it because it is the most used messaging app in their country
It's difficult to understand for the average person just how much Facebook knows about you and what it can do with that information that isn't in your direct interest. At best they think it's weird how long-lost acquaintances show up as suggested connections, at worst they only notice when Facebook does something directly useful to them.
Sure, you can blame the users, but that's kind of unfair if you consider what kinds of markets WhatsApp already dominated before the acquisition.
Why does every thread on Hacker News have to ask this freaking question? It’s obvious that the general public is computer illiterate, Sherlock, just like it is obvious everybody knows someone “good with computers” that can tell them what to use and having lived the sunset if Yahoo Messenger in my country, Facebook should be scared as it happened practically overnight.
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.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Goalkeepers?WT.mc_id=...
Obviously a very ironic source but the others were more political.
there was an anti-monetization clause in the contract. you don’t put that there out of an over abundance of caution. they knew exactly FB’s intentions. they maybe didn’t expect it to come home to roost so quickly, but they should have. again, these are smart guys. they just couldn’t get past the billions, plain and simple.
It's not their fault as it was not their responsibility to provide a private message service for free to millions of people.
This is just how it works, if want to be principled you can't make agreements with the devil.
Facebook has been lying to us since at least 2007. People were always okay with it because they perceived it as being okay and supportive of the right people and policies.
This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions".
> This seems less Facebook specific and more "that's simply what happens with all acquisitions".
I don't know what was going through their heads but as an outsider with no insider knowledge, I justified this as Facebook making sure nobody else gets hold of Whatsapp's user base. It made sense in my head back then.
Yep. 2 years. That's usually the amount time that an acquirer will leave you be.
That Zuckerberg, at the young age, managed to retain control of facebook all the way up to, and beyond, the ICO should have given them pause so. That hints a certain personality (no judgement intended in that assessment). But that is 20/20 hindsight which is always easy.
Freudian slip? :)
You should never “trust” anyone who you do business with outside of a contract.
In this specific case Mark Zuckerberg holds controlling amount of the stock.
https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warr...
"Warren attributes those problems to a shift, which she says dates back to the 1980s, in the obligations of corporations — from balancing responsibilities to all their stakeholders — including both employees and stock owners — to prioritizing their financial return to shareholders only."
(That's not exactly responsive to your point on maximizing profit, but the body of work on this topic shows that when companies care about long-term return, and about employees and other stakeholders, they aren't solely focused on maximizing short-term profit over all else.)
For example, Facebook could've over-induldged on overlay full-screen ads or "watch this video for 30 seconds before proceeding" ads, but they chose not to.
Any public company that is not majority owned by one person and is not maximizing their profit is a target of a Carl Icahn type of investor, who will buy up enough shares to force them to maximize profits.
Your identity is no longer tied to the company and the only thing left is how much profit per share.
It's sort of like a microchasm of socialism or communism. If you own 9% of apple, people don't blame you personally when apple misbehaves.
Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
> There is such a thing as business ethics.
> Facebook's complete disregard for them should not be the norm, even if it, sadly, might be more often than not.
It's alarming how businesses' lack of business ethics is getting normalized by comments like the grandparent's. We should require that companies be ethical and condemn them when they aren't. Yes, we'll often be disappointed, just like we're disappointed with the fraction of humanity that becomes criminal, but that doesn't mean we should lower our standards.
Yes, we should require them. The WhatsApp founder didn't attempt that, he just hoped they wouldn't.
Even if your manager is ethical and “cares” about the well being of his employees, his manager may not. Even if his manager does the board, the investors/shareholders, etc. probably don’t. The whole purpose of a corporation is that a corporation survives without regards of any one person getting hit by a bus.
I worked for a struggling company a few years ago and management was very honest about the dire straights we were in, I was part of the team who sat in on interviews and did presentations for potential acquirers so I knew what was going on.
I trusted management not to purposefully screw me over. But at the end of the day, if they “guaranteed me” that my check would clear for every hour I worked I wouldn’t have believed them. The only reason I stayed until the bitter end was because our VC backers promised us in writing that we would be payed until we got an official layoff notice.
This is defeatist. Corporations can be sued in courts, just like people. Their obligations are binding, just like peoples'. There is a little more complexity to signing a deal with a corporation than a natural person because there are multiple sapient interests involved, but that's what lawyers are for.
Protecting users' privacy was never prioritized in the acquisition process. If it had been, the anti-monetization clause would have been stronger.
That's okay. We're talking about billions of dollars. But turning around and playing the good guy will take these men more than simply claiming ignorance.
TL;DR version of which is "Make as much money as possible or become irrelevant note in history"
Edit: Oh, please. Downvotes keep demonstrating a total disconnect between HN responses that require pushing a downvote button and say mass resignation from Google or Facebook or Whatsapp or Well Fargo or Equifax that might trigger a response.
So yes, the only business ethics that is relevant in the real world is "Make as much money as possible".
They're not noteworthy because they're the norm, not the exception.
Who's PR firm is behind this and the originally posted TC piece [1]? What's their angle? And Why?
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-act... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076008
They will always do what is in their best interest when it is in their interest to do so
I had 0 knowledge about business back then and even u could figure out that something didn't add up.
PS: I'd be happy to pay them $1/month because a significant part of my communication happens over WhatsApp. The challenge is $1/month is probably too pricey for most of their user base.
Most WhatsApp users aren't American, and in a lot of places $1 is a more significant price tag. That aside though, some places don't have the infrastructure or trust to even allow any sort of online payment to happen: a lot of people in India don't have credit cards, and being from Mexico myself, I know a lot of people who do don't trust online transactions enough to pay with it online.
If you think you need tens of millions of dollars annually to run a chat client at scale, no.
[1] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/9867/what-is-annual... (OpenStreetMap infrastructure costs less than $100k/year)
The only reason WhatsApp exists is that international carriers were charging higher fees for text messaging while offering lower data rates, creating an arbitrage opportunity. WhatsApp never took off in the U.S. because U.S. carriers were ahead of the curve in shifting to free texting (thanks to the iPhone popularizing unlimited consumer data plans). So yes, this puts a hard ceiling on what WhatsApp could charge.
And that makes them feigning they thought they could justify a $19B valuation without increasing monetization all the more ridiculous. Of course they knew what would happen. That's why the deal was "if you monetize we vest all our stock and leave and cry out loud all the way to the bank," not "you can't monetize."
The prospect of ad revenue is a bonus.
I was born and raised in a third world country and 99% of my family and friends still live there. Our GDP per capita is around $1,000 (yearly figure). I know people with children who make no more than $150 per month and cannot afford their own apartment. I know people who make even less. I know people who live in villages and probably have a monthly budget of no more than $80-$100.
Yet I have very rarely met people who somehow aren't spending at least $5 per month on their phone bill (buying minutes).
In fact I was very surprised to find that not only nearly everyone has a mobile phone, BUT phone service was more expensive than they are in the US. For example one hour at an internet cafe will set you back 50 cents. Yet everyone has a mobile phone, about half have a smartphone (granted a cheaper version of Android) and people buy internet connection left and right. In America, you walk into any coffee shop, get a free water, a free internet connection and a Thank You.
I say this to say, that WhatsApp could charge $2 per month and most people will happily pay it.
It would be more valid to compare it to carrier text messaging fees, which was the arbitrage opportunity they exploited. But that opportunity is mostly gone now that everyone has smartphones. If WhatsApp charged $2/month they would face the same challenge from upstart apps that carriers faced from WhatsApp.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...
- Mark Zuckerberg in 2003
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've been tested I choose not to believe them.
Yeah, the level of indignation and self-righteousness in the comments on HN (and not just in this thread) seems to have gotten worse lately. Maybe time for me to take a break from HN for a bit...
My theory is there's a lot of resentment of the successful. We're seeing a new generation of engineers enter the workforce that never got to participate in the previous booms, and it's not as easy to make it big as it used to be.
What? It's so much easier than it used to be. Between low interest rates, QE policies and the latest corporate tax cuts, equity markets are booming and it's easier than ever to get bought. And the actual process of building a company is also easier. Between accelerators like YC and Cloud providers, the path from idea to getting acquired is shorter than it's ever been. You just have to adjust the goal posts a bit. It's may be harder now to IPO and become and independent company with the outsized influence of one of the FANGs, but achieving generational wealth by being acquired by one of those companies is routinely done in just a few years.
Props to him. I don't think I would have been able to resist an 8 figure offer
There is not even a path for users that opt out of Google Play Services on Android to install official builds without turning on "enable untrusted sources" and thus opening yourself up to Man In The Disk style attacks.
Signal is modeled very similar to whatsapp where you have to trust a central company to not sell your metadata, and central employees to not backdoor you under coercion.
I don't know what their real agenda is but it is not anonymous encrypted and decentralized communication.
Instead I would suggest looking at Matrix.org/Riot.im which are building anonymous, federated, end to end encrypted messaging where you can use any client that adheres to their published specifications.
I get it; you took the money. I'd sure as hell take the money. One anecdote about sniping at Sheryl Sandberg is washed away by this milquetoast sentiment:
“It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don’t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.”
I get not overconsuming, but if you're gonna buy a car might as well make it a nice one - the impact is basically the same.
I once heard a very wealthy guy complain that "everyone these days wears a Rolex", so he needs to buy something fancier. Well, once every super wealthy person goes out and buys something fancier, then the less wealthy people will want that and the effect trickles down. The fact is that conspicuous consumption is a problem for our society in that it leads people to buy things that they can't afford. By driving a minivan, Brian Acton isn't contributing to that problem as much and I commend him for it.
I checked with Mercedes and BMW and Lexus too. All nice cars, but none as nice as the Honda.
If you regularly haul around 2 kids and 4 adults like I do, honestly, the Odyssey is the best thing you can get.
Of course there's no point foregoing the fancy car if you're going to spend 100% of your money on yourself anyway. But even when it's not a clear, direct tradeoff -- 'hmm, should I buy the Ferrari or give $100k to charity?' -- I think most people give some of their money away, and the proportion depends on how financially comfortable they feel. So stretching your budget to buy the best attainable toy/status symbol probably has a real negative effect, relative to buying one of the (perfectly good) cheaper options, or keeping your existing car for a few more years.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2001/dec/21/voluntarysec...
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 disconnected from reality. There is no free lunch.
None of this is to excuse FB's bad behavior. The fact that they claimed they wouldn't attempt to link accounts but had teams elsewhere in FB working on that very task is yet another example of the true nature of that company and its highest ranking people.
Such as? This kind of handwavy "they could have invented something else that no one else has managed to think of" ignores the possibility that perhaps that other business model doesn't exist.
Of course, they could have charged as Acton suggested, but there is no way that model would have supported their $19B purchase price.
EDIT: And as much as this particular conversation is throwing Facebook under the bus, I feel this holds just as true for Google and the rest of our industry as a whole with a few notable exceptions.
We are using Hacker News, free of charge, without advertising. Or for a bigger example, most Wikipedia users have never donated and yet use the service with zero advertising. Or there's Signal, as mentioned in the article, and countless other examples.
Perhaps there is a free lunch after all.
There is never a free lunch. Employees must be compensated, capital equipment must be bought/rented. The revenue has to come from somewhere.
Neither of Hacker News nor Wikipedia nor Signal was purchased to the tune of $19B. So who set that price? Let me assure you, Facebook would have gladly paid less. And, of course, Facebook bought WhatsApp with the intention of turning a profit. The rest follows logically.
Didn't knew this and takes back to the outrageous SMS pricing of 10 cents per SMS.
I as a consumer can change easily but it's sad to see that business will have to deal with this crap.
And businesses have been paying for all those Toll Free calls customers are making. It's only toll free for the caller.
The fact that we aren’t using peer-to-peer encryption in our message apps today is solely because companies want to charge you money for sending messages.
Because Skype had the capability to operate as a decentralized encrypted messaging app, and now 10-15 years later, there isn’t an app like that. Not because it’s not possible but because giant tech companies have become the equivalent of fossil fuel companies, killing innovation by buying it and absorbing it, altering it or shutting it down.
That's fine in the world of desktops with always on connectivity (often not even NATed), but it doesn't work on iPhones were when your app isn't on screen, it isn't running (they have a limited amount of background execution these days), and anyway connectivity is spotty.
Imagine an App on every platform/device that forms a mesh amongst its users and communicates short messages in a P2P way. Perhaps some simple state could be stored in some special nodes that aid in co-ordination. The whole thing may come with a Wikipedia like openness goal. I'd donate generously for such a cause.
Encryption export laws. And most importantly, pressures by three lettered agencies to target individual bad actors.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/skype...
Of course we as consumers would love to have everything free, but someone is footing the bill.
and making it free, bankrupting any possible competitor
It is already a pain that I can't write bots on WhatsApp like I can on telegram.
Intercom's pricing probably works out to something comparable for the average SMB. If the price is too high relative to the value then businesses won't use it and they'll have to drop the price.
But there's nothing outrageous here.
Takes a certain type of person to add a passive aggressive dig after telling someone not to be passive aggressive.
Also, the author is being very direct about what he thinks of Acton's behavior, he's not being passive-aggressive.
"... 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 billion dollars on something and not get a return. But I can't help but notice how the article depicts him as someone who is thinking more strategically, contractually, and businesslike (i.e. profit-driven) than someone who would write something like the quote above. Whatever he was then, he seems to have taken a step away from it and become... a CEO.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg%E2%80%99s-ipo-let...
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.
They needed the FB acquisition to supercharge their wallets, needed the pound of flesh to be demanded for the price that was paid in order to revisit their original mission, and now we're seeing Acton at least refocus on easy-to-use encrypted communications via Signal and potentially other platforms. The FB money has allowed for potentially more investments in the privacy tools sphere, if Acton continues his work in that area.
Whatsapp is a massively dominant messaging service, but the drive for privacy amongst consumers will continue to increase. It'll be interesting to see how we all communicate with the next evolution of all these apps in 10 years.
i have little sympathy for such actors. i’ve known people who got rich on stock options in the ‘00s and then fled california while decrying the rat race. this is the same thing.
if you really mean it, donate all the money to charity, an ed foundation, or some such. i’ll even forgive you for keeping 10mm for yourself. otherwise, cry me a river.
> Brian Acton, who left Facebook a year ago — before going on to publicly bite the hand that fed him, by voicing support for the #DeleteFacebook movement (and donating $50M to alternative encrypted messaging app, Signal)
And:
> And for leaving a cool ~$850M in unvested stock on the table by not sticking it out a few more months inside Zuckerberg’s mothership, as co-founder Jan Koum did.
Sounds like this actor may in fact be worthy of a little sympathy.
Look, I’m glad they’re not still at Facebook but this is hypocritical posturing. They’re not giving the money back. They’re crying all the way to the bank.
To portray it otherwise is just a spin.
At least he admits to “At the end of the day, I sold my company. I am a sellout. I acknowledge that,”. I'm sure it's much easy to be remorseful with a few billion dollars in the bank.
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that room!
I can't, and neither can you, because it doesn't and it hasn't really been tried in a popular app.
Whether it's as obvious as you think that it doesn't scale and/or it wouldn't work, people would jump ship etc remains to be determined.
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.
Why not wait out the few months, then donate all the money to privacy focused NGOs / investing in competing businesses?
That would be a much more impactful way of proving a point, imo.
The way I see it he evaluated harm to his health and well-being from doing something he didn't want vs vesting tail of his grant and chose a sane option, because he already vested enough. Similar stories on smaller scale happen all the time with VPs and directors after re-orgs.
I realize this was probably said in fruatration, but I think it paints a pretty clear picture of Zuckerberg's arrogance and entitlement.
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.
Another account yesterday mentioned plans to put Kevin Systrom under a different manager that would have given him "less access to Zuckerberg." Earlier accounts described them as friendly, always seen together, etc.
It seems like Facebook is a company where access to the CEO is so tightly controlled that it's basically used as a political weapon.
Engaging instead of sending the thugs to empty the cubicle.
For example, an employee is rude to a client.
You call the client to do damage control, because you have a personal relationship, the client continues to be furious.
You say "Look, I know you're angry and I know this is probably the last time you'll ever talk to me, but if I can say one last thing, it will be that we have always tried to <insert conciliatory remainder of conversation>"
I don't know if that is always arrogance or entitlement, is it?
Who does Zuck think he is, the CEO of facebook?
What is less well-known is the elite institutions which groomed him tend to not do much of anything about the fact that they are sometimes, not always, sending these types of Stanford-Prison-Superiority-Complex personalities out into the world.
The article says they wanted a clause that granted them approval over monetization strategies. So Zuckerberg gave them some version that he knew had no teeth in order to close the acquisition. But he got exactly what he wanted in the end, without any real compromise.
This falling out with Acton and Joum seem like just another case in the long line of bad relationships: Saverin, and perhaps the Winklessvoss twins, although that "business" relationship was for the sole purpose of ripping them off.
Hell, I am a lowly engineer in a tiny company who got screwed by a single line in a contract. I saw first hand what lawyers can do.
It reminds me of the scene in The Big Short where at one point the investors a clamoring to withdraw their money from Michael Burry's fund. They hate him and call him names, but he refuses to let them withdraw. Later when he pays out a huge profit he emails them saying, "You're welcome".
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.
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 sad that so few people with strong business backgrounds are trying new things. Maybe in another decade or two.
That's wrong - WhatsApp was monetized - IIRC, they had 200 million users (and growing) and a staff complement of 50[1]. They could have been easily profitable even if a fraction of their users then paid $1/year, or charged Businesses or bots.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive...
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
In fact given the recent bill's introduced into the Australian parliament, it's irrelevant if they are true. The bill allows the government to demand they produce a version of WhatsApp with a bug that sends a copy of all data receives somewhere, and also allows them to demand they download that app via the automatic security patch mechanism. So unless there is a way to verify what software you have isn't bugged you have to assume even if it isn't now, it could well be in the future.
There are ways out of this mess, but none of them are based on taking someones word for it. Yet the "it's secure because that's what it says on the box" seems to be the most common security model people adopt. It's so clearly wrong I sometimes think I'd be less perplexed if most of the world's population started insisting water wasn't wet.
Also, I think we're cross talking about their statements--I can't divine anything specific from what they say, but their answers (esp. Sandbergs non-answer) seem supportive of other things I've seen claiming the encryption they're using is leaking business analytical information to FB on purpose (effectively undermining the lay understanding of end-end encryption).
BTW That situation in Australia is saddening.
For me this sounds quite ridiculous. He already cashed out as they sold the unprofitable service for ridiculous amount of money. Facebook has to generate profit for shareholders so they have to monetize it somehow. It is quite easy for him to say "yeah I'm morally superior, thanks for the money but I don't want the product to be profitable that way you know, now when you have paid me..."
Seems like he's aware but Forbes is desperately trying to spin it differently.
Not taking the money just enriches the FB management and shareholders, thus rewarding them to continue what they are already doing.
The end-to-end encryption had some issues earlier (last year?), losing my encryption keys and making all messages in the conversation unreadable, but it seems to be working well in the latest version. It still warns you that encryption is experimental when you enable it, though.
(I work there)
Yeah, maybe if I want my messages to immediately disappear when I click off the app.
(even the new 24hr period isn't good enough to actually have a conversation with people over text)
> But that “very simple business” idea was rejected outright by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who he said told him “it won’t scale”.
> “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as…,’
This doesn't scale because people would ditch WhatsApp in favour of a messaging app that didn't restrict the amount of messages you can send behind a paywall.
I know that hating Facebook is in vogue, but frankly with that line of thinking he sounds like would have made poor business/product decisions.
Acton: I'm not taking it.
Z: Just take it.
A: No!
Z: Look, I don't give a fuck, but the boys'll feel better.
A: Fuck their feelings!
Z: [Brian], we're a team.
A: A team? You guys are fucking insane. I'll go back to the Valley, I'll [create messaging apps]. It can't be like this.
Z: It is. I'm sorry, but it is. It's ugly, but it's necessary.
A: I became a [developer] to put away dealers and criminals, not to be one.
Z: You sound just like me. I know what you're going through and feeling. You're scared.
A: I'm not.
Z: Yes, you are. Everyone goes through that the first time. I did. The sooner you match what's in your head...with what's in the real world...the better you'll feel.
Z: In this business...you gotta have dirt on you to be trusted. When all this is behind you, a whole other world will open up for you.
Z: I walk a higher path, son.
Z: I have the keys to all the doors.
At some point in the very near future you are going to end up rotting in a grave. 850M will not do you a lick of good then.
Live your life, don't obsess over the zeros.
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.
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?
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.
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 sold it for $20 billion. It's like winning the lottery. Maybe he feels guilty. But stop with the patting of one's back and pretending to fallen saints.
He knew well enough what selling whatsapp ( a company that didn't make a single penny ) to facebook for $20 billion meant. Monetization. I would have also sold a shitty messaging app I worked on for 3 years to FB for $20 billion. But I wouldn't go around pretending I was a saint who got hoodwinked afterwards.
Besides, even if the guy didn't sell to FB, he would have had to monetize and sellout eventually because he had venture capitalists to satisfy.
These slimeballs are trying to eat the cake and have it too.
Therefore, it’s always at least about money but probably more than that. And when you consider the time investment and risk associated with a startup, it might be a loss if you’re only considering the money.
That is a load of horseshit, and that view only serves to perpetuate that stereotype. To be sustaining is what a businesses needs to survive, but many businesses have missions an ethos of doing good as well.
I feel like you'd see him here on HN advocating for the moral tech choices he's actually made, at great personal expense?
Whining about thing$ after FB made you a billionaire just makes you look like you need a therapi$t.
Now that FB got their money’s worth of “WhatsApp not competing”, they want to actually profit of it.
Also, whatsapp’s Interaction and name database (“metadata”) is super useful to Facebook. Likely not $1B useful, but still a database FB would otherwise pay millions for.
I know both Acton & Koum from Yahoo!. To describe either as "naive" or "a complete moron" is ridiculous. If that is the depth of your thought, it would explain why you're writing angry comments on a message board while they are retired billionaires.
But, as he openly acknowledges, he did sell out to a terrible company.
That has nothing to do with nobility.
So now Snapchat's founders are noble? They did those things you mentioned and your wording is a far cry from their reputation.
For these reasons I don't see Whatsapp as a Todo app. Chat apps did exist, but there wasn't really many alternatives for inter-platform chat like there is today.
Have you actually ever used it?
I do remember them turning facebook down multiple times... everyone has their price though, hard to turn down winning the lottery.
I am amazed at just the plain stupidity of some of the writers of well nown papers.
We've asked you quite a few times to stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN. If you don't stop, we're going to have to ban you.
Of course the title is a bit click-baity, I'll give you that.