Hacker News Reader

His take on Amazon is incredibly ignorant. People act as if Prime 2 day shipping was a simple business decision because that's all they see. They can't see the supply chain optimization behind the scenes that allow this to be economical.

Not to mention that Amazon invented the cloud, and that was built off the back of Bezos' demand that all software at Amazon have interoperable APIs.

WhatsApp had half a billion active users before Facebook. They were doing just fine. That’s why Facebook paid over $20 billion for it.

> They were doing just fine.

The YouTube video I linked to is Neeraj Arora, early WhatsApp employee, on what Facebook's acquisition meant for WhatsApp.

Does it discuss the part where Brian Acton (co-founder of WA) donated 50million to Signal because of how badly Facebook will distort Whatsapp's user base and tech?

exactly this. arguably they've probably trojaned or backdoored the e2e encryption by now, after buying it too.

e2e encryption was only added after being acquired. Not sure why FB leadership would undermine the effort that they helped support in the first place

Perhaps because FB leadership had nothing to do with the decision in the first place? When WA was acquired they maintained fierce independence and would not interact with FB unless absolutely necessary. No code was shared, WA kept its old offices away from the FB campus, they were for all intents and purposes operating as individual companies.

After WA added e2e it became politically possible within FB to add the same to Messenger (as long as it behind a few conversation gateways that made it hidden for most users) but FB leadership did _not_ support adding e2e to WA and certain groups continued to fight against adding it to Messenger because it was going to close off a channel for the ads team to pick up signal by spying on user conversations.

That's late-stage Facebook. The interesting part of Facebook is when they beat Myspace.

> Facebook took Instagram and WhatsApp and basically put it on steroids.

Ok, I’m tracking.

>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook's ample innovative, world-class sales, marketing, engineering weight behind it [0][1].

Wait what? How on earth did you land there? From your own video, Facebook left WhatsApp alone, and the value they got from Facebook was increased velocity. Absolutely nothing in that video indicates they would have failed or not continued the trajectory they were already on, it would’ve just taken a bit longer and probably had a different back-end.

Neeraj Arora: "You saw the result of that [Facebook's acquisition] because when we sold the company [WhatsApp] in 2014 we had 450M monthly active users and I think we doubled or tripled in a few years after that. So, it kind of shows that our speed of execution went up... it was just that we were able to hire aggressively, we were able to get a lot of other technical help from Facebook on the storage, on the server side of the things. They brought a lot of those things that we were trying to build ourselves that they already had... So, combining the two really turbo-charged the growth of WhatsApp. So, I think I'd say execution was flawless in terms of the deal."

> ...it would’ve just taken a bit longer

Yeah, we are in-agreement: "[Facebook] put its growth on steroids".

>Those apps couldn't have possibly been the behemoths they are now without Facebook'

You said they couldn't have possibly been the behemoth's they are. That's just patently false, their growth trajectory pre-facebook would've had them just as big as they are today 6 YEARS later. Post-facebook their growth actually stalled, it took them almost 4 years to double their user base from 2016 to 2020 - previous to that they were doubling every year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthly...

https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/whatsapp

> You said they couldn't have possibly been the behemoth's they are. That's just patently false...

We may never know what might have actually happened but the Stratechery article I linked to in my original comment has this tit-bit (albeit related to Instagram):

...Instagram was a product, and its business model was venture capital funding. To be sure, this wouldn’t be the case forever, but on April 9, 2012, the road from popular product to viable company was a long and arduous one. Instagram would not only need to continue growing its user base, it would also have to scale its infrastructure, figure out a business model (ok fine, advertising), build up tools to support that business model (first a sales team, then a self-serve model, plus tracking and targeting capabilities), all while fighting off larger and more established companies — particularly Facebook — that were waking up to the threat Instagram posed to their hold on user attention.

Or Systrom and Instagram could offload all of those responsibilities to Facebook and continue being "extraordinary product leaders", and pocket $1 billion to boot...

The difference from Zuckerberg — Instagram’s real CEO — is stark. Facebook launched in February, 2004, and sold its first ad two months later. True, “Facebook Flyers” bear little resemblance to the News Feed ads that power the company today, but Zuckerberg’s immediate instinct to build not just a product but a company is notable.

I'm leery to put advances in sales and marketing in the same category as engineering. An engineering advance adds total value, value that was not there before.

Advances in sales and marketing categorically don't do that. By definition they move value around that was pre-existing.

I agree that it's ignorant to call everything outside of programming and product ideation non-innovative. Though also, much of those giant companies' successes come from simply having a critical mass of dollars. At some point, it's sheer brute force.

Maybe an article that is just slightly wrong, just slightly uninformed is the same kind of moneymaker as facebook.

You’re confusing being good at business/marketing with being innovative.

You're confusing being innovative with being innovative in software.

Nope, I’m reading the actual article and using the author’s definition of innovation: creating technology that makes our lives better as human beings. Not a small group of people making something that makes them a ton of money regardless of it being innovative as per the definition above.

Innovation, for better or worse, need not make human lives better.

The author doesn’t seem to understand that growing into a trillion dollar company doesn’t require extreme innovation and cool tech.

No, he's saying that Silicon Valley was originally about extreme innovation and cool tech, not multi-trillion dollar companies

I’m referring to their claims that that not innovating means not standing the test of time. Facebook very well could exist and stay profitable for the next 50 years without a single new product or feature.

Dubious. They're doing all they can to kill it with censorship. It takes more than just new tech to keep something afloat - you also have to treat your userbase well.

That sounds like the kind of thing someone wearing rose-tinted glasses would say. The author even mentions William Shockley but fails to note that the man was authoritarian and divisive to the point that his best employees left him to form their own company.

The Silicon Valley of the 20th century had its share of politics and backstabbing, and certainly money was a big deal; Shockley's former employees enlisted the help of a businessman and investor to found their new company, Fairchild Semiconductor (named after the investor, not after any of the engineers!).

I'll absolutely agree that many of the big names in SV software businesses are greedy outfits that are actively making the world worse, but it's incredibly disingenuous to suggest that's all it is, and ignorant of history to suggest this is anything new.

The piece should be titled "How I Was Naive About Life and Finally Realized It's Not All Roses".

It’s fascinating that you are at the very same time not understanding what he is saying, absolutely illustrating exactly what he is saying.