There's a saying that "Every man has his price."
For me personally, I hope that I'll never be offered enough money to betray those who trust me. But I fear that my selling price is far lower than $19B.
For me personally, I hope that I'll never be offered enough money to betray those who trust me. But I fear that my selling price is far lower than $19B.
Yup, agreed.
And Acton left after his golden handcuffs were up and put $50M into Signal.
Honestly, the situation could have been worse. Let's hope that $50M now propels the future towards truly decentralized communication.
Is the good you're doing via whatsapp enough to outweigh how you could leverage 19B?
It's not perfect, but it's not an easy question and there isn't an easy answer.
That's a very good point. Still, with $19B on the line, I bet there's no shortage of people who would help me rationalize doing something else with that money once it was in my hands.
I tend to have a pretty pessimistic view of human nature, but maybe I'm unfairly projecting my own weaknesses onto the rest of humanity.
Look at Google. We have a bunch of people who don't want to use their new APIs because they've experienced those APIs going away in the past. Ironically, by resisting using them they create a self fulfilling prophecy. An API that lasts 3 years is not more likely to last 6 years than an API that has been around for 1 year will last for 4. By delaying they've just put themselves closer to the drop dead date.
Point is, that dynamic hurts everybody, not just the people avoiding engaging with someone with a questionable track record.
He refused to sell repeatedly.
19B is an insane price. Clearly the buy was worth it for FB so it's not mispriced, but really think about the 19B.
They had 30 employees? I think people that worked there for one year cleared $140M.
If someone held out until 19B I would trust them to be more principled than 99% of founders.
For a founder-controlled company that raised capital so late, is selling for $19 billion much better than selling for $15 or $13 billion and knowing your creation will solve the problem it was meant to? Any of these outcomes leave the founders with many billions (and leave the few employees set for generations).
Contrast with a $2-3 billion acquisition like Oculus or Instagram. They were huge but still in the range where 20% or 30% less (for restrictive deal terms) might actually matter, if only barely. Whatsapp's deal was so large that there's not even the tiniest practical tradeoff from 20% less.