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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

"In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and talked about developing an app.[11] Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California."

"In 2014, Koum and Brian Acton agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for approximately US$19 billion in cash and stock.[9] Forbes estimates that Acton held over 20% stake in the company, making his net worth around $3.8 billion.[12] According to Acton's personal Twitter feed, he was turned down for employment by both Twitter and Facebook in 2009."

3.8B in 5 years of work? It's scarcely conceivable to me after 20 years of salaried grind. These people are well-connected (fine), but they're also geniuses at spotting opportunities.

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Geniuses, maybe, but also exceedingly lucky - right place, right time, right idea, right connections etc :)

The tech behind whatsapp was pretty cool IIRC .. that's how I got interested in Erlang/Beam. These people were not your average CS grad or even your average googler.

WhatsApp could have been coded in any language. The first version was a very simple app but it promised free SMS alternative with some great marketing campaign. Still amazing how they managed to grow the user base using this marketing when there were tons of apps doing the same thing.

Where can I read more about this?

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...

I don't believe the backend would be as scalable (with the same amount of ease) on JVM (Akka) or straight C/C++. Erlang, Beam bring a lot of value to the table for this specific application:

http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...

Also, I got interested in Elixir/Phoenix after I learned about what WhatsApp accomplished.

I'm a bit surprised people are downvoting a technical point on HN but whatever.

The brilliance wasn't in building the core software but rather leveraging the right technology for scalable low cost messaging. WhatsApp's core messaging infrastructure is built on top of a modified version of the open source project Ejabberd. The technology heavy lifting has largely been done by Erlang and Ejabberd. In my opinion WhatsApp was brilliant to leverage those existing systems - but it wasn't the computer science skills that made them successful.

I thought they did some fine tuning to the BEAM VM to get an extreme amount of scale. I didn't know people had Ejabberd deployments at such high scale (2 million+ concurrent connections per server) in that time period. I never got into details of scaling XMPP so you might be right.

Plenty of people sink years and life savings into opportunities that never take off. It's like saying that roulette winners are geniuses at sensing red.

So the takeaway from your statement is that entrepreneurial success is akin to playing Roulette? That's awfully cynical, enough to put off even trying.

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