If Waze had taken the FB deal tho, it would have been a stock deal, and it would have been worth 2-3x more than the Google cash deal.
Generally, I’d happily take a significant discount on the amount to make it a no/low strings cash deal, unless the stock offer is basically equivalent to a cash deal (super liquid, no restrictions on sale).
If all I cared about was money and the potential upside, I'd have taken FB any day over all the no/low strings cash Google could throw at me.
Noam talks about the civic breakdown caused by FB and how he is happy he chose Google but that could be a case of post facto justification. Google, sans its "Don't be evil" is no saint either. I'm sure if he had gone with FB, he'd find five different things to ding Google on - e.g. firing the AI ethics team, sunsetting products without notice, dropping "don't be evil" from their charter, having no North Star other than maximizing ad rev.
It was sure bet, in a hindsight. They could’ve easily botched mobile, open room for competition to swoop in and become irrelevant in the process.
https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-pivotal-tale-...
I mean, I myself left Wall Street to work on iOS apps back in 2011. Only a willfully blind person would have ignored mobile/smartphones by 2012-13.
Of course, they could have botched their mobile transition - Reddit's ongoing dumpster fire is an example of corporate self immolation - but even back then Mark Z was no schmuck.
Rewriting app, means years of no new features (like Twitter did with their backend rewrite). That’s a very vulnerable period of time. And no guarantee that their apps will be any good (especially given their track record of low quality). It wasn’t guaranteed in any way that they will start making meaningful money on mobile.
They could’ve easily end up like Twitter, plagued with reliability issues and no good monetization.
> At the time, the Facebook deal was a stock deal and their share price was ~$25/share. Had we closed with them, the deal could have had a 10X multiplier. Despite that, I feel that Google was the right place for us. We clicked with the engineering team, they let us stay independent and grow (from 10M MAU to 150M MAU)...