I firmly believe that it is consumer apps, and consumer apps alone, that can give blazing home runs like this one.
Despite the risk, numerous deaths, blood and corpses all over the place. Somehow valley since last September had been running after enterprise junk but that's not where the gems lie (My opinion of course!). There is money in enterprise but no home run possible over there.
Edit: I like the way the edited title of this thread: Facebook (whatsapp.com).
10/20/30 years? Look those aren't the days of Henry Ford or J.D.Rockefeller.. tech is changing ever-faster at an exponential rate. You wanna create products for 30 years, none of which will live on their own much longer than 3-4 years (if lucky/successful in their market) because everything is constantly changing? I agree: flipping a messenger toy to FB is a "lottery win", but "a sustainable business that will generate revenue" for 30 years, what is that supposed to be in today's environment? That's a bit of a pipe dream too, just the "nobler" one.
I imagine they made ~$100m last year (400m active users, I'm guessing 100m of which using for more than a year), which is almost guaranteed to go up. For a company with ~50 employees how is that not sustainable?