Things that cost more than Space Exploration: WhatsApp. | Hacker News Reader

Things that cost more than Space Exploration: WhatsApp.

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134 pointsDanielleMolloy56 comments

This post is next in the sequence of HN posts after a large exit: comparison with NASA's budget, cost of trip to Mars, etc.

Typical sequence:

   - news of the large exit, submitted repeatedly
   - hastily written blogs about why it doesn't make sense
   - hastily written blogs about why it makes sense
   - cute stories about the company's past: founder(s) living on Ramen, etc.
   - comparisons with NASA's budget, Mars exploration budget, Gates Foundation budget, etc.
   - and finally, breathless "news" about the slightest change in the acquiree's ToS or some such silly news

Dont forget the

- how to get acquired and cash out early, follow X lead, eat ramens, read hackernews, disrupt the market, america prevails

Also: What technology stack did the startup use to scale.

Well, that might be genuinely interesting and useful :)

Didn't even read the OP. And this first comment sums up what I was already thinking. No need to even read further down. Next.

Yeah, this is just the response pattern happening with every one of these 20 billion dollar exits lately. People should just get used to it and stop thinking about it too much.

For (what I feel is) a more useful figure, let's look at NASA:

> Annual budget ... when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion per year over its fifty-year history. [1]

So WhatsApp is like 1.2 years worth of NASA.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

We're talking space exploration, not going round and round in circles 200 miles away (OK with a bit of robot exploration on the side at a tiny fraction of the cost).

I thought the article and the whole blog to be a rather fun and cheeky counter-point to the argument that space exploration is too expensive.

As a total of US budget, NASA's expenses represented less than one half of one percent in 2012.

We've spent more money on things other than space exploration that, depending on who you ask, has far less social value.

It's possible to coherently argue against multiple types of spending.

Given the vagaries of Congress, arguing against any spending you don't like is probably even a more sensible strategy than arguing first against the ones you like the least.

To put it into one more perspective: ESA's Rosetta mission[1] ran over more than 20 years now and had a total cost of $1.4 billions (spacecraft, launch, instruments, lander, operations), which is 1/14 of WhatsApp.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) (wake-up of the probe happened this January)

On the other hand, considering that the surface of the moon has already been visited by space probes carrying instruments and by manned spacecraft, while many billions of possible combinations of human beings having conversations here on earth have never happened, there is probably a lot more undiscovered return on investment to be had from investing in WhatsApp than from investing in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. Both are arguably good things to spend money on, but investment flows sometimes attempt to follow where the big returns are likely to be.

Short term gains for centralized pools of power != long term gains for humanity. They are going to mine the data in WhatsApp so they can optimize the way they sell to you.

What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power. We're going to need it for all the advertising servers.

>What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power

This meme of we should mine Helium-3 from the moon needs to die already. This kind of thinking is so backwards it's astounding to me that anyone can come up with it. Why would we mine the moon for power that we can't yet use? No one is going to go to the moon to energy for a fuel source that might be in use in the future. It's like spending billions marketing to people in sub-saharan Africa before you have a product designed, much less built.

We'll need to tap the Moon-He3 when we want to fuel manned interstellar missions. So probably not this year.

I'm not sure WhatsApp is tackling the "many billions of possible combinations of human beings having conversations here on earth have never happened" problem. WhatsApp tackles the 'outrageously high SMS and MMS fees' problem.

Besides, the value in WhatsApp is mining the data for value. Eg. to target ads better, identify the key trend setters for special offers, discover what is trending, brand perception etc.

Software Engineer at SpaceX here. Exits like WhatsApp not only cost more than space exploration, but also make recruiting much more difficult for many companies.

Our best engineers are very entrepreneurial. They don't hesitate to tackle massive challenges, often without even being asked. When a large exit occurs, it's an unfortunate siren call: "you could be making billions, writing way less complicated code."

Why am I taking a salary somewhere when some guy just made billions in four years? Did he have to worry about loss of human life if his code failed?

I make my own internal siren shut up by being a complete space geek, but rockets are not always as intriguing to prime candidates in the recruiting pipeline.

It's time for a reality check.

How many people actually exit with this level of success? Why is enabling our species to be interplanetary often a harder sell than the prospect of trading years of your life for a small chance that you might exit with a few billion dollars?

Greed. It's terrifying how much it prevails in our startup culture.

The size of one's exit is far less important than the impact of one's technology on the world.

Hack things that make the world better (or other worlds). If riches come as a result, great, but our startup culture's emphasis on valuation over innovation is, in my opinion, our achilles' heel.

(My views are completely personal opinions and do not reflect the views of the company. I love our startup culture and am proud to be a part of it, but I'm convinced that when I look back I will clearly view the code I've written here to be way more important for humanity's progress than the code I've written for entrepreneurs' selfish attempts at billion dollar exits)

I am not sure why people are so dissed at the cost of WhatsApp acquisition. There is a significant value to whatsapps huge network. You know what else cost almost as much as NASA's entire budget last year - Bonus paid to GoldmanSachs' employees

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/goldman-sachs-pay-bonuses-hit-12-61...

"There is a significant value to whatsapps huge network."

That remains to be seen. I've witnessed enough big acquisitions to know that the jury is still out on whether or not this investment will return value to Facebook.

>Bonus paid to GoldmanSachs' employees

Goldman Sachs has over 30,000 employees and earns over $8BB in profit a year. That's real money in the pockets of stakeholders.

But, as seems to be common on HN, I'll bet you think bankers are scum and the people at WhatsApp are doing yeoman's work, selling ads and handing data over to spying agencies.

The interesting part (for me at least), and the real reason that you guys are having a debate at all, is because our notion of value is so far abstracted from human necessities these days that its hard to put a finger on what value is.

There are a few things that we inarguably need -- food, shelter, water, and so on. See the bottom two tiers of Maslow's pyramid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs .

It's the middle tier and above when things start to get fuzzy and hard to define. When most people globally were engaged in work towards the bottom, it was easy to understand the value that was being added (I grow food! I help myself and others survive!).

Now, when most people (at least in developed countries) are doing things towards the top of the pyramid or off of the pyramid entirely, its harder to define value. Money is one proxy (which you are using), but its probably a poor one. I would love to see better ones.

I think most complaints about bankers are that their profits are ill-gotten, not that they are unprofitable.

Flagged because the comparison of asset cost to operational cost is nonsensical.

It's like telling someone buying a million dollar apartment "but you could rent a mansion for a million dollars/year instead".

The OP is not necessarily talking about operation cost here. For the cost of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp I could launch 4.6 million kilograms into orbit on a Falcon 9, which is essentially the cost of lifting the ISS. When you're talking about space, the cost of launching should be included in your asset cost, because otherwise you're million dollar satellite is worthless.

Facebook didn't pay it all in cash. They paid much of it in (soon to be) worthless Facebook stock.

And this is the problem with the comparison. To fund a space mission, Facebook would have had to either try to realize the value through another huge stock sale, or it would have to use up its cash reserves. The first option is essentially impossible. The second would lead to massive lawsuits as well as having a very uncertain outcome (you think a bunch of web designers could really build a rocket?)

Thanks for making this point. Buying a company with stock doesn't actually result in someone spending something to get something, it merely merges two companies and assigns ownership of the combined entity.

I also flagged it. How much an asset is worth and how much the operating costs are very different things. It was a pointless comparison. Launching a satellite is just a cost like taking a plane trip across the country. The end result is that both might provide you with information that could return value, but the actual trip is a straight expense.

I guess I could write an article comparing how crazy it is that [someone] bought a plane for [millions of dollars] when they should have known that there are many websites that will let them book a flight for [a few hundred]. Using this logic [someone] could have booked hundreds of flights for the same cost! If only they had known better.

The value to Facebook of WhatsApp is greater than them funding NASA for a year and a bit.

Similarly, I could probably feed a starving kid in a third world country for a day or two for $4, but instead i'm going to go buy a latte, because apparently that has a greater reward for me personally...

Now I feel like a jerk. Thanks Zuckerberg!

For what it's worth, the fact that WhatsApp is enabling advanced communications in poor countries for free probably liberates a vast untapped quantity of human capital. That's a much clearer value proposition than a lot of other startups (e.g. Twitter, which merely eases connection rather than making it possible for cash strapped people).

That said, I'd be a fan if Silicon Valley's venture capital got really into making escape velocity affordable for the average Joe....

WhatsApp is basically email, and we've had email for a while.

And mars is basically the earth, and we already know almost everything about the earth

> we already know almost everything about the earth

Not even close.

Well, this article is a complete waste of time, and it's #1 on HN, of course. What the hell, geeks can't help themselves. Seriously, people need to quit whining about stuff like this, accept it, and figure out how to solve whatever problem they'd like to see solved. The US economy is almost $17 trillion. Together, we're freak'in rich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

People will fund comic books, video games, etc on KickStarter. I think that market is approaching $1 billion. Perhaps, there's another multi-billion market for a private "space program", medical research, or whatever. Create more X-Prizes (http://www.xprize.org). They create a lot of value for the investment. You only pay the winner but you get effort all the participants.

>The US economy is almost $17 trillion. Together, we're freak'in rich.

Well, if you ignore that fact that the vast majority of those $17 belong to astoninglishly few people.

In that sense, then yes, Warren Buffet and some family living in a shack in Mississippi are rich together.

France has ghettos and rich people. How would you solve the problem?

By adjusting policy in order to revert those things?

E.g redistribute funds to poorer regions. Enforce equal opportunity hiring for people from those areas. Improve schooling and infrastructure there. Encourange business initiatives. Etc.

You know, it's not like some inpenetrable problem that nobody has ever solved before. Historically, societies have acted and corrected imbalances, creating stronger middle classes.

Rather than talking in generalities, can you give us some specific examples so we can research? Even in the United States, with one of the largest middle classes in the world, we still have a fair number of poor people.

Yes, we can ignore that fact. That was a given, right? There's plenty of money in the US economy that can be funneled into other projects. If there wasn't, KickStarter wouldn't exist, correct?

Kickstarter's existance just means that there is a number of people that can give $10 or $100 for a project they like.

I don't see how to go from there to the assumption that's plenty of money for all kinds of projects.

Most Kickstarter campaigns are quite small in requested budget for example. Space exploration, not so much.

Nowhere did I say that the solution was to exactly imitate KickStarter, or even imitate KickStarter to any degree. The solution is left for someone to do some creative thinking, and a lot of work.

I'm sure someone like you can give a million reasons why an electric car company won't work. It's up to that one in a billion person to solve the problem. In the meantime, I get tired of people complaining about why we should solve that problem. Oh... wait...

Everyone is talking about the value of WhatsApp's social network to advertisers, but I thought one of the key points of WhatsApp was that it was a paid service and they collect no data on you specifically because they aren't interested in selling ads. [http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...] Should people who bought into the idea that they were not the product be looking for a new paid WhatsApp like product?

That is how it always starts, right?

But don't they have to collect the data about you because law? (to use the newly allowed English construct ;)).

Also, in the blog post they didn't explicitly stated that they don't collect data; they wrote that they just don't care about it much when thinking about product development.

Comparing WhatsApp to space exploration is unfair. Arguably both of them are equally useful/useless (depends on who you ask). But what about if all (or even half) that money had been spent to (i.e.) cancer research or something that would radically improve people's lives? I think that's the "utility trade-off" question one should ask...

The population of Kenya is almost 50 million people.

It's GNP is $19.9B.

The population of WhatsApp is 50 employees!

To be fair, GNP is an annual value, while Whatsapp's valuation include it's whole value, including potential future annual revenues.

I can't help but think we're stuck in the middle of another .com bubble

If its stuck its not a bubble, its supposed to inflate

He said "we" are stuck, not the bubble is stuck.

I guess when people are saying that space operation costs a lot of money, they are referring to state program like NASA not google lunar...

You can't pay for space exploration with dotcom bubble stock.

Whatsapp is certainly more useful to humanity than space exploration.

Are you being sarcastic?

No, I truly believe that having a way for everyone to communicate for free, privately, and anywhere is just so great. This level of communication enables so many possibilities for people that couldn't been done so simply oterhwise. I live in Hong Kong and do not know a single person not using whatsapp. It helps everyone. Although I'm a huge fan of space exploration as well, I still think letting people to communicate easily is more valuable for our day to day lives.

Oh OK, I see what you mean now. > No, I truly believe that having a way for everyone to communicate for free, privately, and anywhere is just so great.

I agree with that, but whatsapp isn't a new way of communicating - in the sense that it's not a new protocol like the phone or internet. While it's convenient it's not revolutionary and I am sure that Hong Kongers would be using something else.

Also you don't know what space exploration could bring yo your everyday life (probably we could build new stuff from materials not available on Earth or that are very rare...).

You're absolutely right on both points :)

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