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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, seeing this quote from the article - "strict employment laws don’t kick in until you have 50 employees: that’s how many WhatsApp had when it was acquired for $19 BIllion." - is everything going to be measured by WhatsApp now? This week on HN I've seen WhatsApp used for valuations on car companies, the duration from $0 to a $1B+ sale, the price of a user, and now this, using them for...I'm not even entirely sure. Is he saying that a French startup can easily be a $19B company while still being exempt from the employment laws? Is that incredible wishful thinking on his part? It'd be like a Silicon Valley startup saying "we don't worry about Obamacare costs at all, we'll have a $10B valuation before we hit 50 employees".

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> is everything going to be measured by WhatsApp now?

Since when are we responsible for other's misuse of an example or metaphor?

Whatsapp was less than 50 employees when it was bought, restrictive french laws kick in when you reach 50 employees. This means that does those constrains actually don't affect you when your business is taking off. It looks like a valid remark to me.

> Is he saying that a French startup can easily be a $19B company while still being exempt from the employment laws?

It looks like it. Whatsapp wasn't making $19B, it was sold $19B.

Besides, when you reach 50 employees I don't think you can be considered a startup anymore.

The interesting question with regard to this french bashing is: why do You even care? Are they threatening You in some way?

"Whatsapp was less than 50 employees when it was bought, restrictive french laws kick in when you reach 50 employees. This means that does those constrains actually don't affect you when your business is taking off. It looks like a valid remark to me."

No, all it means is that those constraints wouldn't have affected WhatsApp when their business is taking off. To extrapolate it beyond WhatsApp you have to assume that WhatsApp was somehow representative, when it was clearly a gigantic outlier.

It's just to say a startup can do great things before reaching 50 employees. Even if you ignore the crazy amount WhatsApp was sold for, you can still see that they got a pretty successful product and a huge user base with that number of employees.

Yes, 50 is actually a lot of employees for a startup. It's a weird size where you're already feeling some of the drawbacks of a larger organization, but without most of the benefits.

I'd almost go so far as to say that 50-100 employees is a kind of gauntlet you need to squeeze through fairly quickly. It's not good to get stuck at that size for too long. If you can't grow past it, then rethink and retreat back to a smaller startup size.

I literally just read "You should design for android because they delayed monetization and sold for $19B."

If you're WhatsApp, I doubt it matters how onerous the regulation and taxation is where you operate your business.

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