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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

It might be. But it's also just over four years since Facebook bought WhatsApp. Were his FB shares on a four year vesting plan?

I don't mean to be too negative, but I'm still very disappointed they sold to FB in the first place. There was no need to do so - WhatsApp's business was sustainable. And surely they must have considered this possibility?

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Have you ever been on food stamps, in a foreign country, only to get offered Billions of dollars a few years later? (yes, that's Jan Koum).

Frankly, I can easily defend his choice of selling to Facebook.

Instead, good point on his vesting.

You imply a tale of woe by saying "few years", when it was really closer to 2 decades. He was on food stamps as a child, he'd worked at Yahoo for a decade and started working on Whatsapp with hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, and at the time of the acquisition their finances were extremely healthy.

So, after two decades, the memory of having been on food stamps goes completely away, you say? And it doesn't count in that decision anymore?

Let me remind you that elderly people still have very vidid memories of famine and war troubles even 70+ years later.

It seems to me you are just being pedantic.

It seems to me that you're using someone's personal history to project your own personal views. We have no idea if he is motivated by what you're saying. The OP's counter point is just as valid as yours.

Personally, if I'd grown up on food stamps and was deeply concerned for my future welfare you can bet I would have sold before the price reached $18bn. I'm quite sure WhatsApp had many offers over the years.

Was the business sustainable? They tried some form of paid apps or recurring subscriptions several times, but no one I know actually paid for WhatsApp ever. I imagine they were just burning through VC funds.

It does not take much money to run a messenger, especially one that does not store conversations or files server-side once they are delivered.

Doesn't matter if revenue is less than costs.

I paid for it.

yeah so did I and all my friends. $1 whatever.

Actually in one of their interviews after the acquisition Koum said that they still had every single penny of their VC money, they hadn't spent it. He even showed the bank statement showing it was all there before they took a second round of financing from Sequoia. Jim Goetz said they were the only startup we'd ever dealt with that was paying income tax before taking any money.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive...

I paid 79p for a lifetime subscription but yeah that probably wasn't going to cover costs. They used charges partly to limit uptake when the servers were struggling I think.

I mean... 19 Billion... it's hard to pass that up.

FB tripled in the last 4 years. So, a 4 year vesting period would have been a good thing for Koum!

Oh, I know. On a human level I can't blame anyone for making that choice. But then exiting with a big pile of cash while complaining about what Facebook is doing feels a bit... eh.

What else should he do? He took billions of $ along with a promise that he'll keep control. FB lied, so now he's leaving. I can't blame him here. Money can easily buy a bit of naïvety.

> What else should he do?

That really depends on what was stated in the terms of acquisition. At the most extreme sue to demerge.

But is that a fight he is willing to accept?

That'd be gutsy, but suing wouldn't have a chance unless he had promises in writing, which I doubt.

I'd rather have him do that then decide to stop complaining and give Facebook a pass now that he's one of them.

>WhatsApp's business was sustainable

Was it? Sure, they had a lot of users, but most weren't paying. FB said that the revenue was so small that it wasn't even worth charging. They brought in something like 10M on 0.5B users, hardly sustainable.

> They brought in something like 10M on 0.5B users, hardly sustainable.

Why not? Their team was tiny and they spent next to nothing on advertising (nor needed to). $10m seems like a pretty decent amount of money to be spending on servers in a year. (I'm not saying it definitely was fine, just that I wouldn't assume it wasn't)

Curious. How much do servers cost for serving 1B+ users? Does it really consume millions of dollars if there is no ML/analytics being generated? I used to think that as you scale you start getting cheaper rates.

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