The only thing they failed at was making money. I really wished they had. They knew what Whatsapp meant to the world. Look at WA now.
https://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-found...
IIRC they had 450M users when they sold to FB. Their plan was to charge $1/user/yr. A $450M ARR company run by 50 people would have done fine.
Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.
They also tried the paid version for a while if you remember. And they were also dead against ads on the app. Unless I missed something or if I am wrong somewhere (At which point I would love to be corrected), Selling was the plan all along doesn't seem like a right observation.
I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along.
The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to build a massive product. You know what that translates to? Low opex. If they wanted to, WhatsApp would've been quite profitable if they wanted but instead they chose to sell to the highest bidder.
Again, that's not a bad thing, but also, I'm sure there were PLENTY of people that were interested in buying a billion user platform with 99% user retention. Why did they sold to Facebook? Only they know, but back then Facebook already had a tarnished reputation, so they definitely didn't do it "because of their mission and values".
There is another chance that FB was seen as the lesser evil compared to Google then, who was also in the bidding for Whatsapp IIRC. My younger self would've chosen FB instead of Google for sure.
Not to mention, people wouldn't have guessed how horrible FB would turn out to be.
Edit: Funnily enough, after I wrote this comment, It became clear that money was definitely a factor.