The WhatsApp Story Challenges Some of the Valley’s Conventional Wisdom
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Full disclosure: I worked at Facebook and am still holding on to some stock. I also worked on a project ("Panama") with Acton at Yahoo and knew the reputation of others involved in WhatsApp like Rick Reed. Rick Reed built a high performance messaging bus in C++ at Yahoo that was the foundation of much of Yahoo infra outside of search, so the use of Erlang was not a surprise for me. Nonetheless, I'm sure my opinion would be the same even if I never worked at FB or Yahoo and didn't know of anyone involved.
Keep in mind that while I know nothing of Brian's rejection from FB (it happened before my time), but "Facebook has good talent" is not mutually exclusive with "Facebook rejected some really great people". It's also very likely that he was going for a more senior/leadership position and interviewing engineering leadership is an even more of a dubious "science" than interviewing individual contributors.
Ah. Has there ever been a Yahoo project that had more hype?
Investors are looking for the next Facebook, so it only makes sense to invest in people who seem very Zucklike, which the WhatsApp founders are not (at least superficially). It reminds me of how generals are always preparing to fight the last war rather than the next war. Or how political pundits are convinced the US will never have a black president, let alone a Democrat from the North, until suddenly we do.
I guess predicting the future remains a hard thing to do. :)
True, but if (a) the choices are binary ones, and if (b) they only work half the time, then (c) it's not wisdom, conventional or otherwise.
But now it occurs to me that your post was meant in fun.
>> “Yahoo! doesn’t have talent.” ... The two WhatsApp founders worked at Yahoo!
OK, so two people from Yahoo were talented. How does this lead me to any conclusions about Yahoo's talent overall (positive or negative)? Without any disrespect to them, I am sure the smartness levels of Whatsapp founders is not astronomically greater than those of other Yahoo employees to change the overall Yahoo averages significantly.
>> “Companies like Facebook have the best talent.” One of the WhatsApp founders applied for a job at Facebook and was rejected.
I am at a complete loss for this one. This rejection at best speaks to inadequacy of the interview processes.
>> “The best founders are relatively young.” The WhatsApp founders were in their mid to late thirties.
Let's say there is a probability distribution relating startup success with the age of the founders. You sample this distribution a very large number of times and find that for a very rare event, the founders are in mid to late thirties. Can you really draw any significant conclusions about the shape of this probability distribution from it?
>> “The center of gravity for consumer products has moved north from the Valley to San Francisco.” Well, that’s largely true, but WhatsApp remained headquartered deep in Silicon Valley.
I would assume that WhatsApp's location was not a criteria for the acquisition given that the locations considered here are relatively close by. Surely there would be correlations between a startup success and location within Silicon Valley based on talent pool available, startup atmosphere, etc., but again, the estimated probability distributions would not see a significant change from the new knowledge of this event.
>> “Mobile products should be delightful, beautiful.” ... apps should look nice, but at minimum, they should work to solve some problem ...
I wonder if the conclusion really needs this specific event to be seen as generally valid. It is quite obvious that the app should solve some problem, most probably even if it is a beauty product.
>> “Don’t worry about making money, just grow big.”
This one was an eye-opener for me given the scale of this acquisition, under the assumptions that this high a valuation was sensible and that this event is not actually astronomically rare. Founders and VCs always ask themselves questions on how to monetize. Unless we are in an acquisition bubble, the relevance of this question partly comes under question.
Yahoo! used to have some of the best people.
Beyond the fact that I don't think you understand the reasons why people would stay at a company like Yahoo, I don't think you actually know much about the people who work there. Yahoo owns Tumblr, which still employs some of the best engineers I've ever met. More than 20% of the hires the first year after the Mayer takeover were boomerangs, which is a good indication that your implication that between 2009 and now Yahoo suddenly lost every talented non-immigrant employee is just wrong. And so on.
I'm not saying this to pick on you or just to be critical for its own sake. I'm sure you're a nice person. But this comment was just painful to read. Please think carefully about this sort of thing before you say something else like it.
EDIT: Ah, HN. Where telling someone that a company with 10,000 employees probably does in fact have a few talented engineers earns you anonymous down votes. :(
There exception are people who are trapped there (H1B, a massive side project, sick family member, whatever), or are vesting out after M&A. Come back to this in 0.5 to 3.5 years when the Tumblr team have filled their vesting.
(You can make a reasonable case that big companies are better at EoE than startups, but I don't see a strong case that Yahoo! is better than Apple or Google or ...)
This is because the culture at Yahoo! has been horrible in terms of actually turning technology into products, or at any real innovation. A succession of utterly incompetent CEOs and ossified and incompetent upper management pretty much killed the company, technically.
Every Yahoo! I've talked to said it was a "nice" place to work if you're just collecting a paycheck. It was a horrible place to actually try to do anything meaningful (with a few exceptions, like Panama, and even then). So, it depends on your goals with a job: a paycheck ,or a chance to change the world. It's up to the individual which it is.
However, people who are neither competent nor ambitious are irrelevant in general, and those who aren't both are largely irrelevant in creating anything new. (I know many highly-competent but situationally-lazy people who remained at Yahoo! a bit longer than was good for them. They had impressive personal projects during that time. They were vastly happier when they moved on to other companies.)
(As an indicator: outside of Government, Yahoo! had more contractors in more key roles than anywhere else I've ever seen. Microsoft had a lot of contractors, too, but they were generally not in core roles, and after that court case, were only there for ~a year.)
So, I stand by my original comment.
My opinion is that you're now debating a completely different set of points.First you only told us that no one talented works there, and I think we both know that's just wrong. That you haven't brought it up again indicates that you concede this point. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Look. This is not to say that everything you've said is completely wrong. A lot of what you say is true. But I do think your case is pretty overstated, especially since these things depend pretty dramatically on which team your on. The disparity between a good Yahoo team and a good Google team is miniscule, even though the difference between a good Yahoo team and a bad Yahoo team is really high.
That said, majority of Yahoo employees fit neither into "not employable elsewhere" nor "absolute genius who is hanging on because he is working on the Cure Cancer feature of Yahoo Horoscopes". Far more common were/are people who joined either from graduate school, a startup that burnt them out, a far crappier industry (e.g., government, finance, etc...), who wanted to do something cool (and usually there were chances to do that at least initially on the team you joined) and stayed despite much badness (e.g., their project being cancelled) _not_ because they did not think they could do something as good elsewhere, but because being at Yahoo was a known quantity of pain.
That's the default mode of behavior for most people and it's fine to hire these kinds of people as long as there are others to balance them out -- but not into leadership roles at startups (anyone of the first 15 people in a startup is probably in a leadership role even as an individual contributor). That said there are limits: there were people who were doing very little in their roles and thought neither internal transfers, nor job transfers, nor personal side projects -- I'd have a hard time hiring such a person.
Keep in mind that WhatsApp founders did leave to found WhatsApp (obviously...) and when they were at Yahoo they worked on very challenging and interesting things. They were early employees (as in 96-98), (de-facto or de-jure) technical leaders, and Yahoo was their baby: they had a vested interested and non-negligible ability to have a positive impact at Yahoo and they certainly did.
Unlike, for argument sake, Path, which requires me to register with them, makes me use a "complex" menu, unnecessary status wall, tell me how many connections I should have, etc.
I was using it not because of the interface or anything but because it enabled me, I personally don't like the visual design of WhatsApp btw.
WhatsApp become incredibly popular here in Turkey and I suspect that it's mostly because of the fact that it was the only messaging app that almost everybody can install to their phone, including non-smartphone users. Everybody here have at least one phone but not everybody had a smartphone and if some of your friends are out of reach, its a deal breaker.
Line, I belive had little bit traction, Viber too. WeChat even run TV ads but eventually, everybody have WhatsApp :)
Ahh, Color.
Could the differences between Color & WhatsApp be any more pronounced?!
They did this, in order of importance:
1) They built something that solved a problem.
2) They sold it at a price that the people were willing to pay for that problem to be solved.
3) They built something with powerful network effects, drawing in new users & keeping old ones.
Ian's magic guide to making money by building things:
1) Build things that people will pay for
2) Sell it to those people
ADVANCED COURSE (DLC - send payments to 1QKocu7qqiSGbmaviR4aFVTq3zVWtvdFiA )
3) Charge more than it costs you
4) Charge no more than those people are willing to pay
Astoundingly, I've missed off things like "be mobile first" or "don't be mobile first" or even "it should have been built in this city". I've also managed to not dwell on the language anything like that. Turns out, having loads of people pay you money for a service somehow makes a good business! WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE FORESEEN THAT? TIME TO CHANGE ALL OUR PRECONCEPTIONS!
> I’m not suggesting we throw out all the rules and engage in chaos. But, it is a good time to reexamine them.
If a business that makes a profit and has nearly 6% of the global population as active users (and growing, it seems) being bought for a lot of money is shocking then I cannot fathom what world you live in.
"Be so good they can't ignore you" - https://twitter.com/jankoum/status/262099630773399552
"If you run a startup and your goal is to get on techcrunch, you are doing it wrong." - https://twitter.com/jankoum/status/199240645745979392