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IIRC the interesting point is it was a very, very small team - like 10ish people - and got acquired for $19 billion.
by benologist 7y ago
IIRC the interesting point is it was a very, very small team - like 10ish people - and got acquired for $19 billion.
- Nextgrid 7y agoIt got acquired for the trust people put in the brand, not the technology or the employees. Facebook needed a backdoor into people's contact lists and WhatsApp had a huge user base of people who authorised it to access contacts.
- jpalomaki 7y agoMore boring explanation: For most people Facebook is just a platform for connecting with other people. Any messaging platform with significant amount of users is a threat for them. A platform like WhatsApp could evolve to cover the main things people are using Facebook for. History has shown that people are not too stuck on any platform.
- myblake 7y agoIt was like 40 or 50, but yeah the points stands, it was still like two orders of magnitude smaller than any other 10+ billion dollar exit we’ve ever seen.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAgreed, and I was highlighting how post-acquisition they moved away from the core functionality and started stuffing other apps into it in a pretty predictable fashion. 5 seconds on google finds that adding a SnapChat stories clone is exactly where WhatsApp has gone now, just like Messenger and Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/ Personally I’ve minimized social network use and don’t think every single app needs a status broadcast feature, but it’s popular. Not just a group chat app anymore though.