I think the three points you raised are about how the company was built. For entrepeneurs, it's good to study success stories, but it's sort of like the commen

I think the three points you raised are about how the company was built. For entrepeneurs, it's good to study success stories, but it's sort of like the comment below saying that "J2ME is how it was built, it's not really the story." Knowing how WhatsApp was built gives some clue as to how it reached success, but doesn't fully explain why the value is so high. The article is right- it "reached the middle billion" of people who spend $10/day and don't have a smartphone. Here's a really interesting question: how many of WhatsApp's customers overlap with Facebook's? For the ones that do overlap, what are their usage patterns (i.e. which service do they use more)?