Many of the assertions made by the OP seem highly uncorrelated to the event being discussed, which is may really be a significantly outlying event as OP itself

Many of the assertions made by the OP seem highly uncorrelated to the event being discussed, which is may really be a significantly outlying event as OP itself notes, though not astronomically rare of course. >> “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.