I swear to God, WhatsApp is THE startup fairytale.<p>No dilution, bootstrapped, greenfield tech and mind boggling earn out. A once in a generation business story.<p>I always mention WhatsApp when people want to do something overly complicated.
He has 6.5 BILLIONS. That's almost double what Brian Chesky (CEO Airbnb) has including paper money, more than Evan (CEO Snapchat) has, and more than Travis (CEO Uber) has including the ridiculous valuation. Just an observation.
I'm from an African country where Whatsapp has played a major role in the political uprising against autocratic governments. Its power to mobilize the masses to go on the streets and protest is incredible. Radios and TV stations couldn't do that due to the pressure and their fear of being shut down by authorities. But Authorities have found a way to mute Whatsapp: shutting down the Internet. Just search : "Internet or Whtasapp shut down in Cameroun, Gabon, DR Congo or Togo" to find out.
We are currently looking for alternatives to Whatsapp messenger that can work even when the Net is down. Suggestions are welcome.
The interesting thing about WhatsApp is that most of my American friends haven't heard about it by the time it was acquired for $19B. One of the biggest success stories of a US based company that went global first.<p>Good luck to Brian on his next adventure.
I'm guessing his stock has vested and he can now cash it out. Good on him, it was a nice success story selling for as much as they did to Facebook.
While I understand why the founder would leave at this point, WhatsApp is probably the platform with the most upside gain opportunity in existence today.<p>It has proved that a new paradigm of software development is ready to be opened up in the developing world, has small and big businesses knocking down the door to get in, and the highest daily active user base around. The only downside is how they've failed to scale to accomidate the opportunity.<p>But maybe they are right to go slow as they have network lock in.
My only issue with whatsapp is how the data is stored in a central place. I am a person switching between ios and android and I have lost a lot of data. Plus even has issue in the same device after formatting.<p>I am not a big fan of having my mobile number as my identity as I keep moving around and change my mobile when I get a better package. I wanted an app that assign me a unique id and I can share in that my current mobile number where people can call me in.<p>Just yesterday, I was looking at a phone running all the various IM apps and whatsapp was the lowest with 18mb, IMO was 40mb while facebook was 100+ mb. not sure if it was the messenger alone or facebook + messenger.<p>Facebook doesn't seems to be interested in improving whatsapp.
Hope now WhatsApp start caring more about business and integrations. As basically the only option for communication software in Latin America, it feels a lot behind.
That's almost 3 years (October 6th 2014) since FB's acquisition, social media would have been much different today had they acquired Snapchat.
New foundation, or maybe he finally got a job at Twitter?: <a href="https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068</a><p>(The backstory is: Brian Acton was rejected from Facebook and Twitter in 2009)