>The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things.
I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along.
The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to build a massive product. You know what that translates to? Low opex. If they wanted to, WhatsApp would've been quite profitable if they wanted but instead they chose to sell to the highest bidder.
Again, that's not a bad thing, but also, I'm sure there were PLENTY of people that were interested in buying a billion user platform with 99% user retention. Why did they sold to Facebook? Only they know, but back then Facebook already had a tarnished reputation, so they definitely didn't do it "because of their mission and values".
This is a good point of view and this is entirely possible. But from an employee POV, FB was touted the best place to work. Things like that would've been a reason to select.
There is another chance that FB was seen as the lesser evil compared to Google then, who was also in the bidding for Whatsapp IIRC. My younger self would've chosen FB instead of Google for sure.
Not to mention, people wouldn't have guessed how horrible FB would turn out to be.
Edit: Funnily enough, after I wrote this comment, It became clear that money was definitely a factor.
I'm not saying they are bad people, and selling is not a bad thing either. I'm just pointing out that selling was the plan all along.
The WhatsApp story that gets told regularly (like in this instance) is a story of how such few employees and such small infrastructure is enough to build a massive product. You know what that translates to? Low opex. If they wanted to, WhatsApp would've been quite profitable if they wanted but instead they chose to sell to the highest bidder.
Again, that's not a bad thing, but also, I'm sure there were PLENTY of people that were interested in buying a billion user platform with 99% user retention. Why did they sold to Facebook? Only they know, but back then Facebook already had a tarnished reputation, so they definitely didn't do it "because of their mission and values".