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apatters | 3 years ago

It was a smart acquisition for sure, but "ruthless business genius" is a bit of hyperbole imho. FB's market cap was in excess of 200B at the time and they were growing like crazy. 16B on buying what they had failed to build internally and needed as a moat around their core business seems pretty straightforward. Mere mortals like us just get caught up on all the extra zeroes these guys are playing around with.

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el_nahual|3 years ago

Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive. If it were one percent of the business, sure, play defense, whatever--but 10%, over an abstract notion of "defensibility" is a really hard pill to swallow.

It would be amazing to know what the FB board thought at the time, and if zuck had to push hard for the transaction or not .

throwawaylinux|3 years ago

> Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive.

It's not, and Facebook of all companies knows why. What they have is not some stupendous, irreplaceable technology. What they have is users and their relationships. That's how they killed myspace, not with revenue, not with their employee count, and not with their masses of technology, but with their users and the network effect. And that's how they will be killed.

jagtesh|3 years ago

Zuck controls the board though! Majority voting rights. Still, have to give it to him. Need guts to make such a call. WA and Instagram, the Crown Jewels of Meta.

Then again, nobody wins all the time (cough oculus cough).

iLoveOncall|3 years ago

You're giving him way too much credit by underestimating grossly what the value of WhatsApp was: around 0.6 billion users.

It's the exact same reason why Microsoft bought Minecraft for 2B. Not because the game was worth anything near that, but because the community was.

ramraj07|3 years ago

You don’t need to respect him but continuing to disregard the intelligence of people you’re against (or not ) arbitrarily isn’t a smart move. Zuckerberg has proven beyond doubt that he’s more of a visionary than all other tech bro cEOs he gew along side.