WhatsApp had (depending on who you talk to) about 55 employees at the time of the acquisition. We learned from Techcrunch that the only investor, Sequoia had about 20% of the outstanding stock (with everything converted to Commmon).
So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That is roughly $30M per person.
How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..."
It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will never be the same.
It seems that people are running towards Telegram: "This is crazy. We'are getting 100 new registrations every second. Trying hard to prevent connection issues in Europe."
https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437313902058426368
One of the key tenets of Warren Buffett's theory of investment value is based around "moats" - businesses that can't easily be replicated. It's impressive how large WhatsApp has grown but it might be more remarkable how quickly another service can grow in its place. Barriers to entry are continuously falling in mobile and tech in general.
It must be incredibly difficult to turn the whatsapp service back on after an outage, since most active users have probably sent a message that is waiting in the queue. Literally hundreds of millions of messages would hit the server once it goes up. Does anyone know how they handle this?
Actually this is the one of the things that annoyed me about WhatsApp - when it is down or you don't have a connection you can't queue messages to be sent. I frequent places without phone coverage (e.g. the Tube in London) and this was one of my big gripes.
On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry" sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order). Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.
You've been using WA for 2 years and haven't noticed any issues? You obviously haven't been using it much. Regularly whatsapp has short issues where messages will not go through, this is just a particularly long one.
These accu-hires are getting out of control. (a little bit of quick math says that each employee was worth a bit less than 300 million dollars to Facebook.
Looks like they're taking Telegram down with them.
It seems to me that the already massive rate at which WhatsApp users were fleeing to Telegram has accelerated to the point Telegram can't handle it anymore either.
For example, the "remove account" is not as efficient (for example, there's extra locking performed), and since removals are thought to be rare nobody bothered with its performance.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Kik. It's a great platform, and lots of users are switching to it now because of this aquisition. I think lots of people who are privacy conscious will make a move away from WhatsApp/Facebook in the next few months.
What about BBM? Kik completely copied BBM (the founder was an ex employee). BBM is a lot better in many ways, including real groups. Strange seeing BBM not try and capitalise on this purchase of Whtasapp by Facebook.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
So 55 people are splitting 12.8 billion dollars of value. Assuming a power log function (the founders have a big chunk and only 10% of the stock was owned by the 'rest' of the employees, 53 people, 10% of the 16Billion, is 1.6B$. That is roughly $30M per person.
How much attention do you think they are paying to their job, walking around in shock thinking "Holy shit, I'm freakin' rich now!" And trying to let that settle into their brains. Think about how it must feel, you're some employee and you're sitting there "worth" enough money that you can buy a house in California for cash and still retire easily with more "income" just from the interest than your current salary. So you're in a state of shock, and someone says "Hey, the site is down." and you say "Really? Oh look, I could buy that jet, its like only $5M. Hey look at this we could spend a week at this camp in Africa, or this I am so thinking it would be cool to hire a sailboat and crew to ferry us around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, ..."
It will wear off, but the folks who experience it for the first time will never be the same.
[+] [-] crazypyro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okgabr|12 years ago|reply
UPDATE: Telegram is already facing connection issues in Europe caused by the "avalanche" of new users. https://twitter.com/telegram/status/437335049923727360
[+] [-] lmg643|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ereckers|12 years ago|reply
And I thought the Facebook hate was mainly in the tech circles. I guess it's a real "thing". 100 registrations per second can't all be HNers.
[+] [-] RockyMcNuts|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancarroll|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|12 years ago|reply
EDIT: This is what I'm talking about http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/crypto-weaknesses-in...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] okgabr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliwary|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucaspiller|12 years ago|reply
On iOS Facebook, iMessage and SMS allow you to queue messages and "Retry" sending them when you have a connection (often in the wrong order). Surprisingly the best app for this is Skype which automatically resends them.
[+] [-] sepbot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
Although, knowing Zuckerberg, I equally accept all the "conspiracy" explanations in the thread :)
[+] [-] theintern|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gahahaha|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhaumik|12 years ago|reply
Updated story: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/22/whatsapp-is-down-facebooks-...
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me that the already massive rate at which WhatsApp users were fleeing to Telegram has accelerated to the point Telegram can't handle it anymore either.
[+] [-] Freestyler_3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavideNL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
For example, the "remove account" is not as efficient (for example, there's extra locking performed), and since removals are thought to be rare nobody bothered with its performance.
[+] [-] level09|12 years ago|reply
http://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/558/efsf2...
Strangely, there have no status update so far regarding the issue:
https://twitter.com/WhatsApp
[+] [-] okgabr|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WaterSponge|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] znowi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaterSponge|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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