[Aperocky]

I see a common pattern among utility providing IT companies, that despite the core functionality can be supported by tens of people, it goes ahead and hires thousand anyways, which give raise to features that are neither core nor that anyone wanted. The company then go under as the business can’t generate enough revenue to feed the thousands of developer and management that has been brought in.

If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.

[kelnos]

Patreon comes to mind. They're essentially a members-only blog subscription company. It's beyond me what they need all those employees for. The only difficult problem they should have: dealing with fraud.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm guessing sales & marketing (and the usual O(log n) amount of management and administrative positions to support that).

It's one of those hidden costs of advertising being a zero-sum game. The waste only grows as you try to keep up with the competition that tries to keep up with you.

[8ytecoder]

WhatsApp (pre FB) being the only exception I know of.

[wlesieutre]

I’ve never used WhatsApp, but I assume it got the same clone of Snapchat Stories that facebook stuffed into Messenger and Instagram?

[benologist]

IIRC the interesting point is it was a very, very small team - like 10ish people - and got acquired for $19 billion.

[myblake]

It was like 40 or 50, but yeah the points stands, it was still like two orders of magnitude smaller than any other 10+ billion dollar exit we’ve ever seen.

[wlesieutre]

Agreed, and I was highlighting how post-acquisition they moved away from the core functionality and started stuffing other apps into it in a pretty predictable fashion.

5 seconds on google finds that adding a SnapChat stories clone is exactly where WhatsApp has gone now, just like Messenger and Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/

Personally I’ve minimized social network use and don’t think every single app needs a status broadcast feature, but it’s popular. Not just a group chat app anymore though.

[Nextgrid]

It got acquired for the trust people put in the brand, not the technology or the employees. Facebook needed a backdoor into people's contact lists and WhatsApp had a huge user base of people who authorised it to access contacts.

[jpalomaki]

More boring explanation: For most people Facebook is just a platform for connecting with other people. Any messaging platform with significant amount of users is a threat for them.

A platform like WhatsApp could evolve to cover the main things people are using Facebook for. History has shown that people are not too stuck on any platform.

[wongarsu]

It has stayed basically the same. No relevant features were gained or lost.

[wlesieutre]

Color me skeptical

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/

[wongarsu]

Huh, so apparently the Status tab is supposed to be something like Stories? I've never used it, it wasn't really advertised to me, and when I open it it's an empty page with a prompt to add a status update. From what I gather from the internet it's somewhat like the status messages from old messengers, just some text you can set?

Stickers are new, I must have forgotten that because every other chat app I use has had them for ages. They are really an example of WhatsApp moving slowly compared to Telegram and Discord.

Group video chats are something that's probably motivated by rising mobile speeds? As bandwidth becomes more plentiful and smartphones have plenty of RAM and CPU power there's no reason to restrict video chats to one person.

[justinclift]

This feels like the trajectory Mozilla is on. :(

[senordevnyc]

Could you share a few examples of this common pattern of IT companies hiring thousands and then going under?

[Aperocky]

Uber? They are on borrowed time