[bduerst]

Too high of a risk for companies.

Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too.

Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acquiring that company instead.

[scep12]

> Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win.

Sorry, I can't help myself, but at a salary of $160k a year, payrolling "a hundred of them" per year would only cost 1/10th of what FB just paid for whatsapp.

It's too bad companies like FB and Twitter would rather let the 'founder' types slip by than to take more chances. When Facebook last tried to recruit me, they described themselves as "a bunch of startups that just happen to work under the same company." Yeah, right.

[technotony]

I think you mean 1/1000th of what FB just paid... seems like it would be a good investment to me!

[scep12]

I meant to write 1/100th - still a mental math fail!

Stated in a different way - Facebook could have paid 1,000 teams of 10 (founders + engineers) at 160k/yr per person, for 10 years... for what they just paid for whatsapp. The collective diversity of products developed by said teams would probably be worth more than whatsapp.

[bduerst]

Only out of context. It's assuming that he would have founded WhatsApp while working within facebook.

[rodgerd]

> Too high of a risk for companies.

The problem with PARC and AT&T labs wasn't that having a bunch of really smart people doing interesting stuff failed to produce brilliant, world changing ideas, it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them (arguably for the better, in the case of Unix).

[a_bonobo]

> it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them

There's lots of fun evidence for this - AT&T had an answering machine 1934 but shelved it for 60 years.

>AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

http://thinkofthat.net/2010/12/03/no-answer-how-and-why-att-...

[mjn]

AT&T Labs wasn't too bad at capitalizing on their inventions, though they didn't do equally well on all of them. For a pretty long time the lab was definitely in the black, though. Their most profitable invention, which came about halfway through the Labs' existence, was probably the transistor, which made AT&T a ton of money. I don't remember where I read it, but some old Bell Labs people calculated that it made AT&T so much money that that single invention paid for something like 40 years of the Labs' operating costs.

[bduerst]

I've heard the same thing about early Xerox. I think that it requires both the idea AND the execution to make it work.

Did WhatsApp make a profit?

[sokoloff]

I also believe that a significant portion of the deal value is "So Google doesn't get this and buy inroads into 'our turf'".

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it supports the idea that not only do you let the market pick the winner, but that once the market HAS picked a winner, sometimes you have to buy that winner partly as a defensive strategy; it's not enough to find a cheaper way to "play offense".

[waterlesscloud]

>let the market sift out the successful founders

Sure, of course that's exactly what they're doing.

But just giving up on being able to identify these sorts of people when there's tens of billions of dollars at stake seems like an irresponsible business decision.

At these acquisition prices, it's worth putting a great deal of effort and money into alternative processes.

[weixiyen]

> Too high of a risk for companies.

Yeah and this is why Valve is a struggling company. Hiring really smart people and letting them make whatever products they want is doomed to failure.

Oh wait...