[swombat]

Big difference: Skype had many more than the handful of employees needed to run WhatsApp. Their cost base was hundreds of millions.

WhatsApp seems to run lean and mean, and that makes a big difference in terms of keeping it profitable.

[001sky]

This is slightly misleading in that a business with no revenues doesn/t have that much work to do.

[swombat]

WhatsApp makes $1/user/year after the first year, and appears to keep users around pretty much forever because it's such a good deal.

So that's a revenue that, today, is probably a sizeable fraction of $400m/year. All that with a few dozen employees.

[001sky]

You guys are taking this comment to litterally.

Sales, marketing, accounting, legal, and financial controllership are going to skyrocket when this company has a revenue stream that is worth NPV=$19B.

This is a credit to the company; who like instagram was able to build much value with few FTE's. But building a company "worth money" and building a company "making money" are really different things.

This is smart from a founder's perspective, because in a sense all of those other employees would just be dilutive of attention and likely equity. But from an economic perspective, it's jumping the gun a bit to conclude what the steady state economics will be.

[pjbrunet]

Assuming Google/Apple maintain respective strangleholds, continue to share the wealth, etc. The "app store" craze could fizzle out, nobody knows for sure.

[sbarre]

WhatsApp didn't have "no revenue", they had a much simpler revenue stream.. But your point stands. No doubt a lot of Skype's operation costs were the business and marketing side of things.