That's fascinating and completely believable. The question will be can FB move those people to their own platform in the future and quietly retire Whatsapp in the future.
It's interesting that the CEO of Whatsapp is joining the FB board since that will affect the direction both products take.
To get $16bn cash from Facebook is hilarious.
Next time a start-up says they won't pay you market rate because of x, y, and z just walk away and laugh. For the sake of a few thousand dollars in wages, you could make them billions.
Don't work for cheap bastards. Funny how engineers are supposed to sacrifice yet we never see a lawyer or accountant charge below market rates, and their work can save businesses millions as well as jail-time.
And yes I do agree with you. I recently rejected a offer from a start up for offering 50% below market rate.
Seems like I made a smart decision.
If you've only been there 2-3 years, that's a substantial bonus that pushes your pay above market rate.
16B * 10% * .5% = 8 Million
The opposite of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Dropbox, Palantir, etc...
With such a large user base and their established mobile presence it would have been fairly easy to challenge Facebook in the social network field, so Zuckerberg might have seen that coming as well. In that light the announcement that Whatsapp will basically stay the same actually makes sense - it will stay the same and will not develop those features that could have threatened Facebook in the long term.
Well, I already sent some messages to my friends to move on to threema, which has the added benefit of having encrypted messaging and being located in Switzerland.