I've had this one sitting in my drafts folder for about two weeks now, mostly because I kept getting distracted by other stuff (Flappy Bird clones, mostly, which I'll get to in a second). But I keep coming back to one detail from the WhatsApp deal that nobody seems to be able to let go of, myself included.
You know the numbers by now. Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp - $4 billion in cash, about $12 billion in Facebook stock, and another $3 billion in restricted stock units for Koum and his team, vesting over four years. Fine. Big number, biggest tech acquisition ever, blah blah. Thats not the part that got me.
The part that got me is where Jan Koum actually signed the papers. He drove over to 650 Castro Street in Mountain View, the old county social services building, the place people used to go stand in line for food stamps and welfare checks. Koum himself stood in that line as a kid, after his family emigrated from Ukraine in the early 90s and his mom couldnt find steady work. He picked that building on purpose. Didnt have to. Could've signed anywhere, could've had Facebooks lawyers messenger the papers to his house. He drove to the building.
I dont know why that detail has stuck with me more than the acquisition itself, but it has. Maybe because so much of what gets written about Silicon Valley deals is just spreadsheets and org charts and none of it feels like it happened to an actual person. This one detail makes the whole thing feel like it happened to somebody. Koum apparently posted about it on his own Facebook page too, which is a strange sentence to type given the context.
Anyway. Im not going to sit here and write another 800 words about whether $19 billion for a messaging app with 55 employees is insane (it is, a little, but so was Instagram at $1 billion and that one worked out fine for Facebook so far). Everyone else on the internet already wrote that post, probably four times over, in the two weeks since it happened. Im more interested in the fact that a guy who once needed food stamps ended up as one of the largest individual shareholders of Facebook once this closes. Thats the kind of thing that doesnt happen in most countries. It barely happens here.
Semi-related tangent: Ive been trying to get WhatsApp working properly on my phone for the past week because half my friends who travel a lot swear by it, and I still dont totally get the appeal over just texting, if Im honest. Maybe its an international-SMS-cost thing that doesnt hit as hard if your carrier plan already includes unlimited texting. Ive sent probably nine messages on it total. My contact list on there is mostly just people testing to see if it works. Not exactly the feature Facebook paid nineteen billion dollars for, at least not for me personally, but Im clearly not the target market. The target market is the roughly 450 million people already using it every month, most of them outside the US, in places where SMS actually costs real money per message.
The Flappy Bird thing I mentioned is its own weird story. Dong Nguyen pulled the game from the app stores three and a half weeks ago now, and the clone flood that followed has genuinely gotten out of hand. I counted something like fourteen "Flappy" branded games in the top 100 free apps last time I checked, all with slightly different bird shapes and slightly different pipe colors, none of them actually good. Theres a version with a helicopter now. A helicopter. Somebody's grinding these out in an afternoon and shoving them into the store hoping for ad revenue off the confusion, and its working, which says more about app store discovery being broken than it does about anything else.
Two different stories, two different kinds of Silicon Valley: one where a guy who grew up on food stamps signs off on the biggest tech deal in history in the building where he once needed help, and one where a hundred nameless developers race to clone a dead game before the moment passes. Both are true at the same time. Thats sort of the whole thing about this industry right now, isnt it.