Slashdot Mirror
WhatsApp Founder Used Unchangable Airline Ticket To Pressure Facebook
McGruber writes "In a post on the Flyertalk website, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum provides another interesting detail about how he steered WhatsApp into a $16 billion deal with Facebook: 'we announced the deal with Facebook on wednesday after the market closed. during the process, we realized there was a chance we might not be able to get the deal wrapped up and signed on wednesday and it could delay. when the risk of the delay became real, i said: "if we don't get it done on wednesday, it probably wont get done. i have tickets on thursday to fly out to Barcelona which i bought with miles and they are not easily refundable or even possible to change. this has to be done by wednesday or else!!!"...and so one of the biggest deals in tech history had to be scheduled around my M&M award ticket."
Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund for the service outage that happened after the deal went through.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
think he'll be flying to Barca on a private jet next time.. at at least a full fare F ticket.
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I am Audience.
It's hard to think that FaceBook would take this threat seriously. It's a $10+ Billion deal. Throwing in some extra first class seats for a different day would be the equivalent of a give-a-penny-take-a-penny dish compared to this.
This is Facebook we're talking about. They could have offered to charter a jet to take him where he needed to go if missing his flight was a possibility from long negotiations.
Yeah, Facebook caved over an airline ticket cost.
1,000,000 round trips to Barcelona. I smell bullshit.
Whats in Your Wallet
The word BULLSHIT jumps to mind. If facebook felt the need for more time they would have happily bought him a replacement first class ticket to anywhere he wanted to go, especially when it is billions of dollars on the line.
and so one of the biggest deals in tech history had to be scheduled around my M&M award ticket
There are no grown-ups running businesses in this country.
or my 16oz latte is going to get cold and I will need to buy another one.
Now he has the money to fly to Barcelona and back every day for the rest of his natural life, so that worked out great.
Why is this a story? Obviously nobody was pressured by the cost of an airline ticket. So that's bullshit, and that's the entire story. Are you trying to get the content down to the quality of the Beta site?
i hope we do not overlook koum's total hipster prowess evidenced by the lack of proper capitalization. too cool for me!
Beware of the Leopard.
This kind of ultimatum sounds like standard chest-thumping. Yeah, sure, you're going to walk away from a 16-billion-dollar deal for the sake of an airline ticket. Pull the other one.
Reading posts like this remind me why I'm glad I collect miles (aka Avios) with British Airways rather than Lufthansa (M&M = Lufthansa Miles and More). As a BA Gold I can change my miles bookings free of charge up until 24 hours before my flight.
I'm currently in Prague at the moment, decided I want to get a later flight back tomorrow so logged in and switched my booking.
There's a reason why those who are not fans of Lufthansa call their scheme Miles and Less. It's one of the least generous schemes out there.
Hey should give all 450 million customers a $1 refund.
They supposedly have 450 million users and charge $1 a year, but in 2013 they only had $20 Million in revenue. Either the 450 million users is an inflated meaningless number, or they have huge churn where only 4% of users stick around past the first year that's free.
A piss take, so is this story.
They railed against advertising and even Facebook yet he found $16B too rich to resist. Of course I can't blame him; $16B is an insane amount of money, and he'll get a big chunk of it. But the bottom line is he sold out his principles for wealth.
The main draw of Whatsapp is that it allows penny pinchers to save on texting fees. In the countries dominated by WhatsApp all incoming calls and texts are free by law. People only pay for outgoing texts. If you have WhatsApp account, from a dumb phone you can send an SMS paying for just one outgoing local text fee. If you have smart phone, it would come under your data plan. That SMS could be echoed to many people as incoming texts by WhatsApp, across countries if necessary. Thus you avoid international texting charges too. These users are tightwads and penny-pinchers extraordinaire. They are the ones who developed elaborate missed-call etiquette and protocols to avoid paying air-time charges. They would sign up, use the first year for free, and create a new account under a new user name and get one more year free. WhatsApp knew it and it did not care, it is able to count old users as new users and show phenomenal user base growth. You can not make any money off these users. They will dump WhatsApp the moment it tries to charge any fees. There is no compelling reason to use WhatsApp and the switching costs are minimal. It is not like Facebook where all your friends are and you have to be in Facebook to see it.
In a developed market with smartphones, where dumb phone market is shrinking, there is no way FB can make any money off WhatsApp. And it has spent 35% of cash on hand in this acquisition. Media is making a big deal of 19 billion dollar figure. But much of it is from overvalued FB stock so that is not relevant. What is important is, in the coming year it is going to be cash strapped. It is having huge buyers remorse. It is going to more circumspect in the next acquisition target. It will swing in the other direction and let a good deal slip in the coming year. That is the effect of WhatsApp on FaceBook.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I know that editor's at slashdot have a reputation for not editing summaries, but this has got to be the worst example of a summary I've ever seen. Perhaps Timothy's shift key is broken, or is it now acceptable to start sentences with a lowercase letter? Proper nouns seem to have escaped the need for an uppercase letter as well. I normally just ignore typos in the summaries, but this is beyond belief.
You'd dump a deal worth billions over a few hundred bucks - man if I where on the other side I woudl see that as a sign of weakness just pony up the cost of a ticket to Spain and put it on the table - "right shall we continue or are you not serious"
Anyone who believes this summary is worth following or that there is any meaningul contribution performed by these so-called editors belongs on Slashdot.
We now have the name of the first exec to be leaving in the restructuring following acquisition. And if he thinks he'll sell another startup after bragging and attempting to make the purchaser of whatsapp look foolish....
If I had mod points today, you, good sir or mam, would get them all!
spelled with 1 *L* or 2?
Who really cares about theatrics?
GA - Gloating Asshole.
Hah! You think we believe that? Getting M&M to issue a ticket to Barcelona is a lot harder than closing a $16b deal with Facebook!
I'm sure a $2K flight ticket really influenced everyone involved this deal when there was $16B at stake.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
A psychopath brags.
Either that, or the facebook guys asked him to say it.
what a load of crap. 16b deal hinged on a plane ticket? if so our economy might as well be run by monkeys.
and no, i didn't rtfa, you've got to be kidding.
what happened to slashdot? the amount of posts that are utter turds is getting insane.
fuck.
it's like losing an old friend.
...and this stupid fucking social media bubble. Can it please pop, already?
Whatsapp is good enough, its strenght isn't security or privacy, but rather its comfort. You don't need to add anyone, no pins, usernames, passwords or logging in.
Very true. It stores your phone number and contact details in the cloud, which is very useful when you change phones. Just install the app on your new phone and boom! All your contacts are there.
Zuckerberg could have purchased American Airlines AND Dunkin Donuts for that 19 billion. What an idiot.
it's not a big secret, at least if you're in the restaurant business. if the business deal isn't closing by wednesday, the deal has no shot to be completed. that's why most restaurants have THE BEST of everything (staff, cooks, linens, utensils, ingredients) on wednesday. there is no such thing as a bad meal on a wednesday. usually if something bad happens, it's probably you were a dick or they don't want you coming back. otherwise, they know the big wigs will be out celebrating, and LARGE. and when these folks celebrate large, orders get large, and the tips will be large.
Or Antarctica, if that's where you'll be.
Have gnu, will travel.
In negotiations there is a point where you need to behave irrationally otherwise negotiations continue to your detriment. That was a means to signal that it is your final offer, and I am willing to drop it for something as ridiculous as a flight to Barcelona. They could have offered a flight in a gold plated A380, it would not have made a difference. Next time you negotiate with your wife over going out with your buddies, you might recognise the "irrational behaviour" trick now.
He was willing to risk losing out on $19 billion because of a plane ticket that cost a few thousand dollars at most? What a total idiot.
That would be so funny. A 16B dollar investment made totally worthless in one fell swoop! :-)
Thats a clever way to get users to tie billing info to their accounts and would add lots of value.
Wonder how many of the 450 million subscribers would sign up for the $1 refund ?
Some might not sign up because they didn't know about it, some might not sign up because it's merely $1, but then ... some might not sign up because their privacy is worth much more than $1.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Reminds me of when Gary Kildall said to IBM "The last bus goes in an hour, and no way am I taking a taxi, you bastards."
This how Microsoft got to [re]write DOS for the PC. The rest, as they say, is geography.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
it is freaking massive in Hong Kong
Looking at the [tiny] size of Hong Kong, _anything_ is ***MASSIVE***
Facebook does not intend to make money of those users. Even if 450 million users actively subscribed and paid $1, it would take 38 years to recover the costs. Facebook intends to milk ad revenue.
CEOs are rich because they pinch on things that seem strangely unreasonable to the layman. I bet one CEO pressing another to an appointment because he otherwise has wasted his Miles was actually a solid appeal to Zuckerbergs politeness and courtesy and Zuckerberg felt compelled to follow suit - and rightly so.
Zuckerberg, Jobs and other rich people have strange money saving habits they carry on well into being insanely rich. I'll still be mending my own trowsers should I ever land a lucky punch, f.i. Zuckerberg lives in a house reminiscent of that of a simple honest working craftsman here in Germany and he's married to a modest, refreshingly unspectacular asian woman, probably because the western / u.s ladies were to strenious for him.
Truth is, these people don't give a shit how many bazillions they have on the bank. They want to build cool stuff and make a dent in the universe, and they would be doing the *exact* *same* *thing* if they just would barely get by, because they like what they do. I know wealthy multi-Ph.Ds who still ask for the rest of their dinner to be wrapped up so they can take it home. That may be strange, but it's comforting. They haven't forgotten where they come from.
That's why these people have my respect. I don't like FB to much, I don't like Apples golden cage lock, etc. pp. But who am I to complain? Nobody is stopping me from sitting my ass down and building the next big thing in IT. But my respect they have nonetheless.
As fas as I'm concerned that WhatsApp guy deserves every billion he can squeeze out of the deal. If he still doesn't waste his miles, that makes him more respectable in my book.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whatsapp are now obsolete, defunct, and discredited as the sellouts they are. Next shot story please ..
Who the hell wrote the summary? This is laughable. Who posted it on Slashdot? Do they not know what a capital letter is?
Actually, they should just refund what people paid for the lost service: $1 per year = $1 for 8760 hours 1/8760 = $.000114 per hour, or .0114 cents per hour
Service was down for, what, four hours?
0.0114 x 4 = 0.046 cents per user.
It would cost the company a little over $205,000.
Now Facebook has real phone numbers to go with those accounts. What a great marketing value.
What else should I say to this stuff? There is always the question: What's coming next? ... next? And then comes the next peng.
.. still can't punctuate or use grammar. Shame. The retiring generation is more literate and numerate than the average undergraduate apparently. Shame again.
@peetm