It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's getting behind the #deletefacebook movement.
Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have believed in it strongly.
That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge, because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M?
Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the acquisition happened. Conversations took place, but I'm not going to quote anyone.
As Scott McNealy has said; once you have investors, your company is for sale.
So not only would you have to deprive that engineer but you would also have to explain to Sequoia why you weren’t going to give them a gargantuan return on their investment.
Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into. If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100% ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your shareholders.
Yes, within the institutional role, eg as CEO of a company, a person is obliged to make certain decisions. Eg a CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company, otherwise the shareholders will fire him.
So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.
> So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an institution.
This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism. Any political or economical system that has institutionalized roles will have the same conflicts between duty and personal principles.
And history shows us, in fact, that capitalism has much fewer of such conflicts than any alternative.
Supposing Signal had a larger userbase, and got offered a similar deal. Well, it basically did happen; Moxie's previous company Whipser Systems got bought by Twitter, Moxie left after a couple of years, losing his options in the process. I doubt it would happen again.
I get that it's hard to pass up on the money. Once you take it though it's hard to not look hypocritical. Especially since he gave them a large amount of the data that was abused.
He owned 20% of Whatsapp, so its possible he didn't want to sell to FB. Only 50.1% of the shareholders presumably had to want to sell to overrule the others.
He started a company, and made a delicious exit. Him becoming a privacy advocate maybe was his secondary goal yhat now became primary. Or maybe with his founder he had disagrements but he sold anyway because what else could he do if everyone but you wants that exit?
One thing one might speculate about is that there was a "change it from the inside" motivation. For example, WhatsApp did add Signal's encryption protocol, which I think has been fantastic. Having lots of money available as a fallback to now sponsor alternatives is a nice addition to that.
But of course, all of this is speculation - I can't look inside the man's head.
