Category: Venture Capital

Why WhatsApp Doesn’t Sell Ads

Back on June 18, 2012, WhatsApp’ founders/PR/younameit wrote this brillant statement about “Why [WhatsApp] [doesn’t] sell ads.”
Today, WhatsApp sold itself to one of the world’s largest advertiser.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

→ WhatsApp Blog

We are Founders, and We are Afraid

Fear doesn’t go away, it simply evolves. And that’s okay, because it’s the fear that drives us—but it’s up to us to embrace that fear and channel it, rather than let it drown us. It’s up to us to recognize the fears and go after them. It’s the scary parts of our business (like talking to potential clients to make a sale, or firing a troubling employee) that play the most critical roles.

→ Medium

The Religion of Entrepreneurship

In relgious communities, when someone is in need, the community rallies around them. People do kind things to other people just because it is the right thing to do. The startup world has a similar shared value; investors, CEOs, and service providers throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem are always willing to lend a hand, donate time, and provide guidance and counsel.

→ VentureBeat