David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…Yup. We talk a lot on this show about, it’s hard to grasp the scope of China’s scale. WeChat as of the end of last year had 1.1 billion users. It’s the operating system for how people do things on their phones of all types including messaging in China. It’s 40% bigger than that. Yup, yup. Now a very different business as we will get into. But, some cracks start to form. Remember Facebook had agreed to this no advertising thing and all these messaging. Behind the scenes though, Facebook is of course like, “Yeah, we’re an advertising company. That’s our business model. That’s what works on the Internet and that’s why we’re huge. At this point hundreds of billions going to $630 billion market cap company. WhatsApp, you should be part of that.” Jan and Brian fight it, apparently, it gets really heated internally. Apparently Sheryl Sandberg keeps saying to them, “It worked for Instagram.” They keep rejecting any participation in the ad ecosystem within Facebook. Importantly, that means two things. Not just showing ads on WhatsApp, that’s actually at first the less controversial thing. It’s about sharing user data, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.