Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, totally. Seems obvious, right? Well, they just announced last week that they're not going to do that. That they're pulling all advertising from stories on WhatsApp, so back to no advertising on WhatsApp. This is where things really jumped the shark, the final thing that has happened in the post-founder exiting world is Libra and Calibra within Facebook, which of course Facebook's crypto currency efforts. The thesis was WhatsApp would make a lot of sense as a remittances platform for people use it to communicate with trusted interpersonal relationships between countries. Shouldn't that also be a really great platform for remittances and people always said crypto currencies are great for remittances. You can avoid all [...]. That makes sense, but we all know Libra’s a mess right now. I think they're being sued by the government, I don't know the latest state of it, but it seems unlikely that that is going to be a viable business model anytime soon. Anytime soon as the right thing there. I think there's a variety of things that could still work out for WhatsApp, but the important takeaway, listeners, is we could not sit on our hands any longer before doing this episode and just keep hearing wait and see from Facebook on earnings calls. It's not happening in the near future. There might be something interesting. It might be with paying businesses, that might even be tools for businesses to promote, I don't know. I'm not being articulate here because I don't actually have a really great thesis around this, but the thing to take away here is it's not going to be very soon. Okay. I think this is the perfect transition to acquisition category and this is the place to ask the question again that you asked the top of the show, which is, “Okay, what is this? $22 billion for no revenue six years later, effectively no revenue, what's going on here?”…

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