Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Nobody else. The only Facebook employee board members are Mark and Sheryl, and everyone else is outside board member. This is pretty big. It’s unclear if Facebook knew about Tencent, but they knew about Google and they really did not want Google to acquire WhatsApp. Jan says, “Okay, interesting. Thank you very much.” The next day, he and Brian go down to Google. They meet with Larry Page, they talked for an hour, have a nice conversation. Where is Google in their messaging world right now? Because Google’s launched some new form of messenger. I think it’s an annual tradition for them to launch a new messaging product. I think at this point, G Chat I don’t think was totally dead, but Hangouts, they were trying to double down on. It was before Duo and some of these newfangled blondes. You got to remember back at this time, people really felt that or at least the tech press was obsessed with writing about the mobile messaging wars. There are these deep dives on WeChat in China and WhatsApp’s crazy growth. Facebook had acquired Blue Guy, they can launch Messenger at this point. Is this the new App Store? Is messaging the new app? Now, we don’t think of Google really as a messaging company even though obviously, tons and tons of messages are exchanged on the Android all the time. They were very much still in this race for what everyone thought was going to be the next user interface paradigm. Yup, yup. And failing at it.…

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