Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
34 published records
01 / commitment
“Now, I will update WhatsApp so that every time you change your status, it’ll just broadcast the away message out to everyone.”
02 / belief
“Now, of course this is accounting treatment and anybody who's worked in investment banking or certainly accounting knows good will is it’s just where your stuff, it’s a plug, but I think you're right, this is illustrative.”
03 / belief
“There really were two core use cases of BlackBerry and I think people forget this.”
04 / belief
“One, in talking to a bunch of friends at Facebook and former Facebook friends, and thinking about this episode, one thing that is a core competency and I think from my understanding, really viewed as a core competency within Facebook is extremely robust competitive intelligence.”
05 / belief
“I think that's an interesting point for us to consider in grading, a lot of execution risk ahead for WhatsApp, but they were the only player out there that had the scale to really be a global threat.”
06 / belief
“I think the moral of the story is podcasts are the next platform for the Internet.”
07 / belief
“I think AIM was demoed on stage as this is a really good way to use notifications to send messages to people.”
08 / belief
“” What facebook was giving up here (and we’ll talk about this in the grading) I don’t think you should think about is the cash value, I think you should think about as the percentage of their equity value, which is about 10%.”
09 / belief
“David, if I sent you a message on what's up right now, Facebook would have it in their server logs, I believe.”
10 / belief
“” There was a cockiness that permeated (I think) the development organization of that company early on.”
11 / belief
“To get into some of the nitty-gritty of that, they actually then, WhatsApp later implemented the signal protocol which is I believe also end-to-end encryption.”
12 / belief
“I think you're probably right, but Jan and Brian got this question all the time, and their answer that they came up with was, “No, no, no we're actually helping carriers because we're encouraging people to adopt smartphones and move over to data plans which data plans are more expensive than text plans.”
13 / commitment
“We’ll do most of the deal in stock and you’re going to become a very large shareholder in Facebook, Jan, you personally, and we will make you a board member of Facebook.”
14 / commitment
“We are going to start in the mid-1970s, in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, in a little village just outside Kiev, where a boy named Jan Koum is born to a Jewish family in 1976, in this village, in the then Soviet Union, and this is a pretty not great time to be all of those things.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don't know, but if your final resting face is at Verizon, it's irrelevant where your final market cap was.”
16 / observation
“Alright, so listeners, this is where we analyze what did this acquisition enabled them to do, them being Facebook and what plays or what tactics did WhatsApp and Facebook used along the way to become this behemoth that it's become.”
17 / belief
“The second thing that I want to say is, I would love to quote for you how Facebook broke this down when they reported the acquisition to their investors, which I think is really illustrative of their thinking at the time.”
18 / belief
“I don't need to paint the picture to our listeners that the most successful company to ever be on the Internet and monetize attention is Facebook. I think there's this incredible book ending of the story there.”
19 / belief
“There's a thing, though, that was going on at Facebook at that time, that I think a lot of people forget about, not that the company is benevolent now, but whereas Google was hiring a lot of the smartest people who were academic and obsessed with.”
20 / belief
“Brian was born in Michigan in 1972. I believe his parents may have divorced when he was quite young.”
21 / belief
“I think at this point, G Chat I don’t think was totally dead, but Hangouts, they were trying to double down on.”
22 / belief
“I'm working on the shoe deal. If Kanye can have a shoe deal, I think Acquired can have a shoe deal.”
23 / uncertainty
“Would they have figured out some of these business models that we talked about along the way, independently? I don't know.”
24 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if this was something that because the deal came together so quickly, Facebook didn’t think hard enough about this, or they agree to do it and thought, “Whatever, we’ll just do it anyway.”
25 / prediction
“’” I think that’s so powerful in terms of what that sets up for a relationship between a founder and venture capitalist, but also clearly that was so important to Jan and Brian all throughout everything and foreshadows what’s about to come with Facebook here.”
26 / evaluation
“I remember this being the stupidest thing because you would pay for (I think) an extra $10 a month to get unlimited SMS.”
27 / observation
“Yup, yup. Now a very different business as we will get into. But, some cracks start to form.”
28 / evaluation
“25 million because it was over the total amount of capital they had raised altogether, including the $250 million seed round.”
29 / prediction
“Certainly, if he's willing to pay $22 billion for WhatsApp, he certainly could have had Snapchat for $22 billion, I suspect.”
30 / evaluation
“It's funny, in his post, when I saw this at the time and I remember this, I thought, “Oh man, Jan is just trolling Facebook,” because his post reads that he's going to go, “Take some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate Frisbee.”
31 / recommendation
“My carve out is a product category that I'm going to recommend because I don't know the brand, but I recently went to the eye doctor, I wear contacts.”
32 / evaluation
“because in a lot of ways—we haven't really covered it enough on this show yet—it was the first successful Internet company.”
33 / evaluation
“The what would have happened otherwise way to think about this is, they could have been independent and they could have evolved to do their own social network or to your point earlier, Google could’ve bought them and that would have been catastrophic, because I think Google would've been the only formidable ones as you mention who could have paid up, but then also who would have executed attention-grabbing strategy there.”
34 / prediction
“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.”