<story><title>Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-message-to-whatsapp-make-money-1533139325</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>storgendibal</author><text>Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy&amp;#x2F;squishy&amp;#x2F;learnable.&lt;p&gt;During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, and can make or break a company. Corporate planning from a cost &amp;#x2F; revenue perspective is super critical. Steering a large organization and navigating personalities and power structures in such a company is difficult and squishy.&lt;p&gt;Certainly, some MBAs are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;ve also run into plenty of engineers who are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to stereotype. When I first started business school I thought everyone would be the stereotypical investment banking jerk. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that most people were fun, &lt;i&gt;very sharp&lt;/i&gt;, pleasant, intellectually curious, and they really respected folks with a technical background. Exposure to them broadened my own worldview in a number of different ways. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to run a company. But you also don&amp;#x27;t need a CS degree from MIT to be an awesome engineer.</text></item><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that&amp;#x27;s nothing to sneeze at. It doesn&amp;#x27;t cost them $100M a month to provide the service.&lt;p&gt;I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>volgo</author><text>Just because it&amp;#x27;s hard, and the people running them are sharp and smart, doesn&amp;#x27;t make it any more righteous or normal.&lt;p&gt;Back in the Colonial times, sharp smart lads went to prestigious military schools and learned the complexities of how to subjugate conquered people. How to efficiently run a slave camp. How to squeeze every unit of labor off the peasants, etc. People went to these schools were probably very cultured, polite, and were funny and pleasant at social events. But history will judge them harshly&lt;p&gt;Would not be surprised if the same thing happened to MBAs when the tide of history turns in a few centuries. Maybe squeezing profit off of people will no longer be ethical or acceptable, even if your model is complex and intellectual</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-message-to-whatsapp-make-money-1533139325</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>storgendibal</author><text>Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy&amp;#x2F;squishy&amp;#x2F;learnable.&lt;p&gt;During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, and can make or break a company. Corporate planning from a cost &amp;#x2F; revenue perspective is super critical. Steering a large organization and navigating personalities and power structures in such a company is difficult and squishy.&lt;p&gt;Certainly, some MBAs are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;ve also run into plenty of engineers who are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to stereotype. When I first started business school I thought everyone would be the stereotypical investment banking jerk. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that most people were fun, &lt;i&gt;very sharp&lt;/i&gt;, pleasant, intellectually curious, and they really respected folks with a technical background. Exposure to them broadened my own worldview in a number of different ways. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to run a company. But you also don&amp;#x27;t need a CS degree from MIT to be an awesome engineer.</text></item><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that&amp;#x27;s nothing to sneeze at. It doesn&amp;#x27;t cost them $100M a month to provide the service.&lt;p&gt;I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>secfirstmd</author><text>Personally I just wish less of our world class minds were working at huge, de facto advertising companies thinking about how to monetise&amp;#x2F;track the flow of information, sneak an microsecond advantage on the stock market etc and more were solving more important stuff like climate change, disease and democracy&amp;#x2F;human rights being under retreat.&lt;p&gt;Lets be honest here, Whatsapp gathered hundreds of millions of users with a tiny team. Signal and Signal protocol made Whatsapp secure with less than 10 people on the team full time. So less than a hundred staff, 1.5 billion per year is more than enough resources to add get most of the benefits of Whatsapp to humanity. Leaving plenty of engineers, MBAs and who ever is left to go do more useful stuff.</text></comment>