WhatsApp Founder Used Unchangable Airline Ticket To Pressure Facebook 144
McGruber writes "In a post on the Flyertalk website, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum provides another interesting detail about how he steered WhatsApp into a $16 billion deal with Facebook: 'we announced the deal with Facebook on wednesday after the market closed. during the process, we realized there was a chance we might not be able to get the deal wrapped up and signed on wednesday and it could delay. when the risk of the delay became real, i said: "if we don't get it done on wednesday, it probably wont get done. i have tickets on thursday to fly out to Barcelona which i bought with miles and they are not easily refundable or even possible to change. this has to be done by wednesday or else!!!"...and so one of the biggest deals in tech history had to be scheduled around my M&M award ticket."
Re:How cute (Score:3, Informative)
Go to http://soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] and just enjoy slashdot again.
Re:How cute (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Facebook was dumb. (Score:4, Informative)
You are mostly right, i live in Venezuela, here we only get charged for data/outgoing sms/outgoing calls. Incoming sms and calls are free, as they should. Of course, our cell plans suck, for example i only get 60 minutes a month, 300 sms and 250 MB of data.
You are wrong about whatsapp not caring for new accounts, it is widely known whatsapp 450M users have about 70% of daily use.
Here a trick for whatsapp users: don't want to pay anually? Have android? Borrow an iphone, put your simcard, buy whatsapp for 1$, put your simcard back into your android phone. Boom, you get lifetime service for 1$.
Whatsapp is good enough, its strenght isn't security or privacy, but rather its comfort. You don't need to add anyone, no pins, usernames, passwords or logging in. If you want security then use BBM.
Re:Something doesn't add up (Score:5, Informative)
Ungodly Churn, almost nobody uses WhatsApp.
Perhaps in your part of the world, but outside of the US, Whatsapp is big in some countries. As in used by practically everyone kind of big.
Re:Something doesn't add up (Score:2, Informative)
it is freaking massive in Hong Kong... I don't know anyone who doesn't have it.