WhatsApp’s ‘no ads’ promise meets Meta’s reality

IT’S hard to think of a more extraordinary business deal than Facebook’s US$19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in February 2014. Its creators were outliers. With a lean staff of just a few dozen people, they had no marketing department, no sign on the door, and had spent zero cents from their sole investor, Sequoia Capital.

But WhatsApp had 450 million users, mostly outside the US. Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton also hated ads. They had spent a combined 20 years working at Yahoo!, bonding over their frustration with a business model that sucked up personal data to show us pop-ups.

Building ad systems was “depressing”, Koum told me in an interview in mid-2014. But not too depressing to sell their chat service to online ad magnate Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms, just a few months later. Eight of WhatsApp’s roughly 50 employees made more than US$100 million off that deal, while Koum gained a net worth of US$6.8 billion.