Steve Moran
I help Central Government and CNI centralise, manage and report on their mandated CAF Assessments with our PionenAssure tool. I am also a recruiter by trade with nearly 30 years experience.
I read an article this morning on the messaging platform “Whats App” and it stopped me in my tracks and made me quote some of the figures to the guys on the team, most of the responses were “no-way.. really?”
The rags to riches story of one of the founders is interesting in its own right, but the main thing that caught my eye was a company established in 2009, with only 55 employees sold for 19 billion dollars! This blows me away every single time I read the sentence.
It raises all sorts of questions like how, why, who valued this company? Is it right, wrong? All valid debates for another day.
It is taking all my mental strength to comprehend the basic ratios. I did know that it had been sold to Facebook for a princely sum last year, I also knew that it was a relatively young company, it's not the sale price that gets me it's the ratio of staff numbers.
Sale price : The age of the company : The number of employees
$19bn for a 5 year old firm with 55 staff – this is unbelievable, if it were not fact.
Here are a few more astonishing facts about this extra-ordinary company.
- In Numbers – WhatsApp boasts of 48 million monthly users, 72% of whom use it every day. There are 19 billion messages sent and 34 billion received via WhatsApp each day, in addition to 600 million photos and 100 million video messages.
- WhatsApp has reached its 450 million active users base faster than any other company in history. Whatsapp's monthly user base tops even that of Facebook (145 million), Gmail (123 million), Twitter (54 million) and Skype (52 million). In fact, its messaging volume is approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume.
- Both founders were interviewed and rejected for jobs at Facebook and Twitter.
- The company mantra is “No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” To keep them solely focused on building a pure messaging experience.
- Whatsapp had not spent a single penny on marketing, PR and user acquisition, all word of mouth – check out the uptake on the graph pictured
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Not a bad return on 5 years work guys - fair play to you. I am sure this will mean a lot coming from me.
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9 年Oui john gérant zouki
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Senior AWS DATA ENGINEER
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bleu Restaurant Gérant assistant Current Bleu Education Explotaution
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Sina macht sichtbar
9 年Facebook had to buy WhatsApp at any price. They where to much of a threat. Few weeks before the deal I just thought to myself: "Oh cool, soon I will not need Facebook anymore to stay in contact with everyone..." Well, so much for that....I switched to Telegram. Still I am very impressed by the success of WhatsApp.