WhatsApp, a popular app has been acquired by Facebook for an insane $16 Billion dollars in combined stock and cash, along with as much as an extra $3 Billion in restricted stock units for the WhatsApp founders.
According to sources, the cash part is $4 billion dollars!
The story gets even more interesting, as WhatsApp was launched in the middle of 2009, after founder Brian Acton, a software engineer, could not land a job with either Twitter or Facebook, despite years of experience at Apple and Yahoo.
WhatsApp?!
Instead, he launched his own company, and with Ukrainian Jan Koum they rolled out WhatsApp on a domain they bought from a Dutch domainer.
We aren’t sure how much they could have spent on WhatsApp.com, definitely no more than four figures; according to data from DomainTools, the domain was registered in 2008 by Leroy de Rouwe, a web specialist from Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
While the domain itself meant nothing without the subsequent creation of the chat app, it shows how one does not have to spend a lot of money on a domain in order to roll out a successful business.
This post is 100% true!
i bet they still won’t buy the new gTLD – whats.app
Brian Acton has some serious entrepreneur skills!……Well done!…..It doesn’t get much bigger than that………
Anunt – It will all depend on Facebook’s strategy on the matter. They are the new boss.
WhatsApp is one catchy brandable!