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.
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.