The Ledger
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Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”
Dixon: Crypto will reinvent Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Lyft by 2030
“Hospitality, services like Airbnb, messaging, things like WhatsApp, ride sharing, services like Lyft, you know, I think all of these, I believe we'll see over the next decade, all of these things kind of reinvented.”
Jordan: Premier networks like Facebook and WhatsApp skip paid user acquisition
“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook won the smartphone and messaging wars
“The sort of, the feeling you have in mobile right now is we're kind of at the end of one wave, and we haven't got another wave coming up yet, so we've kind of had the smartphone wars, and Apple and Google both kind of won, and we've had the messaging wars, and…”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Evans: WhatsApp rivals global SMS volume with only 30 engineers
“Even more dramatically, WhatsApp is doing almost as many messages a year as an entire global SMS system, and it's doing that with just 30 engineers.”
Bhardwaj: Indian bank conducts entire lending process conversationally over WhatsApp
“I was working with a bank in India, and now given that AI is, has become reasonably reliable, they are offering entire lending over WhatsApp.”
Knott Craig: WhatsApp has permanently won the messaging market in Africa
“As soon as the smartphone kind of wave started breaking, you know, WhatsApp just won the race. It has won the race. It will win the race.”
Evans: WhatsApp processes 50% more messages than global SMS with 40 staff
“WhatsApp going to seven or eight hundred million users with a team of 30 or 40 people, and WhatsApp doing 50% more SMSs than the entire global telecom system, sort of 50% more messages than the entire global SMS system with 30 or 40 people”
Andreessen predicts WhatsApp, iPhone, and Android will reach 1 billion users
“And then like WhatsApp is going to do it, and then there's going to be a whole bunch of others. And I, you know, iPhone is going to do it, and Android is going to do it.”
Acharya: People open smartphone apps to satisfy specific emotional states
“I've always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling. You know, and I think, of course, there's some like functional set of needs, which is why you open calendar or something. But I also think that, you know, Wha…”
Hayes: Users are fleeing public feeds for private group chats
“The move from public posting to group chat is, I think, a hundred percent driven by that, right? So like, You know, more and more of all the traffic and Instagram talks about this all the time is happening in private messaging. Things are happening in private …”
Karen X Cheng Predicts AI Platform Consolidation via Startup Acquisitions
“Most companies will have different strengths, and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that, but I do imagine that some of these companies are gonna buy other companies, and then so they'll like, you know, kind of have m…”
Sinofsky: Facebook operates WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus as independent entities
“You know, between WhatsApp and Instagram, Oculus, and so on, that are run as very distinct entities, and they don't overlay some grand strategy about what's going to go where, and who's going to do what, when, and tie all the pieces together.”
Horowitz: Tesla and WhatsApp require fundamentally different employee option plans
“Tesla's option plan cannot be the same as WhatsApp's, or it probably should not be.”
Evans: WhatsApp handles 50% more volume than global SMS with 40 engineers
“WhatsApp is doing about twenty billion messages a day, and the entire global SMS system of every mobile operator on Earth is doing about twenty billion. So WhatsApp is 50% bigger than SMS with 40 engineers.”
Attar: Displaced Syrian families rely on WhatsApp groups to stay connected
“I don't know any Syrian family, including my own, that doesn't have their family WhatsApp group, because that's the only way that you can actually see each other because people don't meet each other anymore inside Syria.”