WhatsApp

“We have two different channels, so one is Slack for work, and one is WhatsApp for private communication, so our life, and we never mix them”

“I invested years ago in a company called Gorgias, which is a little over a hundred million, which used to be So e-commerce support. Now it's an AICX, right? And they launched their agent in WhatsApp that anybody can uses and text, and it's already double digit…”

“My take is actually it's why you buy Meta today, because you've got the most clear, unwavering PMF for this product. And Zuck is the one who owns the core distribution channel, and Zuck has been working on this product.”

“When I was at Meta on the WhatsApp side, we had that problem. The WhatsApp app for whatever reason is built in a way where you can, I don't know, maybe this is common. I don't know enough about mobile apps, but it's built in a way where you can break it down a…”

“They're going to have a personal assistant that's going to come in WhatsApp. I don't know if they're launching it in a day or in three months, but it's coming.”

“Zuck also just paid essentially nine hundred million dollars to hire a head for WhatsApp, right? By investing nine hundred million dollars into cred, right?”

“So I think S tier would be Slack. And then Discord, Teams, and then goes like Telegram, and then WhatsApp. They're very, very limited in what you can do, and it's hard, like, you have to have your own phone number if you want, like, a decent experience.”

“They call themselves end to end encrypted, but the reality is if you have the private key, if you have the encryption key inside WhatsApp server, What's the point of calling it end-to-end encrypted? Because you need to send the message from your phone to them,…”

“Applications that were used to spy on journalists like Khashoggi, and it was done through WhatsApp.”

“I think to me what will happen is the analytics are going to get so much better. And these systems are going to know and they're going to be able to look at your, WhatsApp, and your messages, and your emails, and all of your calls, and they're going to be able…”

“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…”

“I don't think it is a unique enough of a product that can't be disrupted, or I will make the switch from a WhatsApp to another chatting service, given a very small incentive. I think the reasons for Indians to use WhatsApp might go away when the world becomes …”

“So I don't really believe in the mission control stuff or multi-agent. I just have Larry as the one agent that I text through WhatsApp and we just message like you would an employee.”

“And our customers were recovering about 20% of their abandoned carts.”

“So it was a subscription model, but it also had a Variable component, which is each message so WhatsApp, the cost of each message Meta has cost for the type of message, which for, if I'm not mistaken, for GoRecover, it was a marketing message, but it also depe…”

“And so SMS in Mexico Mexico, Latin America is not very strong. WhatsApp is definitely the go-to.”

“Last year we actually had run some experience. Experiments. We were running pie with WhatsApp. So that's groups of people and individuals, right?”

“When we fundraise, we raise from very rich individuals, we raise from, you know, institutions, and I would, in between sets in the gym, walk around in my two-minute breaks, and I would message individuals, this was, and say, hey, I'm going out to raise the new…”

“What people don't see is the 10 years of relationship building before that, but the most important lesson from that, actually, is I always want people off email. Get people off email. People want to work with people who they like”

“And then I didn't realize WhatsApp charges an arm and a leg per conversation window. Then my costs would like balloon to like, 15 K a month.”

“Meta said Saturday it would cut off access to non-meta chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year.”

“Once you get a service as widespread as Instagram or as widespread as Facebook or WhatsApp, it's hard to introduce a new behavior there. You know, we did it with stories. I think they've since done it with reels but it's almost like one, you get one per genera…”

“Oh, the WhatsApp one's really good... It's the most successful integration we've got.”

“WhatsApp didn't win because it had Stickers or stories or dark mode. In fact, I don't even think it had all of those things when it won. It won on a few premises because one was the phone book. Like you knew that when you use WhatsApp, you could reach every si…”

“So we've always had this tendency to run relatively lean. So it is a small team that is running chat GPT. I take inspiration from WhatsApp where like, you know, it was a very small team running a very global scope product.”

“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 …”

“No AI product has within app network effect. Like it's not like WhatsApp where if you build a WhatsApp rival, Meta has a definitely like a questionable brand, right? Like people don't necessarily trust Meta's products. They think like these are ad products. De…”

“This was the ill-fated Project Panama at Yahoo, which, by the way, acquired Easter Egg. That is where Jan Coom and Ryan Acton met at Yahoo, and then they would get so frustrated and leave and start 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.”

“What I would suggest to any founders is like the first hundred customers of Submagic, I took on Stripe the information. I reached out to them. I say, send me a text message, please. I will give you like a discount for the next month, but please send me a text …”

“This is like a dirty little secret that nobody talks about. You know, yes, you have your military systems that are protected and all that, But a lot of coordination is happening through WhatsApp, a lot of coordination on, and so all of a sudden you turn off th…”

“I worked for Shriram when he was at introducing, because he built out their group chat operation. They basically have dozens of chats, different verticals, different categories in WhatsApp. It's all separate chats.”

“So we just decided to hack around, work on a project, and it just started off as like a WhatsApp group where we were delivering groceries for our neighbors, because it was a nightmare to get groceries in the first wave of the pandemic.”

“I feel like they're very well positioned to keep their existing ad business strong or even, or make it even stronger in a world where AIs actually work. It's a kind of a interesting position to be in for them where their ads business is going to flourish even …”

“But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for, you know, the derivative companies akin to the, Yeah. To the Ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else.”

“As incredible as I think Zuckerberg and Meta are and the advancements they made, I have not particularly been impressed by the productization of Meta AI, right? It's basically just a search box stuck at the top of Instagram or stuck in my WhatsApp thread.”

“Most of the platforms are seeing declines in daily active users. WhatsApp is going up. Snapchat, eh, but, like, most of them are going down.”

“So, you know, one integration we have that is in beta is with WhatsApp.”

“Most future consumer LLM usage will go through existing platforms, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, iPhone, Android.”

“A hundred million plus users in the U.S. On WhatsApp. That's probably about 30, 40% of the adult population.”

“So, like, what I will tell you is you are seeing incredibly fast-growing India companies that are building WhatsApp groups for their SaaS businesses, growing much faster than their U.S. Counterparts, trying to drive everyone into a Slack channel.”

“So if you think about it, email WhatsApp, and RCS, they are transforming the one-way push channels into basically becoming two-way endpoints for conversion.”

“These days, a lot of startups, instead of Doing like email support, they're opening up shared Slack channels, Microsoft Teams channels Discord communities, WhatsApp chats, et cetera. And the biggest problem, the initial problem that we actually discovered was …”

“We're trying to build like WhatsApp for money or a global Venmo. You know, we've been building for two and a half years. It's super difficult. You know, you iterate, you keep building, and then, you know, maybe you have a moment. We had a moment last week. We …”

“You don't drive returns in venture to an institutional venture capital fund through an M&A. Like WhatsApp may be the only one that really drove a fund returning exit to a serious fund.”

“It previously was being leased by, I think, Facebook slash WhatsApp. And then immediately after that Ghost Autonomy, and then now here we are, and we also, you know, I guess one of the things that the landlord told us was this was the place that they shot all …”

“And we had a hundred and twenty five billion approximately messages sent in the app last year. That's about 50 messages Per person per day which is more than WhatsApp messaging in a given day per, per user.”

“Until you know whether your product or feature works, you don't actually need all of that. In fact, it muddies the product because it's harder for users to understand what it's for. What I learned at WhatsApp is that it didn't actually make sense to ship every…”

“So we had to spend our entire roadmap on that. We had to slow down all the other grand ideas we had. And I'll tell you, this was not always easy. We would look at other teams building the newest AI models or advanced photo filters, and we'd get a little bit je…”

“If Android put a floating action button down in the bottom right, that's where WhatsApp would put its button too. And we built the same patterns consistently throughout the app”

“Globally, it has two billion users, a hundred billion messages a day, a billion calls a day”

“WhatsApp crossed a hundred million users in the US last summer.”

“Either way, Onavo ended up being, like, a hugely important acquisition for Facebook, because it really tipped them off to WhatsApp and Snap, too.”

“WhatsApp has a hundred million now in the US, which this is sort of a big narrative violation that WhatsApp will never catch on in the US, and iMessage is dominant, and even after that it's, you know, text message. This is crazy. A hundred million people a mon…”

“I actually think WhatsApp is a garbage name. It's a garbage name because first of all, it's like when they were first starting and they were trying to get product market fit and you know, it just basically didn't pass the telephone test.”

“When Facebook bought WhatsApp, I think 99% of people in Spain had WhatsApp. It was some of the most incredible market penetration ever.”

“It's impossible for platforms to pick this up because everything is done behind the scenes, the recruiting, the payments, the editorial direction, usually in discords or in text messages or on WhatsApp signal. And it's very, very difficult to pick up.”

“It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from re…”

“I've been thinking that, like, WhatsApp actually ends in the most success in social with all of this AI stuff, because they're actually real communities.”

“So he has a thing called done. It's like a group of people that all agree. We're going to do X every day. And I forgot what X is. It might be walk a certain amount of steps, might be cold plunge, might be whatever it was. Let's assume you set the bar. And what…”