The WSJ reports,"WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton spoke Wednesday night to a small crowd of mostly Stanford students about founding the mobile messaging service and the company’s $19 billion deal with Facebook.
Acton, who attended Stanford in the late ’90s, said the wide-ranging forum was his first speaking engagement. The event was sponsored by StartX, a Stanford-affiliated incubator for startups.
Acton took pains to emphasize WhatsApp’s independence from Facebook. He said the company’s motto was “no ads, no games, no gimmicks,” and that he planned to keep things that way.
The goal, he said, was to maintain the simplicity and ease of use of the WhatsApp platform. At one point, though, his vision for WhatsApp sounded similar to that of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who routinely says his aim is to connect everyone in the world. “It’s the best if everyone in the world could talk to each other,” Acton said.
After the acquisition was announced in February, privacy advocates voiced concerns over Facebook gaining access to information about WhatsApp users. Acton described the relationship between Facebook’s Messenger app and WhatsApp, as well as between the two companies’ policies on user data, as “separate but equal.”
He didn’t go into detail about how the two platforms would work together but compared the situation to an insurance provider who has a person’s phone number, but doesn’t merge that data with their Facebook identity.
Acton said that long-term questions of “how we generate revenue” still needed to be resolved, as well as questions of “interoperability” between the two platforms.
To grow WhatsApp, which has roughly 450 million users — many in developing countries — Acton said that he and co-founder Jan Koum studied differing communications styles across regions. “You learn a lot about how people in the world talk to each other,” he said.
For example, the two made the app free in India because people there aren’t accustomed to making payments over the phone or through credit cards. In the Middle East, people tend to broadcast messages to groups, he said, so he’s been studying how people communicate during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.
Acton said WhatsApp could have done a better job growing its user base in Japan and Taiwan with more focus and concentration, he said.
“I think we can build a substantial amount of revenue for Facebook,” he said. The business model wouldn’t be based on advertising, he said, but didn’t comment further".
