WhatsApp Co-Founder's Reaction to Snapchat: 'I Don't Give a Sh-t About This' Competition gets us fired up -- sometimes with entertaining results.
By Jason Fell
Ah, competition. It inspires us to work harder, to develop new tools and features that customers will drool over -- not to mention give you a leg up on the guy who's trying to steal those customers from you.
Competition also gets us fired up. Sometimes with entertaining results.
Like many of us, I've been reading all the "inside stories" on the founders of WhatsApp, the mobile messaging company that was just acquired by Facebook for an astounding $19 billion in cash and stock. A passage in one of those stories gave me a good laugh.
In a feature in Wired magazine, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton goes off about Snapchat, another messaging service that Facebook tried to buy. Oh, right, you might recall that Facebook offered $3 billion to buy Snapchat last November, but was turned down.
Related: This Is the 23-Year-Old Entrepreneur Who Just Turned Down $3 Billion From Facebook
"I don't give a shit about this," Acton told Wired when asked about Snapchat. But that's not all he had to say. Here's the excerpt from that article. It's worth a read (and a chuckle):
"It's not 100 percent clear to me what's working about Snapchat," Brian Acton says. "Great, teenagers can use it to get laid all day long. I don't care. I'm 42, essentially married with a kid. I don't give a shit about this. I'm not sexting with random strangers. I send the 'I love you's in text. She's sending me photos of our baby. These are memories. It's not clear to me that being goofy with Snapchat necessarily creates that level of intimacy. Clearly [Snapchat cofounder] Evan Spiegel only has his pulse on one part of the world. We have a whole wall of stories about people who got to know each other long distance and eventually got married. You're not going to do this over Snapchat. And people want chat histories. They're a permanent testimony of a relationship."
Related: Facebook Buys WhatsApp in Whopping $19 Billion Deal
