It was a deal two years in the making, according to a source close to the situation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first called Whatsapp CEO Jan Koum in the spring of 2012.
A month after the call, the two went out for coffee in Los Altos. They went on a hike.
Despite Zuckerberg's wooing, the deal didn't happen.
But the two stayed in touch. There were dinners and a lot more hikes.
There were three reasons Zuckerberg was so fascinated with Whatsapp:-
He's confident it's going to reach 1 billion users in no time. Even with 450 million monthly active users, WhatsApp's growth rate is faster than Facebook, Instagram, Skype, or Gmail.
-
Of those 450 million monthly active users, 70% come back every day.
That's a stickiness that is unheard of. Zuckerberg is proud that
Facebook is among the stickiest ever, and only 62% of its user come back
every day.
- Zuckerberg looked at other products as popular as he expects Whatsapp to be: Tencent, Google search, YouTube, Facebook. They are all extremely valuable.
So Zuckerberg stayed on Koum.
Finally, on Feb. 9, 2014 he had Koum over for dinner at his home. He
proposed the merger. Zuckerberg said to him: Let's connect the world
together. He said that this would not be an ordinary startup acquisition
– it would be a partnership. He said he wanted to put Koum on
Facebook's board.
Koum thought about it for a couple days.
Then, last Friday — on Valentine's — Koum came over to Zuckerberg's
house. Interrupting Zuckerberg's Valentine's dinner with his wife,
Priscilla, Koum said yes, he wanted to do the deal. The two hammered out
pricing and terms over chocolate covered strawberries.
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