Y Combinator
8 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2014–2025
29:13 · 38K views · Oct 14, 2014
A Startup School SV 2014 conversation between Sequoia's Jim Goetz and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. They discuss how Sequoia pursued WhatsApp, its tiny engineering team, and how it handled growth and support.
HN mines it for WhatsApp facts, such as pricing used to slow growth, a 7-8 person backend team and late hiring of customer service.
8 comments from Hacker News
>I never got into Y Combinator but I'm now the CEO of a rapidly growing, well funded startup that actually SERVES an increasing number of YC companies This this kind of thing always feels like a bit of a victory. I never came close to being admitted to Stanford, but years ago found myself on the campus, hiring a professor as a consultant to a startup I co-founded. As we walked around the campus and then sat in his office, this far-off universe of people that the Stanford admissions committee had long-ago decided were smarter and more capable than I was suddenly seemed far less so. I was already doing what many of the students, and even many professors, aspired to do. A rejection from YC, Stanford, or any other exclusive club with limited space isn't necessarily an indictment of your abilities. In the case of a startup, launch your product and let the market tell you how valuable you are. Remarkable products will quickly spread, and investors will line up to write you checks. You can have VC partners worth hundreds of millions of dollars literally walking the streets [1] to find you, too. [1] this video
Here is Jan Koum, at Startup School SV 2014 [0]: "... our iPhone app was paid and our other platforms were free." Other platforms being Nokia and Blackberry. He further explained that it may sound somewhat counter-intuitive: the reason why they made the app paid for some users was to slow their growth (similar to Facebook's college-only focus) so they could properly build out infrastructure and improve on the user-experience [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Sorry for the harsh words, but this looks like a solution looking for a problem. Any CEO of a company that's lucky enough to have customers contacting them would spend a not trivial amount of their time reading and replying to the contacts. For example, Jan Koum, Whatsapp founder said that they only started hiring dedicated customer service staff when they reach 150M users [0]. [0] this video
> ... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter ... Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0]. On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee. [0] this video
Jan Koum on Twitter when their app crossed 1 billion users on the Google Play Store[0]. Not sure what their current team size is, but it seems like it's around 40-50. Last year at Startup School, Jan said the backend team 7-8 people on the backend[1]. [0] - [LINK] [1] - this video