WhatsApp is Different

Good non-anecdotal analysis by Om Malik1 on how exceptional WhatsApp is that it is worth $19 billion to Mark Zuckerberg.

Among other interesting data in the article, two interesting facts:

• WhatsApp has nearly 500M users after 4 years of founding. (It took Facebook 6 years to reach that point.)
• Monthly active users per employee at time of acquisition was 8 million users per employee, the most efficient in the market. (For example, Facebook has less than 500 thousand users per employee, and Snapchat less than 1.5 million.)

2. Om Malik is the founder of GigaOm and venture partner at True Ventures. ↩