
You know what’s cool? Turning down twenty billion dollars - flying_whale
https://m.signalvnoise.com/you-know-whats-cool-turning-down-twenty-billion-dollars-bbdc2ea63ae5
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beamatronic
“The bastion of hope that was WhatsApp is gone.“

There’s no technical barrier to building the same thing from scratch....

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goombastic
Users. The critical mass of users that's required for this to happen comes
once in a rare while.

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mesozoic
Dude knew what would happen when he took the billions of dollars. Pretty much
everyone who's forced to work in the rat race will take the deal. It's so
stupid for rich people to speculate on what entrepreneurs who are scraping by
should do ethically.

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Jyaif
Brian Acton turned down way more than this guy ever made, so I say he is
already pretty cool.

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RickS
It sounds like you missed the point of the article.

You can't take the ink out of the water, once it's in. When you sell your
autonomy over a product whose properties give your life meaning, you pour the
ink. Even more painful if that product then turns around and comes to
represent values opposite yours.

Short of a buyback, which in this case is off the table, there's no sum that
rectifies the regret of lost opportunity and the turning of the thing you
built against you.

It's a hair callous DHH to be so direct about it, but as an observation, it
seems sound – Acton appears to be a distraught billionaire when he might have
been a sound-sleeping millionaire.

Perhaps that's not a trade worth making.

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swingline-747
On the plus-side, that money has bought him the _choice_ to build whatever,
whenever, almost never having to beg for financing ever again and the _choice_
to not sell.

DHH often talks like bootstrapping and not selling is The One True Way™ but,
financing trades equity for time: accelerating traction or traction-ability
that can beat someone else to market (T2M). It's a slower path, but it's not
rushed either. Pluses and minuses to both, and it depend on the category and
circumstances

