
Things that cost more than Space Exploration: WhatsApp. - DanielleMolloy
http://costsmorethanspace.tumblr.com/post/77364014273/what-costs-more-than-space-exploration-whatsapp
======
ajays
This post is next in the sequence of HN posts after a large exit: comparison
with NASA's budget, cost of trip to Mars, etc.

Typical sequence:

    
    
       - news of the large exit, submitted repeatedly
       - hastily written blogs about why it doesn't make sense
       - hastily written blogs about why it makes sense
       - cute stories about the company's past: founder(s) living on Ramen, etc.
       - comparisons with NASA's budget, Mars exploration budget, Gates Foundation budget, etc.
       - and finally, breathless "news" about the slightest change in the acquiree's ToS or some such silly news

~~~
adharmad
Also: What technology stack did the startup use to scale.

~~~
RafiqM
Well, that might be genuinely interesting and useful :)

------
taspeotis
For (what I feel is) a more useful figure, let's look at NASA:

> Annual budget ... when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the
> figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion per year over its
> fifty-year history. [1]

So WhatsApp is like 1.2 years worth of NASA.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)

~~~
agentultra
I thought the article and the whole blog to be a rather fun and cheeky
counter-point to the argument that space exploration is too expensive.

As a total of US budget, NASA's expenses represented less than one half of one
percent in 2012.

We've spent more money on things other than space exploration that, depending
on who you ask, has far less social value.

~~~
maxerickson
It's possible to coherently argue against multiple types of spending.

Given the vagaries of Congress, arguing against any spending you don't like is
probably even a more sensible strategy than arguing first against the ones you
like the least.

------
tokenadult
On the other hand, considering that the surface of the moon has already been
visited by space probes carrying instruments and by manned spacecraft, while
many billions of possible combinations of human beings having conversations
here on earth have never happened, there is probably a lot more undiscovered
return on investment to be had from investing in WhatsApp than from investing
in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. Both are arguably good things to spend money on,
but investment flows sometimes attempt to follow where the big returns are
likely to be.

~~~
kordless
Short term gains for centralized pools of power != long term gains for
humanity. They are going to mine the data in WhatsApp so they can optimize the
way they sell to you.

What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power. We're going to need it
for all the advertising servers.

~~~
benihana
> _What we need to be doing is mining the Moon for power_

This meme of we should mine Helium-3 from the moon needs to die already. This
kind of thinking is so backwards it's astounding to me that anyone can come up
with it. Why would we mine the moon for power that we can't yet use? No one is
going to go to the moon to energy for a fuel source that _might_ be in use in
the future. It's like spending billions marketing to people in sub-saharan
Africa before you have a product designed, much less built.

~~~
sentenza
We'll need to tap the Moon-He3 when we want to fuel manned interstellar
missions. So probably not this year.

------
blakeeb
Software Engineer at SpaceX here. Exits like WhatsApp not only cost more than
space exploration, but also make recruiting much more difficult for many
companies.

Our best engineers are very entrepreneurial. They don't hesitate to tackle
massive challenges, often without even being asked. When a large exit occurs,
it's an unfortunate siren call: "you could be making billions, writing way
less complicated code."

Why am I taking a salary somewhere when some guy just made billions in four
years? Did he have to worry about loss of human life if his code failed?

I make my own internal siren shut up by being a complete space geek, but
rockets are not always as intriguing to prime candidates in the recruiting
pipeline.

It's time for a reality check.

How many people actually exit with this level of success? Why is enabling our
species to be interplanetary often a harder sell than the prospect of trading
years of your life for a small chance that you might exit with a few billion
dollars?

Greed. It's terrifying how much it prevails in our startup culture.

The size of one's exit is far less important than the impact of one's
technology on the world.

Hack things that make the world better (or other worlds). If riches come as a
result, great, but our startup culture's emphasis on valuation over innovation
is, in my opinion, our achilles' heel.

(My views are completely personal opinions and do not reflect the views of the
company. I love our startup culture and am proud to be a part of it, but I'm
convinced that when I look back I will clearly view the code I've written here
to be way more important for humanity's progress than the code I've written
for entrepreneurs' selfish attempts at billion dollar exits)

------
loneranger_11x
I am not sure why people are so dissed at the cost of WhatsApp acquisition.
There is a significant value to whatsapps huge network. You know what else
cost almost as much as NASA's entire budget last year - Bonus paid to
GoldmanSachs' employees

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/goldman-sachs-pay-bonuses-
hit-12-61...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/goldman-sachs-pay-bonuses-
hit-12-61bn-2013-1432575)

~~~
hnnewguy
> _Bonus paid to GoldmanSachs ' employees_

Goldman Sachs has over 30,000 employees and earns over $8BB in _profit_ a
year. That's _real_ money in the pockets of stakeholders.

But, as seems to be common on HN, I'll bet you think bankers are scum and the
people at WhatsApp are doing yeoman's work, selling ads and handing data over
to spying agencies.

~~~
vikp
The interesting part (for me at least), and the real reason that you guys are
having a debate at all, is because our notion of value is so far abstracted
from human necessities these days that its hard to put a finger on what value
is.

There are a few things that we inarguably need -- food, shelter, water, and so
on. See the bottom two tiers of Maslow's pyramid:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs)
.

It's the middle tier and above when things start to get fuzzy and hard to
define. When most people globally were engaged in work towards the bottom, it
was easy to understand the value that was being added (I grow food! I help
myself and others survive!).

Now, when most people (at least in developed countries) are doing things
towards the top of the pyramid or off of the pyramid entirely, its harder to
define value. Money is one proxy (which you are using), but its probably a
poor one. I would love to see better ones.

------
ig1
Flagged because the comparison of asset cost to operational cost is
nonsensical.

It's like telling someone buying a million dollar apartment "but you could
rent a mansion for a million dollars/year instead".

~~~
stackcollision
The OP is not necessarily talking about operation cost here. For the cost of
what Facebook paid for WhatsApp I could launch 4.6 million kilograms into
orbit on a Falcon 9, which is essentially the cost of lifting the ISS. When
you're talking about space, the cost of launching should be included in your
asset cost, because otherwise you're million dollar satellite is worthless.

~~~
rwmj
Facebook didn't pay it all in cash. They paid much of it in (soon to be)
worthless Facebook stock.

And this is the problem with the comparison. To fund a space mission, Facebook
would have had to either try to realize the value through another huge stock
sale, or it would have to use up its cash reserves. The first option is
essentially impossible. The second would lead to massive lawsuits as well as
having a very uncertain outcome (you think a bunch of web designers could
really build a rocket?)

~~~
Tloewald
Thanks for making this point. Buying a company with stock doesn't actually
result in someone spending something to get something, it merely merges two
companies and assigns ownership of the combined entity.

------
goatforce5
The value to Facebook of WhatsApp is greater than them funding NASA for a year
and a bit.

Similarly, I could probably feed a starving kid in a third world country for a
day or two for $4, but instead i'm going to go buy a latte, because apparently
that has a greater reward for me personally...

Now I feel like a jerk. Thanks Zuckerberg!

------
SapphireSun
For what it's worth, the fact that WhatsApp is enabling advanced
communications in poor countries for free probably liberates a vast untapped
quantity of human capital. That's a much clearer value proposition than a lot
of other startups (e.g. Twitter, which merely eases connection rather than
making it possible for cash strapped people).

That said, I'd be a fan if Silicon Valley's venture capital got really into
making escape velocity affordable for the average Joe....

~~~
rwmj
WhatsApp is basically email, and we've had email for a while.

~~~
shawabawa3
And mars is basically the earth, and we already know almost everything about
the earth

~~~
Fomite
> we already know almost everything about the earth

Not even close.

------
melling
Well, this article is a complete waste of time, and it's #1 on HN, of course.
What the hell, geeks can't help themselves. Seriously, people need to quit
whining about stuff like this, accept it, and figure out how to solve whatever
problem they'd like to see solved. The US economy is almost $17 trillion.
Together, we're freak'in rich.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States)

People will fund comic books, video games, etc on KickStarter. I think that
market is approaching $1 billion. Perhaps, there's another multi-billion
market for a private "space program", medical research, or whatever. Create
more X-Prizes ([http://www.xprize.org](http://www.xprize.org)). They create a
lot of value for the investment. You only pay the winner but you get effort
all the participants.

~~~
coldtea
> _The US economy is almost $17 trillion. Together, we 're freak'in rich._

Well, if you ignore that fact that the vast majority of those $17 belong to
astoninglishly few people.

In that sense, then yes, Warren Buffet and some family living in a shack in
Mississippi are rich together.

~~~
melling
Yes, we can ignore that fact. That was a given, right? There's plenty of money
in the US economy that can be funneled into other projects. If there wasn't,
KickStarter wouldn't exist, correct?

~~~
coldtea
Kickstarter's existance just means that there is a number of people that can
give $10 or $100 for a project they like.

I don't see how to go from there to the assumption that's plenty of money for
all kinds of projects.

Most Kickstarter campaigns are quite small in requested budget for example.
Space exploration, not so much.

~~~
melling
Nowhere did I say that the solution was to exactly imitate KickStarter, or
even imitate KickStarter to any degree. The solution is left for someone to do
some creative thinking, and a lot of work.

I'm sure someone like you can give a million reasons why an electric car
company won't work. It's up to that one in a billion person to solve the
problem. In the meantime, I get tired of people complaining about why we
should solve that problem. Oh... wait...

------
welshrats
Everyone is talking about the value of WhatsApp's social network to
advertisers, but I thought one of the key points of WhatsApp was that it was a
paid service and they collect no data on you specifically because they aren't
interested in selling ads. [[http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-
we-dont-sell-...](http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-
ads/)] Should people who bought into the idea that they were not the product
be looking for a new paid WhatsApp like product?

~~~
TeMPOraL
But don't they _have to_ collect the data about you because law? (to use the
newly allowed English construct ;)).

Also, in the blog post they didn't explicitly stated that they don't collect
data; they wrote that they just don't care about it much when thinking about
product development.

------
mallamanis
Comparing WhatsApp to space exploration is unfair. Arguably both of them are
equally useful/useless (depends on who you ask). But what about if all (or
even half) that money had been spent to (i.e.) cancer research or something
that would radically improve people's lives? I think that's the "utility
trade-off" question one should ask...

------
t1m
The population of Kenya is almost 50 million people.

It's GNP is $19.9B.

The population of WhatsApp is 50 employees!

~~~
shmed
To be fair, GNP is an annual value, while Whatsapp's valuation include it's
whole value, including potential future annual revenues.

------
jneal
I can't help but think we're stuck in the middle of another .com bubble

~~~
antocv
If its stuck its not a bubble, its supposed to inflate

~~~
shmed
He said "we" are stuck, not the bubble is stuck.

------
hartator
I guess when people are saying that space operation costs a lot of money, they
are referring to state program like NASA not google lunar...

------
stefantalpalaru
You can't pay for space exploration with dotcom bubble stock.

------
mw67
Whatsapp is certainly more useful to humanity than space exploration.

~~~
S4M
Are you being sarcastic?

~~~
mw67
No, I truly believe that having a way for everyone to communicate for free,
privately, and anywhere is just so great. This level of communication enables
so many possibilities for people that couldn't been done so simply oterhwise.
I live in Hong Kong and do not know a single person not using whatsapp. It
helps everyone. Although I'm a huge fan of space exploration as well, I still
think letting people to communicate easily is more valuable for our day to day
lives.

~~~
S4M
Oh OK, I see what you mean now. > No, I truly believe that having a way for
everyone to communicate for free, privately, and anywhere is just so great.

I agree with that, but whatsapp isn't a new way of communicating - in the
sense that it's not a new protocol like the phone or internet. While it's
convenient it's not revolutionary and I am sure that Hong Kongers would be
using something else.

Also you don't know what space exploration could bring yo your everyday life
(probably we could build new stuff from materials not available on Earth or
that are very rare...).

~~~
mw67
You're absolutely right on both points :)

