Just because WhatsApp will “operate independently” doesn’t mean Facebook won’t put its 6,000-employee muscle behind its new acquisition.
We’ve heard a lot about how WhatsApp will save Facebook from losing the
international messaging war, but sources close to the parent company
tell me it actually did a lot to help Instagram. Here are the ways you
can expect it to do the same for WhatsApp.
Engineering
Instagram CTO Mike Krieger apparently wasn’t sleeping much in months
before his company was bought by Facebook. In two years, Instagram had
grown to 27 million registered iOS users before launching on Android
where it picked up 1 million more in the first 24 hours.
Krieger was known to spend late nights fighting server fires to keep
Instagram from going down like the Hindenburg. With just a dozen total
employees, he didn’t have much help.
After
the acquisition, Krieger could suddenly call on Facebook’s massive,
world-class engineering team for help or guidance. When I saw him a few
months after the deal, he’d regained his youthful glow and looked like
he’d been sleeping more. Now imagine what life’s been like for WhatsApp
co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton. I’m gonna go on a hunch and say
“stressed”.
Over the past few months their service grew to serve 450 million users with just 32 engineers, each one supporting 14 million people. In Forbes’ profile of Koum, Parmy Olson writes
that during his often-missed kickboxing class “Every few minutes Koum
sits down for a break, slipping the gloves off and checking for messages
from Acton about WhatsApp’s servers.” Well lucky for them, the cavalry
has arrived.
WhatsApp will be able to draw on Facebook’s engineering know-how and
team if their code breaks or servers stumble. That could help prevent
outages and make WhatsApp work even faster, even if it doesn’t get
slapped with a Facebook logo or any other design changes.
Recruiting
At over 6,000 employees and rapidly growing, Facebook knows a lot about recruiting. It’s far from perfect, considering Facebook rejected Koum and Acton
when the two applied to work there around 2008, and it’s seen some
brain drain since the IPO. Still, the company has feelers out around the
world looking for top talent.Facebook can now pitch potential recruits a
spot at WhatsApp. Sure, the upside potential is diminished now it’s
already been acquired, but Facebook’s HR team can tempt people with the
chance to work on an app serving almost a half a billion people.