The 'holy sh*t' moment: Facebook's blockbuster WhatsApp acquisition one year later
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Chris Best was working at his desk late in the afternoon on Feb. 19 of last year when he saw the news: Facebook had agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. With a B. "Holy shit that's a big number," Best, cofounder and CTO of Kik, a messaging startup based in Canada, recalls thinking at that moment. "I remember there just being a general atmosphere of disbelief and excitement. It got sent around [the office] by e-mail. People were like, 'Whoa!'" SEE ALSO: The lesser-known member of Facebook's original team is ready for the spotlight A few thousand miles away in San Francisco, Jim Patterson's initial reaction bordered on disbelief. "That's gotta be a typo," says Patterson, founder of CoTap, which some dubbed a WhatsApp for enterprise. "Did someone add a digit?" "That's gotta be a typo," says Patterson, founder of CoTap, which some dubbed a WhatsApp for enterprise. "Did someone add a digit?" On the East Coast, Brooks Buffington, busy working on his new anonymous sharing startup Yik Yak, simply thought, "That sounds exorbitant." The WhatsApp deal, more than any other acquisition in recent memory, prompted a collective gasp from consumers, analysts and tech founders around the world. Facebook committed $19 billion — that number would rise to $22 billion when the deal closed in October — to a startup with just 55 employees. Put another way, Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg bet 10% of its total market cap on the mobile messaging space. It made Facebook's $1 billion Instagram deal look almost cute by comparison. Those in the industry eventually collected their jaws off the ground, but the impact of the WhatsApp deal can still be felt one year later. Investors and founders we spoke with generally characterized the blockbuster acquisition as either a watershed moment that proved once and for all the tremendous value of messaging applications, or at the very least, a large link in a chain of events that led to greater consumer and investor awareness. "It got us into the conversation in a bunch of places," Best from Kik told Mashable in a recent interview. That included countless media outlets and at least one investor. Valiant Capital Partners approached Kik's team after the WhatsApp acquisition in part because of the Facebook deal, according to those we spoke with at the startup, and would go on to lead a $38 million round of funding in Kik. Tango, another popular messaging service, confirmed raising $280 million in funding exactly one month after the WhatsApp acquisition was announced. Eric Setton, cofounder of Tango, said the funding talks had concluded before the WhatsApp news, but he believes the Facebook deal helped in other ways, including partnerships with media brands for its content discovery feature that launched several months later. "It legitimizes a lot of things," says Setton, who characterized the WhatsApp purchase as "a landmark deal" in an interview. "That acquisition, coupled with our investment, has allowed us to do amazing things ... I think that the caliber and the quality of the content partners that we were able to sign up was definitely of that quality because of the legitimacy that people now see in Tango and the messaging space in general. People feel they now need to be present."