When I did the startup that was bought by Amazon, I said, "Leave us on our own. We're smart and independent enough to be able to do good work that will inject things from the side into your other organization." The thing that Jeff Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization and others through ours.

Koum and Acton had already raised $250,000 in seed funding from a few ex-Yahoo employees, but they saw VC funding as a bailout. Still, Goetz was persistent. He assured the founders that he would act as a strategic advisor, helping them turn WhatsApp into the powerhouse he knew it could be. Eventually, Koum and Acton agreed to take $8 million from S

spectrum, from a guy in a garage, to a startup with five or six employees, to a twenty-five-to-three-hundred-person

You can do big things with small teams, but it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to do small things with big teams.