I'm marginally in the IT space... Is there anything to my reaction that at least in dollar terms this is a multiple of the dollar amount of what Whatsapp was acquired back in the day, which was a large consumer facing product that I could see was quite literally taking over messaging all over the world, and this is a... platform I've never heard of?
Wiz is enterprise software aimed at and popular with large companies that need to check all the compliancy boxes, and according to sources used by >40% of the Fortune 500 companies. It's also only 5 years old, so that's a ridiculously fast growth.
Valuation multiples for a free direct to consumer messaging company are very different to a paid-for b2b cybersecurity company. It doesn't really matter whether you've heard about Wiz, the important thing is every CISO has heard of it and many of them are prepared to pay actual money for the product.
True, but the vast majority of people spend zero money on WhatsApp. I actually have no idea how I would give them money. There are no adverts, the metadata is not valuable, and no companies even use WhatsApp business, at least in the UK. Their UK revenue is basically 0, despite 100% market share.
This is an enterprise product in a space where companies spend millions of dollars.
As far as I remember they didn't ever really collect that money though. I certainly never paid it. I'm not sure they ever even implemented payment on Android.
WhatsApp purchase was for that sweet sweet data of everyone's contact lists (this was their original innovation for onboarding — just give us access to your phone book and we'll tell you who else is on WhatsApp). Their earnings were completely irrelevant in price discussions. The billions were paid for the dataset.
How do they spend insane amount of money in targeted ads and all the ads I get are useless?
I constantly get ads to learn how to code. Ok I've been doing that professionally for over a decade and I have a real degree from a real university… why would I do some online programming course?
I'm just trying to make sense of the numbers.