I love goats. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to share how well goat attack packs have been selling?

Well I've goat to tell you, we send a lot of goats! To give you an idea, since we launched April 2015, we've sent over 2 million messages.

The point is that by addressing the non-US markets, WhatsApp helped their position everywhere -- including the US.

You only need one friend you care about using a Blackberry or Nokia for it to matter though. The long tail matters when it comes to communication.

Ah. Blackberry. I forgot that is included in the J2ME target devices. That explains nearly everything, although any of my friends who had those blackberries have transitioned since, and now people are just (well played WhatsApp) locked into the service.

I'd rather just SMS/email them. At least those are actually cross-platform, and don't depend on proprietary apps like WhatsApp.

SMSs are expensive and people just don't prioritize email like they do IMs.

The phone number as an id is a very important component to their adoption indeed. So do you posit that WhatsApp's adoption rates being what they are (compared to say Viber which does the same thing) is purely due to first mover?

yes that's my opinion.

They aren't paying for a J2ME app and the requisite testing. They are paying for the results of the network effect made possible by it.

So, the $16bn is for a massive network of end-user testers? :-)

Unless everybody switches, few will switch. Network effects also create some pretty powerful stickiness.

That's not really an option at all, at least not to your house. At the kLab we have a 15Mbps line allocated for us, but the realities of oversea (well, undersea) bandwidth purchases means we often don't really see that.

Most people not at kLab get mobile data connections that in good areas when it's working well can get downloads between 200KBs up to 1MBps (those are bytes, not bits) depending on the time of day. Up oftentimes is about the same as down. It's not heavily throttled as you see in many other countries. These data plans are also very cheap.

Really, the biggest problem here isn't so much the speed these days, it's that the connection occasionally just stops working altogether.

We'd love to have the .com, but it's not in the cards. But ya, we chose the India TLD for exactly the reason you suspect.. text it in.

As I'm sure you already know, gay rights have a long, long way to go in the region. If I were gay, it probably wouldn't be at the top of my list :(

Rwanda has a classification specifically for technology entrepreneurs. It's a 3-year visa and if you are a qualified software practitioner, I don't foresee you having difficulty getting a permit to start a software company here. They also pride themselves on same-day business registration.

https://www.migration.gov.rw/services/permits/temporary-perm...

A smart move. How common are those sort of visas in developing countries?

My main concern in this question is that I've heard of a growing concern in East Africa that foreigners are taking jobs/money out of the country instead of investing. From what I've heard, Rwanda sounds perfect, though Kenya has pretty amazing infrastructure too. Kenya is however a lot more dangerous than Rwanda sounds.

I've certainly heard some of that, but I don't think it applies quite as much to tech entrepreneurs -- and I've seen more evidence of that in say, Kenya. If you are coming here to build a software company, I would be surprised if Rwanda's arms weren't opened pretty wide.

At this point, Nairobi has more going on in it's tech scene and certainly a more mature market to sell into, but you are right, it's definitely not as safe and transparent as Kigali.

I don't know how common these sort of visas are the world over, but Chile also has a pretty innovative approach to attracting tech entrepreneurs.

http://startupchile.org/

And I assume no trouble renewing at three years, then?

I just renewed mine this week without any trouble, but of course YMMV.