Pretty sure Zuck makes these decisions and doesn’t give individual apps within Meta much freedom. I recall Instagram (after being acquired) wanting to develop their app a certain way and Zuck kept giving them a hard “no” on a lot of features he thought would steal users from Facebook. Same deal with WhatsApp. I think the Founders of WhatsApp left Meta due to this dynamic (among other things).
This is rational strategy for WhatsApp founders: why would they stay after being paid out? There is no way they can earn more on top of what was already paid.
The WhatsApp founders received the majority of their compensation from the deal in the form of equity in Facebook. As the leaders of an important product unit, I think they could have reasonably expected that staying and continuing to improve the product would have resulted in their Facebook equity increasing in value, some of which they were probably barred from immediately liquidating.
> Now he’s talking publicly for the first time. Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. “It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don’t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.” It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door—the decision cost him $850 million.
> It’s also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”
Not sure on the specifics of the WhatsApp deal, but often times the founders, or key employees will be paid in stock from the new company that vests over some number of years (4 usually). Some or a lot of it might be up front, but to get 100% of it, they might have had to stay for a few years.
