Substrate

More Facebook drama, this time from an interview with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. What was most noteworthy, though was the response.

“That is why I mark April 9, 2012, as the day yesterday became inevitable. Letting Facebook build the business may have made Systrom and Krieger rich and freed them to focus on product, but it made Zuckerberg the true CEO, and always, inevitably, CEOs call the shots.”

“The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.”

“...representative of the sort of slippage I want to avoid; I should and will do better, even if that means taking more time off when appropriate. Many of you have emailed me over the years on precisely this point, and I’m ready to listen.” Thompson’s cadence has always been bafflingly impressive. This is the first mention I’ve read from him about rest—a gentle reminder that we’re all human.