Ep 19: Capital One, What’s in Your Home
Nasir and Matt start the show off discussing Facebook's newest acquisition (WhatsApp), how Capital One's credit card policy allows entry into consumer's homes, the importance of new top level domains to small businesses, and how to not respond to a (fake)employee quitting. They also answer questions concerning about hiring a minor, what expense you can deduct before incorporating, and the legal implications of using a customer's logo without its consent. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: This is Nasir Pasha. Welcome to Legally Sound. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: I know, I threw you off. I usually say, “This is Legally Sound,” and then, “My name’s Nasir Pasha.” MATT: You switched the order and you didn’t even say the full name of the podcast. NASIR: Oh, yeah, that’s true. This is Legally Sound Smart Business – also known, in short, Legally Sound. MATT: Glad you clarified there. NASIR: I thought you were going to finish the other half. I’m the Legally Sound part, you’re the Smart Business. MATT: We don’t need to get to the point where we finish each other’s sentences like that. NASIR: Sentences. MATT: All right. Let’s jump into it. This was a pretty big story this week. There’s a lot of news about it. Facebook is buying this thing called WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars and I think a huge chunk of that is cash and there’s some stock. I mean, I wasn’t familiar with WhatsApp until you actually introduced me to it. We use it pretty much every day. It’s pretty good technology. I mean, this is just really interesting for a few reasons. One, this is a lot of money. This is a pretty small company in terms of size. I think it had 15 employees. NASIR: It’s small and it’s new. It’s only a few years old, right? MATT: Yeah, it’s still relatively new. It’s still really small. I don’t think they’re making a ton of money, if any, right now. NASIR: They’re making money, but nowhere close to 16 billion dollars. I think it’s a dollar per year per user and I know their user base is in the millions. It’s definitely not 16 billion users because that would be more than what’s on the earth. Obviously, there’s a multiplier here. Honestly, when I first saw this, I’m a heavy user. I use it with my family. I use it for TFL. It’s just a good way to have groups and share whatever. I don’t know. I was a little put off that Facebook is now integrating themselves in there. I think they’ve said that they’re not necessarily going to change it too much or let it independently grow and operate and retain its brand. I don’t know. It put me off a little bit. MATT: I forgot that I did pay a dollar for when I bought it. I completely forgot about that. That is how they make their money. This is pretty interesting because I don’t use Facebook Messenger, but I know it exists. I guess they just like what WhatsApp had in place a lot more than their own messaging service because I think they’re competitors in a sense. But another thing here, I guess, what was a reason they did this possibly, what people are saying was international usage. Apparently, primarily in Europe, there’s a very high usage rate of WhatsApp and it’s not the same in the US. Maybe there might be more. I don’t remember if there’s more Facebook messaging users or what it is, but it’s extremely high level of WhatsApp users in Europe and other countries outside of the US. That could be a play that they’re trying to do here. NASIR: Yeah, exactly. I think the international messaging is definitely kind of lost in the Facebook world. I’m just looking it up here. It looks like they have around 450 million users. Assuming each of them pay a dollar per year – some of them may have gotten it for free for whatever reason in the beginning – it seems like a huge multiplier and there’s a lot of discussion about why it’s priced so high and it’s kind of confusing to me, but one thing that you should know here is that there’s a termination fee. If, for some reason,