Francisco coffee shop, Greeley, a tall and soft-spoken software engineer
who got his PhD from MIT, told the story of Samsung’s bumbling bid to
acquire Waze, the popular GPS app that gathers user-reported data to
identify traffic patterns and plot routes around delays and congestion.
Waze CEO Noam Bardin was candid in a meeting with Samsung,
frustrated over his dealings with the Korean company, as well as big
telecommunications companies that wanted him to pour time and resources
into developing exclusive features only for them, “believing they needed
some special feature to make their platform unique,” said a Waze
executive. Samsung, Greeley recalled, treated the prospect of a software
partnership as permission to assert its authority, asking developers to make
software of questionable value—say, for using Samsung’s beloved S Pen
stylus—but without recognizing the time, resources, and potential impact
on the reputation of the developers if the project fell through.
“It’s a new feature that they have to test and maintain, and it affects
their reputation if it’s crappy,” Greeley said. “Samsung didn’t realize that
there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
In 2013 Google acquired Waze for $1.15 billion.
No amount of pleading, meanwhile, could convince WhatsApp’s co-
founders to partner with Samsung. CEO Jan Koum and co-founder Brian
Acton “sat there and looked at the devices and said, ‘Thank you, but we
don’t want to deal with you,’ ” recalled Greeley, who was present at the
meeting. Koum and Acton didn’t want to change the app’s sacrosanct user
interface, which seemed incompatible with Samsung’s little-used operating
system, Tizen. Later, WhatsApp agreed to develop the software for Tizen,
but Tizen users reported bugs and software errors with the app. In October
2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion.
By that time, Samsung had already released its own alternative,
ChatON, in September 2011. Just over three years later, it was
discontinued.
The conundrum for Samsung? “A ten-person startup should be
struggling; lots of people should be knocking on Samsung’s door to be
working with them,” said Greeley. “But with Samsung, the attitude of start-
ups was ‘Thank you very much, go away.’ ”
As Samsung was sullying its reputation in Silicon Valley, it was at least
piquing the interest of Hollywood. Daren and T.J. had a strong network in
the music and film industries and reached out to old friends to get better