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Instagram’s CEO

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Re: Instagram’s CEO

#41

Post by mandeepj »

orliesaurus wrote: post #11

Great article, this is how I feel about Instagram personally: - Great app who turned a camera phone into a powerful camera for those who couldn't afford one of those expensive Canon/other brands of good cameras. - Democratizing photography made phone vendors spend more time build better camera, we're at a point where cameras on certain phones are as a good as stand-alone cameras for photography. - Filters have been a…

> Snapchat turning down $3B acquisition offer

I think it was $30 B

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/google-buy-snap/

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#42

Post by mandeepj »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #18
teagee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systrom and Krieger built Instagram the product, Zuckerberg built Instagram the business

Sheryl Sandberg, a really good sales team, and a bunch of shit-hot engineers in ads built IG, the business. Zuckerberg tends to avoid monetisation, leaving that to Sales (i.e. Sheryl) and Ads.

Sorry, you got it wrong.

Sheryl is not in to sales. And, zuck is all about business but he don't think about monetisation until that product have at least a billion users [1].

The real person behind instagram's monetisation success - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-helped-facebook-brin...

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-products-need-1-b...

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#43

Post by kbenson »

billmalarky wrote: post #33
krn1p4n1c wrote: post #24

Seems like they didn't know when to leave. Once they sold it was no longer their baby and should have started working on an exit strategy. It becomes a contest of egos. On the technical side, FB's methodology with acquisitions seemed the most rational. Rather than sucking the new company in they embedded PE's in there for the purpose of giving the tech teams a fast track to using FB resources.

To be fair, they also had $700 MM in FB stock (now worth $4b according to the article), so there was incentive to help instagram succeed at FB.

I've always wondered about this. How much inventive is that? When the person thinks "if I work really hard and this, I'll increase my huge pool of money from an amount I can't easily spend given the rest of my life to an amount almost six times as much!", does that really resonate?

It's not like it's the same as $700 to $4,000, or even from $7,000,000 to $40,000,000. There are things you can buy to spend most of those amounts, but those are things it's not really worth buying multiple of (e.g. houses, super yachts), so at the point you have close to a billion dollars, what does another billion buy you, besides bragging rights?

I imagine there's some impetus to stick around because you want to see what you built succeed, but at some point I imagine you realize it's not really yours anymore, so why not leave and do what you want, instead of what other people want you to do? I mean, you literally have "fuck you" money.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#44

Post by luckydata »

projectramo wrote: post #26

"Still, as good as the Instagram Stories product was, it is difficult to overstate the built-in advantage that came from Instagram’s larger network, and impossible to overstate the importance of having a shared advertising backend with Facebook. To put it another way, Instagram’s two biggest advantages relative to Snapchat, or any other competitors that may arise, didn’t have much to do with product — Systrom’s speci…

A direct result of another product, Facebook's.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#45

Post by mooreds »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #36
mooreds wrote: post #17

This is a sobering look at what it takes to build a business vs a product (vs, even smaller scale, a feature). You have to be willing to put in the long hours (err, years) and the schlepping to do all the business-y stuff: * distribution * monetization * back end systems for admin users * sales channels etc, etc Or, you can cash out and assimilate, err integrate, with a larger company that has done that hard work and…

Instagram was huge even before Facebook took over. It has gone from strength to strength in the 6 years since but I'm pretty sure that would've been the case without Facebook's involvement (see also: Twitter and Snapchat). You seem to be doing the founders and the team behind Instagram a huge disservice here by accusing them of not being willing to put in the work and riding on Facebook's coattails.

They definitely did a huge amount of work. But did they have a business model before they sold? I don't know, but the author states that they didn't.

I don't think it is a disservice to say that being acquired and integrated into a larger company means you don't have to focus as much on the business schlep. I think that is the truth.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#46

Post by m-p-3 »

> Facebook had agreed to let it run independently as part of the acquisition deal.

Sounds nice on paper.

> It is about finding and developing a business model that lets you determine your own destiny.

But when you sold the business to Facebook, you ultimately agreed to forfeit your ability determine your own destiny to obtain the ability to use their vast resources.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#48

Post by wgerard »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #30
wgerard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there instances where the thesis that “folks who outsource the business side to the acquirer” stay? Hsieh? I mean, I don't know too much about the inner workings of Zappos but I find it hard to believe that the FB->IG relationship is significantly different from the Amazon->Zappos one. Then again maybe he's just the exception that proves the rule.

I find it hard to believe that the FB->IG relationship is significantly different from the Amazon->Zappos one Why? Zappos was minting money and sustainable in their own right well before the acquisition. IG had no datapoints showing they could sustainably make revenue when they were acquired.

> Why?

Hmm, I guess fundamentally I find it hard to believe that a large corporation would acquire a smaller one just to let them run completely independently - it just seems counter-intuitive unless the acquirer is a holding company, basically.

It definitely also doesn't seem like Amazon's jam. Twitch seemed to have a pretty large upward trajectory (and path to profitability) right around the time they were acquired, and Amazon's still clearly guiding at least some of those major decisions.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#49

Post by mooreds »

eldavido wrote: post #38
mooreds wrote: post #17

This is a sobering look at what it takes to build a business vs a product (vs, even smaller scale, a feature). You have to be willing to put in the long hours (err, years) and the schlepping to do all the business-y stuff: * distribution * monetization * back end systems for admin users * sales channels etc, etc Or, you can cash out and assimilate, err integrate, with a larger company that has done that hard work and…

I am a daily reader of Stratechery. It's a very "MBA" publication: the emphasis is always on strategy, distribution channels, markets, sales and marketing, etc. It's a soberingly different worldview than product-obsessed, hacker/maker/developer-centric worldview you get on HN a lot of the time. HN definitely skews toward the entrepreneurial/business end of software, but there's still a real emphasis on building great…

> I think the best products do tend to win.

Ah, you optimist, you! :)

I think that if you expand the definition of product to include sales and marketing, the answer is yes.

But if you don't, the world is littered with great products that lost to better competition: betamax to vhs, apple to windows.

Though I can't think of any modern examples, so maybe the world has changed.

Re: Instagram’s CEO

#50

Post by 6stringmerc »

eldavido wrote: post #38
mooreds wrote: post #17

This is a sobering look at what it takes to build a business vs a product (vs, even smaller scale, a feature). You have to be willing to put in the long hours (err, years) and the schlepping to do all the business-y stuff: * distribution * monetization * back end systems for admin users * sales channels etc, etc Or, you can cash out and assimilate, err integrate, with a larger company that has done that hard work and…

I am a daily reader of Stratechery. It's a very "MBA" publication: the emphasis is always on strategy, distribution channels, markets, sales and marketing, etc. It's a soberingly different worldview than product-obsessed, hacker/maker/developer-centric worldview you get on HN a lot of the time. HN definitely skews toward the entrepreneurial/business end of software, but there's still a real emphasis on building great…

Very interesting perspective and glad you tied together the disparate lines of thinking. Merit in product is, unfortunately, a variable not predictive of success. The strategy component is critical - that is a beautiful, great product that is solving a non-existent problem is probably doomed. There's no path to riches designing the best roller skate wheel marketplace platform, but even a poorly designed gambling tool could probably find a way to profitability.

The only thing I think is outside both of these elements - product quality and viable strategy - is the component of luck be it right place, right time, or catching an unforeseen wave of buzz. The most well known success stories typically owe a non-insignificant amount of debt to good fortune out of the control of the product or strategy. It's a real elephant in the room and it's difficult for ego to acknowledge either in success or failure, but it's real.

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