In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.
To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking photos of your location.
Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.
As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was then.
That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.
I feel that they missed out more on the rocketship journey of being on a startup. And even then that's not everyone's cup of tea.
The "money doesn't make you happy" camp compares $70,000/year and $200,000/year; not $200,000/year and "I have enough money to never work again if I don't feel like it."
Incidentally, I'm not sure if this statement has any validity outside US. I wonder why that is.
Edit: Found my answers on quora, I’ll let you look yourselves as I don’t want to link to what may be gossip but I had a laugh and a wave of nostalgia for those heady nonsense days
I actually met Larry at a bitcoin event a while back. Seems like a normal guy. Is there some back story I am not aware of?
As for me, it worked out - soon after arriving in NYC, I took a chance at starting a company for myself. Unlike Burbn/Instagram, which I would have liked from a market perspective, I went all-in on an idea and an industry that I truly loved. I managed to raise a little bit of funding, hired a great team, and exited 10x a few years later. Still at the company, now CTO. Love it more and more every day.
Right around the same time I started my company, I also met a beautiful woman who is now my wife. Bonus!
Do I think about what could have been? Sure. But I didn't let it stop me from plowing ahead and moving forward. What happened yesterday or last week or last year only impacts you to the extent that you let it. All you can ever do is believe in yourself and make the best decisions you can with the information available to you.
The chances are low that life is better now, after losing out on a chance to be an early part of Instagram.
That's like saying a homeless person's life may be better than if he had a home. Ya statistically that scenario is possible.
But if you had a choice, do you really want that homeless person to stay homeless and just keep telling him "your life may be better now"? Or do you want that person's life to improve so that he eventually has a home?
In the valley you leave the trench and come back to find that all your friends are rich.
No words can alleviate that regret. But if you’re having near misses like this you’re actually really close to something good.
I can relate. I cry myself to sleep every night thinking about those bitcoins I didn't mine, back when you could get hundreds on a single GPU overnight.
(Also, this is a plot point in Bostrom's "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" - the last people to die will really be mourned, and people will then start asking if, maybe, they could have started working on the problem sooner...)
That’s the only thing and best thing you can ever do in life.
I doubt they would be that much better off...
https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-k...
> We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again. Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.
h/t to Bloomberg's @sarahfrier, who also says this:
https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1044419256383729664
> My sources say the Instagram founders are leaving after increased tension with Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of the product. IG culture/priorities very different from FB. See my April story for background
> Without the founders around, Instagram is likely to become more tightly integrated with Facebook, making it more of a product division than a company within Facebook, sources say
Given the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate, I really hope they avoid this for their own sake.
But you have to give credit to how the company started and how it's been running all these years. Instagram is still flourishing (and grew in the face of competition from Snapchat, even by copying its features and making it better) and seems like a nicer group of communities with a lot less of the nastiness that's seen on Facebook (I don't have much first hand experience, but do see some feeds on the web). That's not easy to cultivate, and for reasons I haven't read about or examined, the Instagram users have self-selected such a group to be in.*
Here's hoping the founders start something new and fresh, far from privacy invasive platforms.
*: I'd be interested in any writings about how these communities developed to be what they are.
Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved. It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It’s hard to imagine something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away giving “likes”. Watching somone use Instagram is one of the most depressing things I can imagine in terms of human social interaction.
IG was an app designed to share photos in the moment. It was a digital Polaroid. That was a pretty cool idea. That core feature is essentially gone and so is the community around it.
IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image macro hybrid abominations designed to get likes. I don’t even really know what you call them. They aren’t videos, or flops or even memes. The best phrase I can think of is digital media noise. IG is like some kind of weird digital static. If you wanted to broadcast incompressible nonsense into outspace the best way to do it would be broadcast the explore tab on IG.
>IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace hybrid abominations designed to get likes.
I guess you aren't following the right people or accounts, then.
I've seen plenty of engaging and cool content. I've even become friends with people from the opposite side of the world. Basically a modern kind of pen pal.
And this all happens while I'm still able to share photos in the moment.
The only thing about IG I absolutely hate is the non-chronological feed. It's ridiculously terrible, even reloading before I've seen the most recent posts.
IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.
I don’t use Instagram that often. Sometimes I pop on to see pictures of friends’ kids, holidays, parties, or events. That’s basically 90% of what I see. I post holiday pictures and interesting things I cook, because some other people like to see them. Sometimes there are ads in my feed, and for the most part they’re inoffensive products that I even sometimes look at!
It’s just kind of the least offensive form of social media I can think of. I’m surprised to hear that so many people hate it.
I'm very active on Instagram and 90% of my feed is various electronics, art, and software projects, and family and friends' travel photos and photos of interesting stuff they come across in their day-to-day lives. If you don't like the idiotic meme accounts don't follow them!
What's missing vs. the Facebook experience is the politics, the rants from elderly relatives, the absolutely excessive poorly-targeted advertising (even in Messenger now!), and completely irrelevant posts that I'm only seeing because someone I know has liked or commented on it.
I expect all of this to change and for IG to be brought more in line with Facebook now there's nobody left to defend it from Zuckerberg. A sad day indeed.
Instagram has been susceptible to the same effects, but as others have mentioned, with a small and curated list of people to follow, it's probably a nicer place to be (compared to other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) when it comes to online social interactions.
The Wall Street Journal has a corresponding article about this story. In that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and Krieger..."
Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs" before. I thought it was a typo at first; turns out it's a formal way to refer to two or more men instead of saying Mr. several times. This isn't germane to the story at hand at all, but I found it to be an interesting and educational part of reading both articles about the same story.
E.g., English https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...
French https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...
Though it may be part of the WSJ's house style, so you might see it in its pages quote a bit (the paywall means I don't read it enough to know). For a similar example, see the New Yorker's continued archaic use of the diaeresis:
My point was that it was quite a stretch for the Times to equate this situation with Jan Koum's departure and this narrative around Facebook's moral dilemma. These guys stuck around for nearly a decade, which is frankly the story that should be written about given how infrequently that happens.
I agree with your point though.
What future revenue streams does Facebook have? Are they even capable of creating something new that users love? As far as I can tell, they haven't created any popular products outside of Facebook version 1.0.
Out of all the major tech companies, Facebook's position seems the least stable IMO.
To put it in perspective, they would need to lose 3/4 of their users to reach Twitter levels. Sure, Hacker News has loads of people that hate Facebook, but don't be fooled by the HN bias here. Also, all the armchair CEOs here would do anything to get even 1% of Zuckerberg's success. I don't think Facebook is going anywhere soon.
Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20, startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is the more interesting company. Nearly as many active users as Facebook, but substantially more revenue per user (~$50-$150 for an OEM key? Add in office subscriptions, enterprise users, oh my) and substantially more "eye-time" (monthly active? once per month? ha. you used Windows the entire time you were on the PC). Arguably. I don't want to argue it. It's just a thought and it's not the point.
No one looks at Microsoft and thinks "they're going to absolutely dominate the home computing OS market in 2030." They owned the planet and they threw it away. At best they'll remain a second-rate player in the cloud market, riding the ripples of their 90s enterprise clients until those die out as well.
Meanwhile Apple and Google ate their cake. No one saw that coming in 2001. Wait, the company that nearly went bankrupt and now makes that really bad MP3 player, and... Google who? Hold on let me AltaVista that. The companies that are, today, worth almost nothing are worth a combined $2T in just 17 years? What the hell happens to the US Dollar in the next decade?!
Shit changes, and it changes overnight. Sometimes literally, most of the time just "faster than you expect". The only thing you can bet on is that "active users" means about as much as the moon landing conspiracy theories.
Yahoo used to be the most popular email provider, too. It was relevant to a vast number of American internet users, when American internet users were most of the internet.
I don't think you can infer future relevance from present usage statistics. There are definite network effects with social networks, but fashion and novelty also play a major role. If Facebook/Instagram lose the latter, I don't think the former can sustain the kind of user engagement they require to thrive.
I'm not a fan but I see reality.
>What future revenue streams does Facebook have?
The amount of Data facebook has on the behavioral nature of current parents and current and future American children of said parents is _insane_. Facebook may not be a social media company for ever, but big blue will be an advertising powerhouse for a while with the amount of data they have.
I'm much more bearish on antitrust than most people throwing that term around, but even I am against Facebook being able to buy another upstart social network. They cannot be allowed to do that.
Maybe they can do something completely different like Oculus and leverage their infrastructure to make the best product possible. But even then that's a huge gamble, and I don't think Oculus has lived up to anywhere near the hype.
They acquire the next cool thing
You say least stable but let's look at Yahoo as an example: they've been dead for over a decade and lots of people still use them. Massive data breaches, people still use them etc. etc. Imagine how many people will keep using Facebook if all they manage to do is be a less bad version of Yahoo. People are creatures of habit and once they develop a habit, especially one that doesn't cost $$$ upfront, it takes a herculean effort to get most of them to change their behavior. Once people are hooked, many of them seem to be willing to be abused nearly forever.
Facebook’s Chris Cox has been put in charge of all the company’s apps now.
When Ms. Sandberg went unmentioned in a major reshuffling of Mr. Zuckerberg’s top product executives in May, the moves caused former employees and executives to speculate that she had been displaced as the second-most-powerful figure by Chris Cox, a close friend of Mr. Zuckerberg, who had been elevated to a new role in charge of all the company’s apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-ga...
2. How often do you get to experience the thrill of leading one of the fastest growing and most popular apps of all time? That's a lot of power and prestige, you're basically a real world rockstar. Why leave while the missile is still going upwards to space at full speed, even just for the experience? It's an exhilarating ride, I'm sure, and when it gets too stuffy because FB is trying to milk it for every cent, you can bail and find something else fun to do.
When you create an app that is as consequential as Instagram is on society/culture/media I think any smart person would have to step back and have that "what have I created" moment.
I have no clue why they are both leaving at the same time but I would imagine a health dose of reflection is in both of their futures.
Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video that Snapchat lacks.
So stepping down from FB is kind of a no brainer, especially if it becomes less "fun" due to issues raised by other people. Building stuff is fun, cleaning up a mess, is not fun. Trying to do stuff while the mess is getting worse and worse around you, that is pure torture in my opinion.
[1] There is a sad track of people who have made millions and then lost it all due to poor choices.
[2] Billionaires actually -- https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-systrom/#3b19b6447396 -- or not -- https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...
After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard for tech companies.
Unfortunately, I believe this is just hopeful ambition that won’t become a reality. The majority of folks I meet in tech tend to be a paycheck or two away from financial catastrophe and generally shy away from rocking the boat. A small percentage have their house in order, and those are the folks that have the luxury to resign so quickly when they have moral/ethical objections.
I’m not too sure what the overarching reasons for that are, but my guess is that lifestyle inflation is very real, financial education isn’t very common, and many people focus on the wrong abstractions (ie decision making starting with “I make $200k a year, I can afford this!” rather than “what’s my burn rate?”)
this evil face of facebook will hurt more and more companies day after day and in a result a chain reaction that will affect the life of general people.
A good example of what I'm talking about is the whole recent you've seen all the posts you care about, keep scrolling for things you're not interested in from people you don't care about "feature" that popped up a few weeks ago. They just seem to be incredibly determined to push the content of users I don't care about on me, when what I think made Instagram so great was that I could carefully curate what I follow to only see stuff by profiles I'm interested in... And what's the deal with not having a native iPad app? That's just insane!
I wonder how much of this is pushed on them by Facebook, and whether that had something to do with them leaving?
non-story
