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.
A lot of commenters seem to be bemoaning this poster as missing out on endless riches. Why? we already know that being super rich doesn't really make you all that much happier compared to being rich (and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich).
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.
Why did everyone run into Larry so much back then and what happened to the startup party scene... which was so odd at the time.
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
Hi everyone! Well, thank you for all of the comments - didn't expect my short little tale to be that interesting :)
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.
Might be worth reaching out and saying best wishes.
Short & sweet. Not for any ulterior motive, just out of the spirit of an old, forgotten friendship.
> 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:
> 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.
Well, there's more than a 50% probability that they're leaving because of conflicts with Facebook, the privacy issues and the push to add more and more ads everywhere. If this were the case, I hope they'd speak up sooner than later. We need voices from within FB and its acquisitions to tell everyone how messed up things are behind the scenes.
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.
Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are all pretty message board-y, they’re all centreded online discussions/arguments, and that can get toxic in a hurry, unless the discussion is super focused and tightly moderated. Instagram has always been a place to share the nicest photos you take, and that’s basically it, the comments are extremely secondary. There’s way less opportunity for conversations to turn toxic when there are few conversations.
Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the New York Times) denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger..."
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.
I'd venture that they're extremely wealthy, still friends, and decided it's time to go have fun rather than prescribe this to Facebook's ethical challenges like the article would have you believe.
I wonder what's Facebook's move after Instagram becomes stale and no longer "cool". It seems to me that the popularity of social networks are cyclical, and there's very little that a company can do to satiate a user's appetite for something new. That's before we discuss future regulatory troubles Facebook might face.
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.
They have over 2 billion monthly active users. This is a global penetration rate that is the best in the world. They have done something that no other company in the world has done. They are relevant to basically the vast majority of all Internet users in the world. To say they are the least stable or that their power over most humans is waning is, quite frankly, ludicrous.
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.
Facebook is here to stay. They are not Myspace. They are following the model of many of the tech companies that survive. If they can't copy it they will buy it. They have enough revenues that they can buy any hot startup and nurse it to success. Zuckerberg will likely be CEO for at least the next 10 years and has shown that he can learn from mistakes and continue to succeed. He's one of the few that has learned his way to successful CEO of a large company.
There's very little that can bring them down. Even if the government regulates them the regulations will not be so stringent that they will cause Facebook to fold. The irony is that regulations favor big companies since they make it harder for small start-ups to succeed.
I mean, can they not BUY the next one? It's what they did with Instagram after all.
>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.
Cool probably doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to given Facebook's user base size. As long as they have eyeballs, they'll have a revenue stream. Their willingness to pay what appeared to be outrageous sums for competitors users reflects that. But now that they've got the lions share of the social network using world, it's doubtful that they'd need to do that again in a big way unless they see something getting serious traction with people who are not already Facebook users.
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.
I think the next big thing for FB is VR. If VR becomes mainstream soon (and I think it will) and FB lead the space with Oculus, then their future is bright.
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.
As a non VC, non founder, the only surprise to me is that anyone stays beyond contracted minima. The first, assuming you had taken a role as a VC, you'd want out to go do the VC thing somewhere else. The second, you would be watching your baby pimped out and sold for drugs on the streets, as things you had no desire to see were done, in the name of profit.
Instagram often seemed to have its own way of doing things and its own aesthetic within Facebook, one that the founders championed. Recently, however, the winning strategy for Instagram seems to be copying features from Snapchat, and abandoning the style that got it to its first 100 million users. I can imagine that being frustrating.
Without being too careless[1] I think it is plausible to assume they and their children will not "have" to work again. The "have" is in scare quotes because, in my experience with tech people I know who have 'banked out' of the workforce, working on something is often more rewarding, over a longer term, than sitting around consuming entertainment while eating and drinking. So nearly everyone I know who became multi-millionaires or beyond have ended up still doing something interesting with their lives.
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.
> 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 know i'm wrong, and doing a misjudgement here but the fact is "Companies like facebook don't need founders, they will eventually make the product that people might use in everyday life, they will do it anyhow; by either copying that product or to buy it. Remember that the 'poke your friend' feature is only unique from facebook everything else is someone else's things"
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.
I find Instagram fascinating, because on the one hand it's one of my favourite social network apps, but on the other hand I kind of feel like they don't know what people like about it and are trying to kill it... Perhaps I'm just weird though and other people like the direction they're going in?.
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?
[+] [-] throwaway724|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] laurieg|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] throwaway724|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dangwu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uuilly|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmvnty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quintin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuiA|7 years ago|reply
That’s the only thing and best thing you can ever do in life.
[+] [-] person_of_color|7 years ago|reply
I doubt they would be that much better off...
[+] [-] hitekker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rattray|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] news_hacker|7 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] themagician|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yashap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaymath|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goseeastarwar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephpmay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam-a|7 years ago|reply
I agree with your point though.
[+] [-] benchplz|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bepotts|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] docker_up|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WheelsAtLarge|7 years ago|reply
I'm not a fan but I see reality.
[+] [-] lbotos|7 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] imron|7 years ago|reply
They acquire the next cool thing
[+] [-] blihp|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allenleee|7 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kookiekrak|7 years ago|reply
Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video that Snapchat lacks.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] minimaxir|7 years ago|reply
After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard for tech companies.
[+] [-] shshhdhs|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rakibtg|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wenbin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tareqak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antpls|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuyguntn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebookart|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hackwarenews|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sp527|7 years ago|reply
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