Riding the wave

Instagram’s story — a $1-billion sale and a broken pledge

No Filter

Sarah Frier

Simon & Schuster

It might seem perverse that the founders of a mobile app lovingly designed around the craft of photography would sell their business to a company whose motto is “move fast and break things.”

But when the creators of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, received an offer in 2012 from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, they saw a path for their venture, which was generating buzz, but no revenue yet. They also saw the terms: $1 billion.

The financial transaction was the easy part. Much harder was integrating the startup and its 13 employees into the world’s largest social media company, a process business writer Sarah Frier meticulously chronicles in No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.

When they launched Instagram almost 10 years ago, Systrom and Krieger had little idea their app would someday have one billion active users a month, mint celebrities, start trends and come to generate a quarter of Facebook’s revenue.

They were catching a wave, writes Frier, a tech reporter for Bloomberg News. Instagram was built for mobile just as our phones were taking over our lives and as those phones’ cameras were vastly improving in quality. When Zuckerberg looked at Instagram, he saw its potential. So, he bought it. Zuckerberg promised the founders he would let them run their product independently within Facebook, a pledge he kept against all expectations. Until he didn’t.

Under Facebook’s ownership, Instagram grew dramatically. Celebrities used it to endorse themselves and products. Ordinary people became “influencers.” Young people, though, faced pressure to present their lives as perfect on the platform. Misinformation found a home on Instagram. It was also found to be a marketplace for illegal drugs.

The author deftly weaves Instagram’s cultural impact into what might otherwise be a coldeyed business story, adding rich texture and context, and giving us non-billionaires something we can relate to. Through it all, Zuckerberg comes off as both predictable and mysterious.

Six years after the acquisition, tensions with Zuckerberg made working for him impossible for Systrom and Krieger, and they left.

Was it all worth it? Without Facebook’s infrastructure, would Instagram have ended up in the startup graveyard with other smart ideas that lacked funding, good timing or luck? Did Zuckerberg originally want to embed Instagram into Facebook’s platform, only to accept it would be more successful on its own?

The answers are unknown, but not irrelevant. Frier wanted to talk to Zuckerberg, but Facebook wouldn’t make him available.

She wanted to ask why Facebook sought to acquire Instagram.

The company sent an answer, attributable to Zuckerberg: “It’s simple. It was a great service and we wanted to help it grow.”