7 ms·
Well it might have played differently. If Facebook hadn't bought it then Facebook would have competed against it and that's not an easy fight. Look at Snapchat.
by samsonradu 8y ago
Well it might have played differently. If Facebook hadn't bought it then Facebook would have competed against it and that's not an easy fight. Look at Snapchat.
- xkjkls 8y agoIs Snapchat the best example? Snapchat is getting killed. Also, as it was made that Instagram only had 7 employees when they were purchased, that's actually one of major reasons why the acquisition worked so well. 7 employees for an application of that scale is not "swift and agile", it's criminally understaffed. After the Facebook acquisition, Facebook was able to easily redirect some of their hires to work on Instagram which allowed Instagram's original workforce to actually be able to worry about things other than just keeping their heads above water. It's definitely not ridiculous to credit some of Instagram's success to the acquisition itself.
- fabricexpert 8y agoIf you're not pushing revenue (i.e. you don't need a sales team, ads team), you probably aren't going to need that many engineers to run something like IG. The original feature set was pretty basic, and it only ran on iOS for quite some time.
- xkjkls 8y agoYeah, but 7 engineers at that growth rate means your entire team is just going to be devoted to beating all of the scaling fires. That leaves little time for other product improvements that might enable more growth. FB was pretty slow to monetize Instagram, and they still had hired 100s of people pretty quickly after the acquisition.
- mygo 8y agoIt’s quite possible to run a high-traffic app with a small staff if you have the right engineering talent and developed the infrastructure thinking about scale from the start. Before facebook bought Whatsapp they only had 5 employees. But they had the best engineers for the task at hand. In fact they’re famous for handling 2 million TCP connections on a single server due to much of their engineering decisions (including choice of tech stack). And it’s not like they weren’t generating revenue. Before facebook acquired them, their $1 fee earned them $1billion the first 9 months.
- xkjkls 8y agoWhatsApp had 55 employees not 5. And additional features are going to add massive complexity and decrease your ability to scale relatively quickly. Sure, with the right engineering you might be able to run a relatively light operation if you have a feature-set well thought out, but as soon as you want to add any other thing-a-mo-bob to the operation it gets much harder.
- skinnymuch 8y agoAlso, they didn’t make close to $1B. More like 1% of that in the year before Facebook acquired them. If they actually made that much money they’d have more staff dealing with that.
- mygo 8y agoIt appears I have been given false information. Thanks for the correction.
- skinnymuch 8y agoWhatsApp had 50+ employees and made only tens of millions from their $1 fee. Where are you getting $1B from? It was never remotely close to $1B. FB publicly posted Whatsapp revenue from before the acquisition. It was a pittance. Whatsapp also only had a couple hundred million users back in 2014. So they’d have no way to make a billion even if they charged everyone. Which they didn’t. They barely charged anyone.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pas 8y agoI'm not familiar with IG's features except the filters. But to me it seems there is no new thing on it. So 7 engineers are probably all worked on scaling.
- hyperbovine 8y agoIsn't that exactly OP's point? FB might have counterfactually opted to bury Instagram rather than drop tres comas buying it. Conceivably this could have cost x < $1b. In that world, Zuck is a fool for wasting $1b - x dollars, rather than the one we live in where he's hailed as a visionary for making $99b off the deal.
- mac01021 8y agoCould FB sell now for ~100B and then still proceed to bury it for $x?
- hyperbovine 8y agoIf you believe that markets are efficient (+ the $100b figure, no idea who made that up), no.