13 ms·

Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company

467 points by garretruh 8y ago

minimaxir 8y ago
My first reaction was the parallel to Jan Koum's unexpected exit over Facebook's ethics; good to see the article ends with that story. After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard for tech companies.
- shshhdhs 8y ago
  > 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.
  - GuiA 8y ago
    I was shocked to discover that many people making salaries amongst the highest percentile in the world are indeed a few months without paychecks away from being in an unpleasant financial situation. 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?”)
    - hatergonnahate 8y ago
      When you have 1.5 - 2M mortgage which is super common among my friends in CA, a few months without paychecks is totally unacceptable.
      - ryandrake 8y ago
        Yea, people who don’t live here have no idea how expensive it is. Based on how much I make, my rural east coast parents, bless them, probably wonder why I live in a home 1/2 the size of theirs with a 50 mile commute, and not a castle with a 7 car garage. Bay Area prices and taxes...that’s why!
        umichguy 8y ago
        Though to be honest, even if I could afford something massive, I'd rather not - just don't see the appeal in it anymore. Maybe when I was a kid growing up in HS and in college, I used to think that way. But having traveled and lived in a bunch of different countries around the world, I just lost that "aspiration," if you could call it that. I will be more than happy with a nice and simple 1 or 2 bed apartment. Plus, big houses = lot's of caring/ maintenance = boring!
    - Groxx 8y ago
      That, and rent that's well over 50% of your monthly income, to have a 1 bedroom apartment miles from anything.
      - mercutio2 8y ago
        No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income. 1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k. Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k. NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt, but Bay Area programmers are still very rich.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        otalp 8y ago
        4k a month is ~50k a year with utilities, which is 50% of post-tax salary if you're earning 120k pre tax.
        Groxx 8y ago
        Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use those numbers: Your top number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.
        mercutio2 8y ago
        You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb. If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conveniently located 1 bedroom is likely to be what the FHA would consider cost burdened, unless they’re working for well below market rate at a startup (and thus are, in my opinion, being exploited by their employer). Every company I mentioned is public, and RSUs are extremely relevant for total compensation analysis at these companies.
  - IBM 8y ago
    The popularity of finance/banking declined after the financial crisis. It might not make a difference for people already in, but it definitely impacts recruitment for new grads.
goseeastarwar 8y ago
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.
- danso 8y ago
  Why would you guess that when a FB spokesperson doesn’t have a prepared comment about this massive change in leadership?
  - opportune 8y ago
    How many pre-announcements must a person make before they are sufficiently prepared for an actual announcement? This is already a pre-announcement of the announcement of the resignation, because this info is leaked from within Instagram
    - danso 8y ago
      According to the article, this info was leaked to the reporters from several people who knew about it, and the co-founders have already notified Instagram's leadership team. It's not just anyone, but two co-founders of one of the world's most prominent tech companies. If they are indeed leaving "just for fun", presumably they care enough about their company and their colleagues to have given an explanation for their unexpected, simultaneous departure. I would also assume they aren't naive enough to think this wouldn't be leaked before an official press release.
      - opportune 8y ago
        I don't understand, what could the founders have done differently? At some point they must make the initial step to notify leadership that they are leaving. This the step that was leaked. Were they supposed to write their own press releases before they even told anybody that they were resigning?
        8y ago
ggm 8y ago
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.
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  1. They probably had some sort of golden handcuffs with FB, a vesting period? 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.
  - dawhizkid 8y ago
    I think you have to step back and wonder what "growth at all cost" can turn into. Multiple research studies have confirmed Instagram, relative to other social media apps, has basically been engineered to maximize FOMO and is making people more depressed, isolated, feeling "not good enough", and in a constant cycle of comparison with others. 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.
    - abraae 8y ago
      > I think any smart person would have to step back and have that "what have I created" moment There's little correlation IMO between being a smart person and being a caring person. The average FB shareholder or employee could give less than a fig if the product is making people depressed, as long as their eyeballs stay attached to it.
lacker 8y ago
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.
- kookiekrak 8y ago
  Instagram hasn't copied from Snapchat in a very long time. Have you used Snapchat recently? The UX is completely different and awful now. Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video that Snapchat lacks.
  - untog 8y ago
    Instagram Stories felt like a very obvious copy of Snapchat, and it wasn't that long ago.
    - Puer 8y ago
      They may have initially copied Snapchat, but they've built on the feature and made it much more engaging to use than the original.
  - traek 8y ago
    Snapchat has had video calling for a lot longer than IG.
  - wzsddtc 8y ago
    Snapchat had video calling for a long time and live video is straight from Music.ly and Twitter.
  - what_ever 8y ago
    Video calling and live video is innovation now?
    - 8y ago
hackwarenews 8y ago
They shouldn't sell in the 1st place.
bepotts 8y ago
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.
- lbotos 8y ago
  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.
  - brandon272 8y ago
    The ability to buy the next big thing is far from guaranteed.
    - CamelCaseName 8y ago
      Facebook has the power to know what the next big thing is, maybe better than those building it. Reading up on onavo is terrifying.
      - m_ke 8y ago
        I'm sure Google will be willing to beat anything that Facebook offers for the next rising competitor just to hurt them.
  - asah 8y ago
    ISWYD "big blue" = FB not IBM.
allenleein 8y ago
According to WSJ's report: 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-gale-of-bad-news-at-facebook-1536085230 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-ga...
gammateam 8y ago
rest and vest! non-story
oyebenny 8y ago
Is HN going to continue linking people to pay wall articles?
- whorleater 8y ago
  Are HN commenters going to continue complaining about a paywall that's documented to be easily bypassed? Are HN commenters going to continue complaining about a payall that's pretty cheap to pay for?
- jrs95 8y ago
  Yes, there are workarounds.
- mahesh_rm 8y ago
  https://outline.com/dZr85J https://outline.com/dZr85J
- crazygringo 8y ago
  Please see the HN FAQ: "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- danso 8y ago
  The NYT was the first to break the story and should be the linked source based on merit. But more to the point, their paywall is trivial to bypass -- is it not still possible to avoid the paywall by going into incognito mode?
mactyler 8y ago
Kevin and Mike have my utmost respect for everything they have done for the world. Thank you so much for truly believing in something and giving it all up for that.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
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. [2] Billionaires actually -- https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-systrom/#3b19b6447396 https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-systrom/#3b19b6447396 -- or not -- https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/tech-millionaire/mike-krieger-net-worth/ https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...
danso 8y ago
First official statement: https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-kevin-systrom-instagram-co-founder-and-ceo/ 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 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 8y ago
  "my April story" - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-10/instagram-looks-like-facebook-s-best-hope https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-10/instagram...
- news_hacker 8y ago
  From later on in the Twitter thread: > 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.
  - neuroptera 8y ago
    Curious as to what you mean by 'the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate.'
    - chrisweekly 8y ago
      Not OP, but I interpret "brand tax" as the opposite of the halo effect. FB's brand is tarnished, and arguably hinders rather than helps w/ IG brand perception.
sp527 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they go and try to build something to unf*ck the world they helped create. It can't be easy to witness the massively deleterious impact your creation ends up having on society. Instagram is a tool primarily for disseminating FOMO, encouraging voyeuristic tendencies, jealousy, and materialism, perfectly calibrated to be addictive, and that is almost certainly on balance a net negative for humanity. I feel very sorry for kids growing up today, because they're subject to stimuli the human brain (and certainly the adolescent brain) is not supposed to be able to tolerate without severe emotional repercussions. Systrom can't be directly blamed for all of this of course (if he hadn't built it, someone else would have), but he never struck me as someone with the same personality deficiencies and borderline sociopathy as Zuckerberg. He probably has regrets. Zuck doesn't really care about the negative externalities of what Facebook is building. He doesn't really care about people, even if he wants you to believe that he's changed from the very early days: > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks
throwaway724 8y ago
Posting anon. 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.
- hitekker 8y ago
  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.
  - benchplz 8y ago
    taking you up on your advice would be an ulterior motive.
- dangwu 8y ago
  Your life now may be better than the one where you accepted Kevin’s offer.
  - 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
    Doubt it
Xunxi 8y ago
This is interesting, considering Snapchat teams up with Amazon to Offer Image-Based-Shopping today. https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/ https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/
- dabei 8y ago
  How is this related?
throwawaymath 8y ago
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.
- khuey 8y ago
  "Messrs" is pretty old fashioned language. It's uncommon to see it in modern use.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > "Messrs" is pretty old fashioned language. It's uncommon to see it in modern use. 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      I know I'm reading a New Yorker quote when I see the superfluous diaeresis in coördination or a similar word. Some words, such as Noël, have a legitimate reason due to counterintuitive pronunciation or as a sign of its archaicness. In any other context, I mostly think of Spinal Tap.
  - gadders 8y ago
    Maybe in the US. It's not uncommon in the UK.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
newscracker 8y ago
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.
- yashap 8y ago
  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.
- themagician 8y ago
  lolwut? 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.
wenbin 8y ago
It’s time to relisten ALL past podcast interviews of kevin systrom https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP and mike krieger https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv :)
stephen_g 8y ago
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?
ebookart 8y ago
https://goo.gl/kXf2q1 https://goo.gl/kXf2q1
rakibtg 8y ago
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.
antpls 8y ago
Is there any open-source, federated alternative to Instagram? Could Mastodon be used the same way?
tuyguntn 8y ago
Whatsapp first, then Instagram, something is going over there, who is next and why?
tareqak 8y ago
WSJ source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagram-prompted-co-founders-departure-1537905005 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagra... .

467 points by garretruh 8y ago

My first reaction was the parallel to Jan Koum's unexpected exit over Facebook's ethics; good to see the article ends with that story. After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard for tech companies.

shshhdhs 8y ago
> 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.
- GuiA 8y ago
  I was shocked to discover that many people making salaries amongst the highest percentile in the world are indeed a few months without paychecks away from being in an unpleasant financial situation. 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?”)
  - hatergonnahate 8y ago
    When you have 1.5 - 2M mortgage which is super common among my friends in CA, a few months without paychecks is totally unacceptable.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Yea, people who don’t live here have no idea how expensive it is. Based on how much I make, my rural east coast parents, bless them, probably wonder why I live in a home 1/2 the size of theirs with a 50 mile commute, and not a castle with a 7 car garage. Bay Area prices and taxes...that’s why!
      - umichguy 8y ago
        Though to be honest, even if I could afford something massive, I'd rather not - just don't see the appeal in it anymore. Maybe when I was a kid growing up in HS and in college, I used to think that way. But having traveled and lived in a bunch of different countries around the world, I just lost that "aspiration," if you could call it that. I will be more than happy with a nice and simple 1 or 2 bed apartment. Plus, big houses = lot's of caring/ maintenance = boring!
  - Groxx 8y ago
    That, and rent that's well over 50% of your monthly income, to have a 1 bedroom apartment miles from anything.
    - mercutio2 8y ago
      No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income. 1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k. Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k. NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt, but Bay Area programmers are still very rich.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - otalp 8y ago
        4k a month is ~50k a year with utilities, which is 50% of post-tax salary if you're earning 120k pre tax.
      - Groxx 8y ago
        Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use those numbers: Your top number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.
        mercutio2 8y ago
        You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb. If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conveniently located 1 bedroom is likely to be what the FHA would consider cost burdened, unless they’re working for well below market rate at a startup (and thus are, in my opinion, being exploited by their employer). Every company I mentioned is public, and RSUs are extremely relevant for total compensation analysis at these companies.
- IBM 8y ago
  The popularity of finance/banking declined after the financial crisis. It might not make a difference for people already in, but it definitely impacts recruitment for new grads.

goseeastarwar 8y ago

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.

danso 8y ago
Why would you guess that when a FB spokesperson doesn’t have a prepared comment about this massive change in leadership?
- opportune 8y ago
  How many pre-announcements must a person make before they are sufficiently prepared for an actual announcement? This is already a pre-announcement of the announcement of the resignation, because this info is leaked from within Instagram
  - danso 8y ago
    According to the article, this info was leaked to the reporters from several people who knew about it, and the co-founders have already notified Instagram's leadership team. It's not just anyone, but two co-founders of one of the world's most prominent tech companies. If they are indeed leaving "just for fun", presumably they care enough about their company and their colleagues to have given an explanation for their unexpected, simultaneous departure. I would also assume they aren't naive enough to think this wouldn't be leaked before an official press release.
    - opportune 8y ago
      I don't understand, what could the founders have done differently? At some point they must make the initial step to notify leadership that they are leaving. This the step that was leaked. Were they supposed to write their own press releases before they even told anybody that they were resigning?
      - 8y ago

ggm 8y ago

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.

BadassFractal 8y ago
1. They probably had some sort of golden handcuffs with FB, a vesting period? 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.
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  I think you have to step back and wonder what "growth at all cost" can turn into. Multiple research studies have confirmed Instagram, relative to other social media apps, has basically been engineered to maximize FOMO and is making people more depressed, isolated, feeling "not good enough", and in a constant cycle of comparison with others. 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.
  - abraae 8y ago
    > I think any smart person would have to step back and have that "what have I created" moment There's little correlation IMO between being a smart person and being a caring person. The average FB shareholder or employee could give less than a fig if the product is making people depressed, as long as their eyeballs stay attached to it.

lacker 8y ago

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.

kookiekrak 8y ago
Instagram hasn't copied from Snapchat in a very long time. Have you used Snapchat recently? The UX is completely different and awful now. Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video that Snapchat lacks.
- untog 8y ago
  Instagram Stories felt like a very obvious copy of Snapchat, and it wasn't that long ago.
  - Puer 8y ago
    They may have initially copied Snapchat, but they've built on the feature and made it much more engaging to use than the original.
- traek 8y ago
  Snapchat has had video calling for a lot longer than IG.
- wzsddtc 8y ago
  Snapchat had video calling for a long time and live video is straight from Music.ly and Twitter.
- what_ever 8y ago
  Video calling and live video is innovation now?
  - 8y ago

hackwarenews 8y ago

They shouldn't sell in the 1st place.

bepotts 8y ago

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.

lbotos 8y ago
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.
- brandon272 8y ago
  The ability to buy the next big thing is far from guaranteed.
  - CamelCaseName 8y ago
    Facebook has the power to know what the next big thing is, maybe better than those building it. Reading up on onavo is terrifying.
    - m_ke 8y ago
      I'm sure Google will be willing to beat anything that Facebook offers for the next rising competitor just to hurt them.
- asah 8y ago
  ISWYD "big blue" = FB not IBM.

allenleein 8y ago

According to WSJ's report: 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-gale-of-bad-news-at-facebook-1536085230 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-ga...

gammateam 8y ago

rest and vest! non-story

oyebenny 8y ago

Is HN going to continue linking people to pay wall articles?

whorleater 8y ago
Are HN commenters going to continue complaining about a paywall that's documented to be easily bypassed? Are HN commenters going to continue complaining about a payall that's pretty cheap to pay for?
jrs95 8y ago
Yes, there are workarounds.
mahesh_rm 8y ago
https://outline.com/dZr85J https://outline.com/dZr85J
crazygringo 8y ago
Please see the HN FAQ: "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
danso 8y ago
The NYT was the first to break the story and should be the linked source based on merit. But more to the point, their paywall is trivial to bypass -- is it not still possible to avoid the paywall by going into incognito mode?

mactyler 8y ago

Kevin and Mike have my utmost respect for everything they have done for the world. Thank you so much for truly believing in something and giving it all up for that.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

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. [2] Billionaires actually -- https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-systrom/#3b19b6447396 https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-systrom/#3b19b6447396 -- or not -- https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/tech-millionaire/mike-krieger-net-worth/ https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...

danso 8y ago

First official statement: https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-kevin-systrom-instagram-co-founder-and-ceo/ 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 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 8y ago
"my April story" - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-10/instagram-looks-like-facebook-s-best-hope https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-10/instagram...
news_hacker 8y ago
From later on in the Twitter thread: > 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.
- neuroptera 8y ago
  Curious as to what you mean by 'the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate.'
  - chrisweekly 8y ago
    Not OP, but I interpret "brand tax" as the opposite of the halo effect. FB's brand is tarnished, and arguably hinders rather than helps w/ IG brand perception.

sp527 8y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they go and try to build something to unf*ck the world they helped create. It can't be easy to witness the massively deleterious impact your creation ends up having on society. Instagram is a tool primarily for disseminating FOMO, encouraging voyeuristic tendencies, jealousy, and materialism, perfectly calibrated to be addictive, and that is almost certainly on balance a net negative for humanity. I feel very sorry for kids growing up today, because they're subject to stimuli the human brain (and certainly the adolescent brain) is not supposed to be able to tolerate without severe emotional repercussions. Systrom can't be directly blamed for all of this of course (if he hadn't built it, someone else would have), but he never struck me as someone with the same personality deficiencies and borderline sociopathy as Zuckerberg. He probably has regrets. Zuck doesn't really care about the negative externalities of what Facebook is building. He doesn't really care about people, even if he wants you to believe that he's changed from the very early days: > Zuck: People just submitted it. > Zuck: I don't know why. > Zuck: They "trust me" > Zuck: Dumb fucks

throwaway724 8y ago

Posting anon. 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.

hitekker 8y ago
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.
- benchplz 8y ago
  taking you up on your advice would be an ulterior motive.
dangwu 8y ago
Your life now may be better than the one where you accepted Kevin’s offer.
- 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
  Doubt it

Xunxi 8y ago

This is interesting, considering Snapchat teams up with Amazon to Offer Image-Based-Shopping today. https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/ https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/

dabei 8y ago
How is this related?

throwawaymath 8y ago

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.

khuey 8y ago
"Messrs" is pretty old fashioned language. It's uncommon to see it in modern use.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > "Messrs" is pretty old fashioned language. It's uncommon to see it in modern use. 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago
    I know I'm reading a New Yorker quote when I see the superfluous diaeresis in coördination or a similar word. Some words, such as Noël, have a legitimate reason due to counterintuitive pronunciation or as a sign of its archaicness. In any other context, I mostly think of Spinal Tap.
- gadders 8y ago
  Maybe in the US. It's not uncommon in the UK.
checkyoursudo 8y ago

newscracker 8y ago

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.

yashap 8y ago
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.
themagician 8y ago
lolwut? 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.

wenbin 8y ago

It’s time to relisten ALL past podcast interviews of kevin systrom https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP and mike krieger https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv :)

stephen_g 8y ago

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?

ebookart 8y ago

https://goo.gl/kXf2q1 https://goo.gl/kXf2q1

rakibtg 8y ago

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.

antpls 8y ago

Is there any open-source, federated alternative to Instagram? Could Mastodon be used the same way?

tuyguntn 8y ago

Whatsapp first, then Instagram, something is going over there, who is next and why?

tareqak 8y ago

WSJ source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagram-prompted-co-founders-departure-1537905005 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagra... .