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You couldn't build a true Instagram clone today with 13 people. The Instagram of the time was more akin to Flickr than the modern Instagram with live streaming,

• williamcotton 3y ago
  Sure, but the product was incredibly well marketed, designed and implemented with just those original 13 employees and sold for $1 billion. Those features you’ve listed were added in the 11 odd years since. I think that the original set of employees could have implemented every aspect of the application since the date of sale!
  • siva7 3y ago
    Implementing a feature is only a small part of the story. It doesn't scale that way. The more features and users you got, the more people you need to maintain it. 13 won't do the trick on insta scale.
  • 0xy 3y ago
    I don't think so. Let's take just one slice of what I mentioned -- video content. Dailymotion, a relatively small competitor, has over 200 employees. Vimeo has over 1,000. That's a single feature. Could 13 people clone Instagram's featureset at the time of the sale? Yeah, it could probably be done by 3 people in a weekend. But you'd need thousands to emulate their current featureset.
• rconti 3y ago
  So, all the junk that made Instagram worse.