FACEBOOK Web app for taking and sharing pictures taken with your digital camera over ADSL broadband to brag/talk to your friends about. 2 years of existence

FACEBOOK Web app for taking and sharing pictures taken with your digital camera over ADSL broadband to brag/talk to your friends about. 2 years of existence 1 product 24 employees 30M+ users $0 revenue What exactly is your point? Instagram had insane adoption and was eroding Facebook's control over both pictures and mobile - the two biggest drivers of future growth over the next decade in both users and ad dollars. Facebook bought them with overvalued stock (before IPO) so it was ~$500 million which is the same as what the VCs valued it at a month before it was acquired. It was a good acquisition - basically a hedge against market obsolescence, easy injection of new IP and easy injection of mobile users. Excite could've bought Google for ~$1 million back in the late 90s. Yahoo! could've had Facebook for ~$1 billion if the pressure on Zuckerberg was higher. They choose not to buy that option. They don't exist anymore.