Before starting a startup, you take into consideration the chance that a tech giant might implement your idea better, faster, and stronger than you. It's a risk

Before starting a startup, you take into consideration the chance that a tech giant might implement your idea better, faster, and stronger than you. It's a risk that Snapchat took, and clearly it woke someone up. From Facebook's point of view, why pay money for an app which can be developed 12 days? The only reasons they would acquire Snapchat are for the team and the users. The users of Snapchat are likely to already have a facebook, so they likely don't care too much about the users. They will paint it as being more convenient for the users, which is true, but it's also true that the nature of capitalism is anticompetitive. http://proletariat.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-myth-of-capitalist-competition/ http://proletariat.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-myth-of-capi... In the case of Instagram, Facebook had more reasons to acquire, but I still don't think that one was really worth 1.2 billion.