Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram

    On October 5th, 2010, Instagram launched

    Instagram Photo
    Instagram Photo

    Weโ€™re really excited to launch our first version of Instagram today, free in the App Store. Instagram makes mobile photos fast, simple, & beautiful.

    When we sat down three months ago to start designing our product, we looked at digital photos and realized very few exciting things had happened in the last 5 years. Weโ€™re setting out to change that, and this release is our first step along the way.

    Just 19 months later, on April 9th, 2012 (yesterday), a new piece of news came along

    When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares. Weโ€™ve had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe. Today, we couldnโ€™t be happier to announce that Instagram has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.

    As an early adopter, I was along for the ride almost since the very beginning - my first instagram photo going online on November 5th, 2010. Yes, I'm an Instagram fanboy! And* I feel included* in the success because I've been rooting for them so long.

    But let's just put that billion dollar acquisition into perspective:

    • 45 million dollars for every month worked on Instagram
    • 76 million dollars per employee (just 13 of them according to Wikipedia)
    • about 30 dollars for every user
    • about a dollar for every photo

    And that is what startups are about. Creating value. Ridiculous amounts of value.

    For even more perspective - if your average university education was providing as much value as Instagram does for both its founders and its users ... someone would have to dump 3.2 billion dollars in your lap as a graduation gift.

    Some of you might be wondering what's so special about Instagram anyway, how can they command such a high valuation, what to users see in them?

    To that, all I can say is ... remember what sharing a photo was like before Instagram? All that uploading to a twitpic service, then posting to twitter and to facebook and whatever ... it was a pain in the arse.

    More importantly, filters are just about the only way you can make a mobile photo look any better than a bland piece of crap with poor lighting. And as a faithful Instagram fan, I'm sticking by this interpretation.

    Published on April 10th, 2012 in Android, App Store, Facebook, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Photograph, Twitter, Uncategorized, Wikipedia

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about 19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help ๐Ÿ‘‰ swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers ๐Ÿ‘‰ ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are โค๏ธ

    Created by Swizec with โค๏ธ