He saw the potential of mobile and the huge explosion of apps focused on location-based check-ins (this was when the Foursquare app was the hottest thing around), and got hacking
Instagram was just a group of 16 developers hacking some software in a poky office above a pizza shop in Palo Alto. They hadn’t made a cent in revenues. But they had attracted more than 30 million users in record time. And, unlike those of most of their competitors, those users were actually sticking around. A few years after the acquisition there is hardly a soul in the business world who would disparage – or even vaguely question – Zuckerberg’s had well over 150 million active users12 by the end of 2013 and the momentum hasn’t stopped. It launched an advertising product for brands on .13 So let’s take a moment to dive into the details of Instagram’s famous journey and understand a bit more about how Silicon Valley thinks, and why the billion-dollar acquisition of the company by Facebook actually does make sense. The face of Instagram Instagram has two cofounders. The first is Kevin Systrom, who is the app’s best-known public face.14 Systrom grew up in a rather nice Boston suburb called Holliston. Continue Reading He jumped on the bandwagon with a social check-in mobile website called