
Instagram’s Co-Founders Said to Step Down from Company - garretruh
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/technology/instagram-cofounders-resign.html
======
throwaway724
Posting anon.

In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids, and our
investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all kept grinding for a
month or two in honorable futility, but after a while, my bank account
depleted and I had to go.

To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the wind down
however, I took up some contract work that I found through various friends in
the SF startup scene. One company that I really liked and did some small stuff
for was Burbn, which was a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged
around taking photos of your location.

Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my inner circle
were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and they went finance, sigh),
I decided to leave SF to head to NYC and get a fresh start.

As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I emailed my contact
at Burbn and said I was likely to be unavailable for any more work, but that I
liked the project and hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that
he was near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested, there
might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was mentally done with SF
and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111 Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like
RockYou, etc.) as it was then.

That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.

~~~
laurieg
A lot of commenters seem to be bemoaning this poster as missing out on endless
riches. Why? we already know that being super rich doesn't really make you all
that much happier compared to being rich (and if you are a programmer in work
in then you are pretty rich).

I feel that they missed out more on the rocketship journey of being on a
startup. And even then that's not everyone's cup of tea.

~~~
fsloth
"and if you are a programmer in work in then you are pretty rich"

Incidentally, I'm not sure if this statement has any validity outside US. I
wonder why that is.

~~~
MrEfficiency
DELETED For asking a question but getting too many downvotes

~~~
verelo
In many cases it’s because that’s what we demand of them. The “you get what
you pay for” line works well here, we demand low cost so they have low time to
build anything right. Long term impact is that they never fully developed into
seasoned and deeply skilled staff. Then we complain about quality, its kind of
funny in a sad way...

------
danso
First official statement:

[https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-
from-k...](https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-kevin-
systrom-instagram-co-founder-and-ceo/)

> _We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and
> creativity again. Building new things requires that we step back, understand
> what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we
> plan to do._

h/t to Bloomberg's @sarahfrier, who also says this:

[https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1044419256383729664](https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1044419256383729664)

> _My sources say the Instagram founders are leaving after increased tension
> with Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of the product. IG culture
> /priorities very different from FB. See my April story for background_

~~~
news_hacker
From later on in the Twitter thread:

> _Without the founders around, Instagram is likely to become more tightly
> integrated with Facebook, making it more of a product division than a
> company within Facebook, sources say_

Given the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current climate, I really hope they
avoid this for their own sake.

~~~
neuroptera
Curious as to what you mean by 'the "brand tax" of Facebook in the current
climate.'

~~~
chrisweekly
Not OP, but I interpret "brand tax" as the opposite of the halo effect. FB's
brand is tarnished, and arguably hinders rather than helps w/ IG brand
perception.

~~~
nojvek
I’m somewhat guilty of this. I really love whatsapp even though it’s owned by
Facebook. I loathe Facebook.com

I left hipstagram a long time ago, it made me feel anxious and addicted.

Network effects though. As long as people aren’t quitting as villages,
Facebook network effects will keep them alive for a long time.

------
newscracker
Well, there's more than a 50% probability that they're leaving because of
conflicts with Facebook, the privacy issues and the push to add more and more
ads everywhere. If this were the case, I hope they'd speak up sooner than
later. We need voices from within FB and its acquisitions to tell everyone how
messed up things are behind the scenes.

But you have to give credit to how the company started and how it's been
running all these years. Instagram is still flourishing (and grew in the face
of competition from Snapchat, even by copying its features and making it
better) and seems like a nicer group of communities with a lot less of the
nastiness that's seen on Facebook (I don't have much first hand experience,
but do see some feeds on the web). That's not easy to cultivate, and for
reasons I haven't read about or examined, the Instagram users have self-
selected such a group to be in.*

Here's hoping the founders start something new and fresh, far from privacy
invasive platforms.

*: I'd be interested in any writings about how these communities developed to be what they are.

~~~
themagician
lolwut?

Instagram today is completely different from the way it started. The app is
different, the community is completely different. Literally nothing is the
same. It doesn’t even resemble what it once was. It has completely devolved.
It may very well be the most toxic property out there. It’s hard to imagine
something more phony, optimized soley as a way to waste your time tapping away
giving “likes”. Watching somone use Instagram is one of the most depressing
things I can imagine in terms of human social interaction.

IG was an app designed to share photos in the moment. It was a digital
Polaroid. That was a pretty cool idea. That core feature is essentially gone
and so is the community around it.

IG now is a platform of the least common denominator. 90% of the posts are
garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image macro hybrid abominations
designed to get likes. I don’t even really know what you call them. They
aren’t videos, or flops or even memes. The best phrase I can think of is
digital media noise. IG is like some kind of weird digital static. If you
wanted to broadcast incompressible nonsense into outspace the best way to do
it would be broadcast the explore tab on IG.

~~~
kccqzy
> 90% of the posts are garbage spam that takes the form of meme/image mace
> hybrid abominations designed to get likes.

IG is like twitter in that the more effort you put in to curate the people you
follow, the more rewarding your timeline is. I never look at Explore, but I
look at the pictures in my own timeline and enjoy them.

~~~
deevolution
My instagram feed is filled almost exclusively with cat photos, its a good
time kill...

~~~
nasredin
"Cat photos"? Right...

------
throwawaymath
Here's an offtopic observation. This article (from the _New York Times_ )
denoted the names of the Instagram founders as "Mr. Systrom and Mr.
Krieger..."

The _Wall Street Journal_ has a corresponding article about this story. In
that article, the Instagram founders' names are written, "Messrs. Systrom and
Krieger..."

Despite frequently reading both papers, I can't recall ever seeing "Messrs"
before. I thought it was a typo at first; turns out it's a formal way to refer
to two or more men instead of saying Mr. several times. This isn't germane to
the story at hand at all, but I found it to be an interesting and educational
part of reading both articles about the same story.

~~~
checkyoursudo
Specifically, it's an abbreviation of the French _messieurs_ , which is just
multiple misters. Maybe it's more formal now, but it was ordinary and
frequently used in the past in both French and English writing. (Obviously,
still quite commonly used in, um, French today.)

E.g., English
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BMessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMESSRS%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmessrs%3B%2Cc0)

French
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_in...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=messrs&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3BMessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bmessrs%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BMESSRS%3B%2Cc0)

~~~
baud147258
As a French, it feels weird to learn something about my language on an English
site :|. I don't remember seeing it written in French. Or I saw it, understood
the meaning and forgot.

~~~
lloeki
That's because it's largely unused nowadays, the current abbreviation being
MM. (which doubles the M. – not Mr! – abbreviation for _monsieur_ ).

------
goseeastarwar
I'd venture that they're extremely wealthy, still friends, and decided it's
time to go have fun rather than prescribe this to Facebook's ethical
challenges like the article would have you believe.

~~~
danso
Why would you guess that when a FB spokesperson doesn’t have a prepared
comment about this massive change in leadership?

~~~
opportune
How many pre-announcements must a person make before they are sufficiently
prepared for an actual announcement? This is already a pre-announcement of the
announcement of the resignation, because this info is leaked from within
Instagram

~~~
danso
According to the article, this info was leaked to the reporters from several
people who knew about it, and the co-founders have already notified
Instagram's leadership team. It's not just anyone, but two co-founders of one
of the world's most prominent tech companies. If they are indeed leaving "just
for fun", presumably they care enough about their company and their colleagues
to have given an explanation for their unexpected, simultaneous departure. I
would also assume they aren't naive enough to think this wouldn't be leaked
before an official press release.

~~~
opportune
I don't understand, what could the founders have done differently? At some
point they must make the initial step to notify leadership that they are
leaving. This the step that was leaked. Were they supposed to write their own
press releases before they even told anybody that they were resigning?

~~~
danso
You don't think the co-founders of a company, who are leaving for purportedly
benign/positive reasons, owe it to their company to have a prepared
explanation? Given that the sudden resignation of a founder -- nevermind _both
co-founders at the same time_ \-- is generally seen as worrying news?

edit: fixed punctuation. By "prepared explanation" I don't mean a formal press
release, but a reason (even if vague) that can be publicly disclosed, even
before the official announcement, so it doesn't look like the founders are
jumping ship for bad/antagonistic reasons.

~~~
packetized
why on earth would they owe anything to the company?

~~~
lugg
Jesus Christ.

Because people worked under and followed the for the better years of their
life to make them rich?

Because the people you work with are more important than the work you do?

Because when you form a relationship with someone, contractually, business, or
otherwise, you do, in fact owe them something, be it money, respect, or even
some simple common decency.

~~~
packetized
if you work for someone, do you owe them anything? beyond a customary standard
of duty and notice of departure from employment?

------
bepotts
I wonder what's Facebook's move after Instagram becomes stale and no longer
"cool". It seems to me that the popularity of social networks are cyclical,
and there's very little that a company can do to satiate a user's appetite for
something new. That's before we discuss future regulatory troubles Facebook
might face.

What future revenue streams does Facebook have? Are they even capable of
creating something new that users love? As far as I can tell, they haven't
created any popular products outside of Facebook version 1.0.

Out of all the major tech companies, Facebook's position seems the least
stable IMO.

~~~
docker_up
They have over 2 billion monthly active users. This is a global penetration
rate that is the best in the world. They have done something that no other
company in the world has done. They are relevant to basically the vast
majority of all Internet users in the world. To say they are the least stable
or that their power over most humans is waning is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

To put it in perspective, they would need to lose 3/4 of their users to reach
Twitter levels. Sure, Hacker News has loads of people that hate Facebook, but
don't be fooled by the HN bias here. Also, all the armchair CEOs here would do
anything to get even 1% of Zuckerberg's success. I don't think Facebook is
going anywhere soon.

~~~
013a
Windows has seen an officially reported install base as high as 1.5B. This was
a few years ago; their numbers have taken a hit recently.

Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20,
startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is the
more interesting company. Nearly as many active users as Facebook, but
_substantially_ more revenue per user (~$50-$150 for an OEM key? Add in office
subscriptions, enterprise users, oh my) and substantially more "eye-time"
(monthly active? once per month? ha. you used Windows the entire time you were
on the PC). Arguably. I don't want to argue it. It's just a thought and it's
not the point.

No one looks at Microsoft and thinks "they're going to absolutely dominate the
home computing OS market in 2030." They owned the _planet_ and they threw it
away. At best they'll remain a second-rate player in the cloud market, riding
the ripples of their 90s enterprise clients until those die out as well.

Meanwhile Apple and Google ate their cake. No one saw that coming in 2001.
Wait, the company that nearly went bankrupt and now makes that really bad MP3
player, and... Google who? Hold on let me AltaVista that. The companies that
are, today, worth almost nothing are worth a combined $2T in just 17 years?
What the hell happens to the US Dollar in the next decade?!

Shit changes, and it changes overnight. Sometimes literally, most of the time
just "faster than you expect". The only thing you can bet on is that "active
users" means about as much as the moon landing conspiracy theories.

~~~
mbesto
> Considering the average annual revenue per U.S. Facebook user is ~$20,
> startlingly less in other countries, arguably Microsoft, not Facebook, is
> the more interesting company.

Your points are all valid. However, you're comparing Apples to Oranges. MSFT
makes a large chunk of their revenue from Enterprise customers. I don't think
it's fair to put the two companies in the same category.

Your larger point however, I def agree. Microsoft diversified itself, and
Facebook will eventually too.

As the saying goes "This too shall pass".

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> MSFT makes a large chunk of their revenue from Enterprise customers

Now they do. Got out of the consumer business like a scalded cat, because
consumers are fickle and quick to anger.

Now, perhaps we could have a word from HiSpace's Tom, or whatever his
Ozymandias was ...

------
allenleein
According to WSJ's report:

Facebook’s Chris Cox has been put in charge of all the company’s apps now.

When Ms. Sandberg went unmentioned in a major reshuffling of Mr. Zuckerberg’s
top product executives in May, the moves caused former employees and
executives to speculate that she had been displaced as the second-most-
powerful figure by Chris Cox, a close friend of Mr. Zuckerberg, who had been
elevated to a new role in charge of all the company’s apps, including
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

link: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-
ga...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-gale-of-bad-
news-at-facebook-1536085230)

------
ggm
As a non VC, non founder, the only surprise to me is that anyone stays beyond
contracted minima. The first, assuming you had taken a role as a VC, you'd
want out to go do the VC thing somewhere else. The second, you would be
watching your baby pimped out and sold for drugs on the streets, as things you
had no desire to see were done, in the name of profit.

~~~
manigandham
Or #3, they saw their baby get better and better, while remaining independent
and equipped with 1000x more resources to do what they want, on top of getting
a nice job and being paid.

~~~
ggm
Yes. The "I'm happy, this isn't a crisis" outcome is always possible.

------
lacker
Instagram often seemed to have its own way of doing things and its own
aesthetic within Facebook, one that the founders championed. Recently,
however, the winning strategy for Instagram seems to be copying features from
Snapchat, and abandoning the style that got it to its first 100 million users.
I can imagine that being frustrating.

~~~
kookiekrak
Instagram hasn't copied from Snapchat in a very long time. Have you used
Snapchat recently? The UX is completely different and awful now.

Instagram is innovating with new features like Video Calling and Live Video
that Snapchat lacks.

~~~
untog
Instagram Stories felt like a very obvious copy of Snapchat, and it wasn't
that long ago.

~~~
Puer
They may have initially copied Snapchat, but they've built on the feature and
made it much more engaging to use than the original.

------
ChuckMcM
Without being too careless[1] I think it is plausible to assume they and their
children will not "have" to work again. The "have" is in scare quotes because,
in my experience with tech people I know who have 'banked out' of the
workforce, working on something is often more rewarding, over a longer term,
than sitting around consuming entertainment while eating and drinking. So
nearly everyone I know who became multi-millionaires or beyond have ended up
still doing something interesting with their lives.

So stepping down from FB is kind of a no brainer, especially if it becomes
less "fun" due to issues raised by other people. Building stuff is fun,
cleaning up a mess, is not fun. Trying to do stuff while the mess is getting
worse and worse around you, that is pure torture in my opinion.

[1] There is a sad track of people who have made millions and then lost it all
due to poor choices.

[2] Billionaires actually -- [https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-
systrom/#3b19b6447396](https://www.forbes.com/profile/kevin-
systrom/#3b19b6447396) \-- or not --
[https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-
business/...](https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-
business/tech-millionaire/mike-krieger-net-worth/)

------
minimaxir
My first reaction was the parallel to Jan Koum's unexpected exit over
Facebook's ethics; good to see the article ends with that story.

After Google's recent Dragonfly resignations, this might be the new standard
for tech companies.

~~~
shshhdhs
> this might be the new standard for tech companies.

Unfortunately, I believe this is just hopeful ambition that won’t become a
reality. The majority of folks I meet in tech tend to be a paycheck or two
away from financial catastrophe and generally shy away from rocking the boat.
A small percentage have their house in order, and those are the folks that
have the luxury to resign so quickly when they have moral/ethical objections.

~~~
GuiA
I was shocked to discover that many people making salaries amongst the highest
percentile in the world are indeed a few months without paychecks away from
being in an unpleasant financial situation.

I’m not too sure what the overarching reasons for that are, but my guess is
that lifestyle inflation is very real, financial education isn’t very common,
and many people focus on the wrong abstractions (ie decision making starting
with “I make $200k a year, I can afford this!” rather than “what’s my burn
rate?”)

~~~
Groxx
That, and rent that's well over 50% of your monthly income, to have a 1
bedroom apartment miles from anything.

~~~
mercutio2
No programmer working at A-list Bay Area companies should be earning so little
that a 1 bedroom anywhere needs to be 50% of their gross income.

1 bedrooms in Mountain View are going for 3-4K/month. No programmers at
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook are making less than $100k.
Starting salaries (not counting bonuses and RSUs) are between $120k and $150k.

NIMBY-ism shovels money towards landlords, no doubt, but Bay Area programmers
are still very rich.

~~~
Groxx
Gross pay is almost totally irrelevant, as are RSUs prior to IPO, but to use
those numbers:

Your _top_ number, 150k, at 30% taxes (roughly expected in this area) gives
you 105k. That's 8.75k/month, which is pretty darn close to half of your
listed Mountain View price... and Mountain View isn't even the most expensive.

~~~
mercutio2
You said “well over 50% of monthly income”, which, in the US, is generally
taken to mean gross income, particularly when relating income to housing
costs, because of the FHA’s ancient “spend no more than 30% of gross income on
housing, or you’re considered cost burdened” rule of thumb.

If you had said “nearly 50% of post-tax salary”, I wouldn’t have quibbled. My
point is that no Bay Area programmer living in a conveniently located 1
bedroom is likely to be what the FHA would consider cost burdened, unless
they’re working for well below market rate at a startup (and thus are, in my
opinion, being exploited by their employer).

Every company I mentioned is public, and RSUs are extremely relevant for total
compensation analysis at these companies.

~~~
Groxx
You can't pay rent with pre-tax money, so I don't see how that can in any way
be assumed to be related to "% of monthly income" that comes out of net pay.

Maybe it's common in financial circles? But most people I know balance their
books based on their take-home, not gross.

~~~
mercutio2
If I tell you “I make $100,000/year”, do you interpret that statement as “my
after tax income is $100k”? Most Americans don’t.

Americans generally talk about income in terms of gross. This is very
disorienting for people from cultures where “income” as a solitary noun
generally refers to post-tax income, but arguing with culture isn’t likely to
be very fruitful.

It is absolutely true that this is rarely useful for making budgeting
decisions, because you have to come up with some inaccurate assessment of
after tax net, which is especially tricky with simultaneously progressive and
regressive income tax regimes like the US system for high earners.

The cultural variation around internalizing taxes is even more obvious for
transactional taxes, where most of Europe lists prices inclusive of VAT but
the US lists prices before sales tax; the US affection for communicating costs
while ignoring tax and then expressing distress when they finally appear is
widespread.

It doesn’t sound like we really disagree on much at the object level, here,
we’re disagreeing on semantics (and, I suspect, on tone).

------
rakibtg
I know i'm wrong, and doing a misjudgement here but the fact is "Companies
like facebook don't need founders, they will eventually make the product that
people might use in everyday life, they will do it anyhow; by either copying
that product or to buy it. Remember that the 'poke your friend' feature is
only unique from facebook everything else is someone else's things"

this evil face of facebook will hurt more and more companies day after day and
in a result a chain reaction that will affect the life of general people.

------
wenbin
It’s time to relisten ALL past podcast interviews of kevin systrom
[https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP](https://lnns.co/Ut_qSy6-TwP) and mike krieger
[https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv](https://lnns.co/YrbpXP9aTMv) :)

------
stephen_g
I find Instagram fascinating, because on the one hand it's one of my favourite
social network apps, but on the other hand I kind of feel like they don't know
what people like about it and are trying to kill it... Perhaps I'm just weird
though and other people like the direction they're going in?.

A good example of what I'm talking about is the whole recent _you 've seen all
the posts you care about, keep scrolling for things you're not interested in
from people you don't care about_ "feature" that popped up a few weeks ago.
They just seem to be incredibly determined to push the content of users I
don't care about on me, when what I think made Instagram so great was that I
could carefully curate what I follow to only see stuff by profiles I'm
interested in... And what's the deal with not having a native iPad app? That's
just insane!

I wonder how much of this is pushed on them by Facebook, and whether that had
something to do with them leaving?

------
tareqak
WSJ source: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-
instagra...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-messing-with-instagram-
prompted-co-founders-departure-1537905005) .

------
antpls
Is there any open-source, federated alternative to Instagram? Could Mastodon
be used the same way?

------
tuyguntn
Whatsapp first, then Instagram, something is going over there, who is next and
why?

------
gammateam
rest and vest!

non-story

------
Xunxi
This is interesting, considering Snapchat teams up with Amazon to Offer Image-
Based-Shopping today. [https://www.snap.com/en-
US/news/](https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/)

~~~
dabei
How is this related?

------
mactyler
Kevin and Mike have my utmost respect for everything they have done for the
world. Thank you so much for truly believing in something and giving it all up
for that.

