Re:The Fall of Silicon Valley
by ignoramous on Thursday October 29, 2020 @10:00AM
(#24930535)
> You said they couldn't have possibly been the behemoth's they are. That's just patently false...
We may never know what might have actually happened but the Stratechery article I linked to in my original comment has this tit-bit (albeit related to Instagram):
...Instagram was a product, and its business model was venture capital funding. To be sure, this wouldn’t be the case forever, but on April 9, 2012, the road from popular product to viable company was a long and arduous one. Instagram would not only need to continue growing its user base, it would also have to scale its infrastructure, figure out a business model (ok fine, advertising), build up tools to support that business model (first a sales team, then a self-serve model, plus tracking and targeting capabilities), all while fighting off larger and more established companies — particularly Facebook — that were waking up to the threat Instagram posed to their hold on user attention.
Or Systrom and Instagram could offload all of those responsibilities to Facebook and continue being "extraordinary product leaders", and pocket $1 billion to boot...
The difference from Zuckerberg — Instagram’s real CEO — is stark. Facebook launched in February, 2004, and sold its first ad two months later. True, “Facebook Flyers” bear little resemblance to the News Feed ads that power the company today, but Zuckerberg’s immediate instinct to build not just a product but a company is notable.
We may never know what might have actually happened but the Stratechery article I linked to in my original comment has this tit-bit (albeit related to Instagram):
...Instagram was a product, and its business model was venture capital funding. To be sure, this wouldn’t be the case forever, but on April 9, 2012, the road from popular product to viable company was a long and arduous one. Instagram would not only need to continue growing its user base, it would also have to scale its infrastructure, figure out a business model (ok fine, advertising), build up tools to support that business model (first a sales team, then a self-serve model, plus tracking and targeting capabilities), all while fighting off larger and more established companies — particularly Facebook — that were waking up to the threat Instagram posed to their hold on user attention.
Or Systrom and Instagram could offload all of those responsibilities to Facebook and continue being "extraordinary product leaders", and pocket $1 billion to boot...
The difference from Zuckerberg — Instagram’s real CEO — is stark. Facebook launched in February, 2004, and sold its first ad two months later. True, “Facebook Flyers” bear little resemblance to the News Feed ads that power the company today, but Zuckerberg’s immediate instinct to build not just a product but a company is notable.