If you sell your company you lose your company. Everyone with the sophistication to be in a position to sell a company to Facebook for ten figures knows this. The main purpose of Zuckerberg saying “I won’t do X” is to give the Instagram some reputational repair so that when they get tsk-tsked on Twitter or at fancy parties in Napa that they can say “Hey he said he wouldn’t!” They knew he would.

If the sale contract says, "In the event that Acquirer does X, Acquirer will pay $100B to the EFF.", one might reasonably believe it, especially if $SUBSTANTIAL is held in escrow.

Yeah those seem like terms that acquirers will just be cool with

They won't mind at all if they never intend to do X and it helps them get a discount.

Poison pills like that are common in conservation easements, for example. Our family owns land with an easement which, if I recall correctly, states that anyone wishing to break the easement will owe back-taxes reaching back to 1992, with compounded interest, on the development rights to the land.

In return, we were able to keep the family farm when my grandparents passed away.

> then bully the original founders out of their company

They sold Instagram. It was no longer their company.

It’s too bad, too. Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it.

> Facebook would have some real competition today if they hadn’t sold it.

Would they? Why do you assume that they’d be able to grow to their current levels without Facebook money, engineering and know how?

Building, growing and sustaining big social network is truly challenging, as we can see by how few companies were able to do it successfully. Even companies with bottomless pockets like Google failed at it spectacularly.

Didn't they already have a large market share before selling to Facebook? They might not have grown as quickly, but considering that they had a foot in the door, and people were already considering Facebook to be the "old-person" social media, they might have done well otherwise.

adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity, they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

> adequate technical talent, at a large enough scale, is a commodity

Then why did Google fail?

> they were already very successful before the facebook acquisition.

They had few million users - that’s pretty good, but far far for being really successful. Everyone (including me) thought that Facebook was crazy for spending one billion on some random hipster photo app.

Technical talent is necessary but not sufficient. You need other things: a niche that hasn’t already been taken over due to network effects, the right design to address that market, possibly the marketing chops to get the ball rolling. Sometimes you can try to tilt the playing field by exploiting advantages that you have. That is not a guarantee of success either.

Technical talent is plentiful in Silicon Valley as long as you have the secret ingredient, stock options actually worth a lot of money.

Google+ bungled the very first part, the need they were serving. It is somewhat common for tech giants to hire renowned technical experts whether in design, engineering, etc but totally bungle the very first part. Just throw money at these experts and they will suddenly appear. As you can see, money isn’t much of an advantage tech giants have against fast growing upstarts, especially with valuations of high growth tech companies.

Doesn't that describe his behavior in creating Facebook as well?

hmmm thats what happened at oculus...