So, it's obviously not for talent ($100mm per head? no way...), users, or tech. That leaves it as a competitive play. They took Instagram off the market to keep it out of the hands of Apple and Google.
Given the "prices" Google are rumored to be paying to acquire great engineering staff, a team of three engineers who've got a proven track record of building and supporting 100million users on their own - surely they'd be worth some not-down-in-the-noise-floor percentage of even the seemingly insane valuation here?
And a founding team who've "created" $1billion in value in ~550 days? Even if you only credit them with last weeks $500mil rumors - surely that founding team would be worth several tens of million dollars even if you didn't get the company they founded?
Darn-it!
Others have been for their user base while some say it's for a talent acquisition (which I highly doubt). The title doesn't seem to imply that's why they bought Instagram.
I wonder what Instagram's privacy policy says about things like the exif data on all your photos? Almost certainly all geo-tagged. A bunch of data like "how often and how quickly individual users upgrade their iPhones".
Cynical-me wonders how much value FB placed on the non-FB social graph that Instagram built when it hoovered up everybodies contact list?
And for their tech stack what its impressing is that they chose very wisely IMO: if I had to build from scratch any Web or mobile app I wouldn't do differently (Python n PostgreSQL, etc)
That's pretty clever.
I do the same exact kind of work. So am I depreciating myself? I may be brilliant and handsome to boot, but I don't think I'm worth 333 million dollars. Which was my point.
Oh sure, I might be worth several mil. I'm that good. But that's still a tiny fraction of what Facebook paid. So no, it wasn't about the brains.
I wonder what the real "market value" for a proven team of 3 great engineers who were the technical base that allowed a company to grow from nothing to $1billion in under 2 years?
It wouldn't surprise me to find those three guys as a team offered 20 or more million if the right company thought they were on the market.
Lars Rasmussen made out like a bandit when he went to FB a few years back, and that was after the "failure" (at least relative to Instagram) of Wave, and before the current "bubble" as well.