The founders of Instagram have always had impeccable timing

In June of In 2014, two years after Facebook bought Instagram, I visited co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to see how things were going. They were extremely, outrageously happy. "When acquisitions are underway, I think entrepreneurs are turning to Instagram to say how it went for them," Systrom told me at the time. "We are just an example of a storybook."

In September 2012, when Systrom and Krieger had brought the team to Menlo Park for the first time, any quick acquisition seemed a little crazy. At the time, the billion dollar Facebook had agreed to pay for Instagram seemed like a scandalous amount of money. Especially for a small photo sharing application with only 30 million users per month. Especially when the acquiring company had just gone public four months earlier and had a difficult start. Why Instagram, a promising startup, would sell so soon, people wondered. And would Facebook, accidentally or deliberately, kill him?

But quickly, life on Facebook has become a growth engine for the company. Namely, the ad took off. In 2016, Instagram launched a "stories" feature that worked exactly like Snapchat's feature, and slowed the growth of its biggest competitor. According to eMarketer, Instagram will generate nearly $ 8 billion in advertising revenue next year. Snapchat, on the other hand, should only bring in $ 921 million. Earlier this year, Instagram announced that it had finally reached one billion users worldwide.

So no one should be surprised that, nearly eight years after the creation of Instagram, its founders leave.

It may seem strange that both go to what appears to be the height of Instagram's meteoric rise. But Systrom, in particular, has always had a talent for timing. At college in 2005, he told me that he had been offered a job at Facebook, and that I refused to finish school instead. For most people, giving up a slot on Facebook might have been a late career mistake. But in hindsight, by the first time, he was able to prepare for his second interlude, with a much greater opportunity this time. He had kept in touch with Zuckerberg, while he and Krieger were building the app that would eventually become Instagram. "I mean, the valley consists of 50, 60 people, one feels, no?", He said. "It's a very small world." As the fledgling app took off, he met Zuckerberg at a party with Matt Cohler, a former member of the Instagram group.

In the weeks that followed, they continued to talk, and the time had come. Instagram was already growing fast, but Systrom and Krieger thought that Instagram could be very big – a service of a billion people one day. To get them there, they knew exactly one social technology company that was mastering the process of creating a social network of billions of people. You can guess which one.

Krieger and Systrom both anticipated that by selling their products on Facebook, they could do without more difficult and less exciting tasks: recruiting engineers, integrating and creating infrastructures for many new users and interfacing with new ones. lawyers, while doubling on the most appreciated parts: construction products. In September 2012, the acquisition was completed and the 15 members of the Instagram team came to Menlo Park to settle in a cavernous room with a large glass door.

At first, everyone was a little nervous. Facebook did not have a template yet to buy a business that it would allow to operate independently. "You take a company that has an identity and you move it into a different context," said Systrom. "I think there was a lot of apprehension." But from the beginning, Systrom was not at all concerned, he said. "Mark and I have always been very aligned. We just wanted to make some really cool stuff together, "he said.

And they did it. By June 2014, their service had grown by 666% to reach 200 million monthly users. They invited me to spend the afternoon piloting drones over the Stanford campus and taking photos to post on Instagram. (#Dronestagram As we were going out, the duo explained how they were trying out new features such as videos and private messaging, they were just starting to show ads, and Systrom was still personally reviewing every ad that was aired. on the rise, especially among the artists and celebrities who were interested in the platform.With what they perceived as a smart link with Facebook, the skies were cloudless, as far as they could see it "I mean you end up as if you had different investors, if it works as we do, which is pretty self-contained," said Systrom.

This was particularly noteworthy, since in the early spring Facebook had agreed to pay $ 19 billion for Whatsapp and soon after he had agreed to pay $ 2 billion for Oculus. These acquisitions had not yet been concluded and Facebook hoped that the successful integration of Instagram could be the model of a strategy that would allow Facebook to create a portfolio of applications. He explained that Facebook would help with the best suited parties. "You know, as potentially with Whatsapp, there is a set of services that Facebook has built and which, I think, can change a business that comes in."

Six years later, a generation in the years of social networking, it should come as no surprise that the founders end up moving forward. On the one hand, this is what is happening in technology startups. As Noam Wasserman, Founding Director of the Founders Initiative of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, wrote, 60% of the founders left after four years. Of course, most of these founders did not create a fast growing startup like Instagram, in the middle of a Web era favorable to the founders, but make no mistake: Krieger and Systrom certainly did not leave early.

But the founders of Instagram have always been masters of timing. Instagram is a beloved social media property within a company under pressure from all directions. Yes, we risk blaming the founders of Instagram for criticism that Whatsapp co-founder Brian Acton attacked Facebook this week in Forbes, expressing concern that the company was too big. . But the relationship of Whatsapp and Instagram with Facebook comes from radically different origins. While Action did not agree at the outset with Zuckerberg's ideas on how WhatsApp should develop, the founders of Instagram were largely in tune with the social media giant. It's only recently that Instagram's founders have expressed concern about the extent to which Facebook is reducing the growth of the photosharing application on its own app.

But regardless of the tension within Menlo Park's closed doors – and even though Systrom and Krieger had the same cheerful relationship with their acquirer as they had at the beginning of their partnership – they would still be smart to leave. .

The properties of social media can often look like nightclubs. They are cool while the cool people are there, and they disappear without a trace. Right now, Instagram's party continues to grow and its founders are smart enough (and cool enough) to know you should never be the last to leave a party. Their reputation is consolidated: they are emblematic and very young founders who have a long future ahead of them. Facebook paved the way for them.

Starting now, they are ensuring a promising future. If Instagram continues to grow and evolve and become something more important – and rewarding – than it is, Systrom and Krieger will always be able to accept its existence. If, however, Instagram experiences the inevitable decline that so many of its peers have been confronted with (remember MySpace? Friendster? Flickr? Snapchat …), this will not happen on their watch.

It turns out that the timing is all in startupland. And the founders of Instagram have proven themselves. Again.

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