Instagram is a cash-printing leviathan, estimated to be worth in excess of $100 billion on its own and widely viewed as crucial to Facebook’s future growth. But it wasn’t always this way.
Back in 2012, the 13-employee photo-sharing app was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, in an eye-popping deal that was questioned by critics at the time but has since paid for itself a hundred times over.
In the days that followed, one of Instagram’s cofounders, Mike Krieger, gave a talk at Airbnb’s San Francisco offices about how he and Kevin Systrom, in under two years, built the photo-sharing app from nothing into a $1 billion business with 35 million users that drew the attention of one of the world’s most powerful tech companies.
Krieger and Systrom have since left Instagram, but the presentation Krieger gave in April 2012 is still fascinating on multiple levels. It presents a unique window into the company’s history, provides insight on the challenges behind going from nothing to huge so fast, and offers lessons to other entrepreneurs hoping to follow the now-legendary Instagram cofounders’ path.
Business Insider has republished the deck of slides from that talk in full below.
