"I can't get to $2 billion, but..."

Emailed on November 13th, 2020 in The Friday Forward

Sriram Krishnan has a great repository of historically important memos from the tech world that I recommend checking out.

One of the more interesting memos was between Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) and Kevin Systrom (Instagram) which led to the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram.

You can read that here.

It's an interesting reminder of how business gets done, even when the purchase price is over one billion dollars. It's also a view into the minds of two of the most impactful product designers of our time.

Reflecting on the memo, a seven sentence summary might go something like:

Zuckerberg: We're going to build a mobile photo sharing app at Facebook. Before we do that, I'd like Instagram to consider joining us so we don't compete.

Systrom: That's great to hear. We're likely going in a different direction than Facebook. Let's see how it goes.

Zuckerberg: Fine, how about a billion dollars.

Systrom: Oh. Let's get lunch.