Instagram Co-Founders Quit Facebook
The co-founders of Instagram are resigning from the social media company.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are famously known in Silicon Valley for being the co-founders of Instagram. This fledgling company was then acquired by Facebook in 2012 for a whopping $1 billion and now is one of the most used social networks linked with Facebook.
Facebook has been taking fire lately, and has been through a lot of controversy this past year. According to the New York Times, Instagram co-founders Mike and Kevin fired some shots as well by announcing their resignations and will be leaving Mark Zuckerberg out to dry within weeks. This resignation follows resignations from a founder of WhatsApp (which Facebook bought in 2014) Jan Koum in May with him simply saying “time to move on”. Another WhatsApp founder Brian Acton was a tad more scathing by donating $50 million to a rival company before quitting in November last year, what a way to go. Their resignations also coincided with the launch of Instagram’s new video service called IGTV.
Instagram co-founders Systrom and Krieger expressed that they are grateful to Facebook and Instagram, but wanted to leave because they want to take a well-deserved time off, and then start something new. There was also an alleged clash between the Instagram co-founders and Facebook’s leadership over their diminishing independence and control of their company. People like Systrom and Krieger want to be their own boss and when someone buys takes their power away, its natural they take their talents somewhere else. Somewhere that’s their own. They will no doubt have routines to success already in place and we look forward to their next project.
Facebook has no comment so far and is still busy testing their still unnamed Facebook dating app which promises to bring serious competiton to OKCupid and Tinder. Although both companies stock prices plummeted with Facebook’s announcement, this still remains to be seen. Facebook has suffered a lot of heat including its brazen use of personal information, security breaches, and overall policies.
Instagram was left untouched by these issues. As a matter of fact, they broke through the 1 billion monthly active users last June, and would generate $5.48 billion. But these major changes to Instagram will hurt Facebook as a whole, imagine the shoes that need to be filled after this string of resignations. And without Instagram co-founders Systrom and Krieger holding together their tight-knit team that they were with since day one, we can only observe how Facebook deals with this.
