Read Online You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane - Free Book Online Page A

Krieger, and two early employees, Josh Riedel and Shayne Sweeney—it was easy to forget that these four twentysomethings in indigo jeans and untucked button-downs were running a billion-dollar tech company. But when Krieger noticed that a photo he snapped of the bar menu had yet to receive any likes (with 177,000 followers, the response was usually instantaneous), a MacBook Air, a Verizon Hotspot, and a pile of iPhones materialized among the glasses of cask-finished bourbon.
    Krieger dug through code on his laptop as the others texted with Instagram engineers via Facebook chat. They found the glitch and went to work. A few minutes later the problem was solved, the gadgets were tucked away, and another round was ordered. “It’s our baby,” said Systrom. “It keeps us up at night and wakes us up in the morning.” Company policy requires engineers to keep a laptop on them at all times. Computers have been whipped out during birthday parties, date nights, and wedding receptions. Once, Krieger was dining at a farm-to-table restaurant when the system crashed. He frantically roamed the grounds for a wireless connection until he finally found one bar of service—inside a chicken coop.
    These feats of server acrobatics ended once the Facebook deal was finalized in September 2012. The growing team could tap into Zuckerberg’s massive network infrastructure. The deal, Systrom said, happened during a frenzied week in April after he returned from a UK vacation. That Wednesday Instagram was wired $50 million in a series B round from venture capitalists including Greylock, Sequoia, and Thrive Capital, valuing the company at $500 million. On Saturday Zuckerberg invited Systrom to his Palo Alto home. This time Systrom took Zuck’s offer. By Monday the billion-dollar deal—including $300 million in cash—was done.
    Facebook’s purchase of Instagram—a company that, at the time of the purchase, had yet to earn a dollar—caused many in the media to scream, “Bubble!” Meanwhile, some insiders were whispering, “Bargain!” “It was worth much more than that. I think Facebook got a great deal,” said Quora’s D’Angelo. “It was probably very scary to Facebook that someone else might own Instagram or that it might turn into its own social network. . . . The fact is that everyone is coordinated on this one thing to share photos, and you can’t move them all out onto something else. The network has been built out. It’s too late.”
    With the benefit of time, it now appears that Facebook did get a bargain. Instagram, today with 200 million active users, was a cheap way for Zuckerberg to jump into the mobile game. In fact many barstool philosophers around the Valley—prompted by Facebook’s failed $3 billion acquisition of Snapchat and successful bids for WhatsApp ($19 billion) and Oculus VR ($2 billion)—theorize that, as of 2014, an independent Instagram would have been worth $10 billion. We’ll never know.
    What is certain: Systrom is now both very wealthy and still in charge of the company he cofounded. Unlike his other acquisitions, which are quickly absorbed into Facebook, Zuckerberg publicly pledged to let Systrom run Instagram independently. Systrom and Krieger now use Facebook’s muscle to scale and shape Instagram into a more substantial service. Their goal: transforming Instagram from a photo app for sharing pics of puppies and pizza into a media company that communicates through photos.
    â€œImagine the power of surfacing what’s happening in the world through images, and potentially other types of media in the future, to each and every person who holds a mobile phone,” Systrom told me. At its best Instagram would be a pocket-size window to the world that would deliver a live view of what’s unfolding across the globe—say, Syrian street protests or the Super Bowl sidelines. “I think