19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram

April 11th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

this story reminds me of MyBlogLog – acquired for $10M after 9 months in 2007, only 4 years later and 2 zero-s added:

19 months from launch to $1,000,000,000 acquisition: Instagram

On October 5th, 2010, Instagram launched My first instagram photo We’re really excited to launch our first version of Instagram today, free in the App Store. Instagram makes mobile photos fast, simple, & beautiful.

We need this to understand how you use our service - you can take it out if you like. Cheers, your Blogspire team.

via: swizec.com

Instagram

Instagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

when I saw this news on TV, and sitting trough the whole story, it felt like they were announcing a war or a new terrorist attack. it was not good news for anyone but those three founders.

these valuations have only market-sense, but no connection to the real world. Lot’s of friends have been talking about new bubble for over a year now, and I couldn’t agree with them. I believed that this time it’s different, that everyone is building real companies, with real value, and that exits happen only after they prove it or run out of resources.

not anymore apparently. instagrams valuation makes sense only in relation to facebook’s valuation, not in relation to the world or the users.

i am not saying that they are useless, like some bubble 1.0 ideas were – not at all. instagram figured out how to make pictures of urban reality, full of smog and with poor natural light, beautiful again. it gives a chance for new kids to live in a visually nice world again. like bauhaus did a century ago.

but that on it’s own is not worth 1/30th of world hunger.

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