INSTAGRAM CO-FOUNDERS RESIGNED FROM FACEBOOK
The co-founders of the world's most famous image-sharing app, Instagram, announced that they will resign from Facebook in the coming months – making this the second Facebook-acquired company to lose a founder after WhatsApp's Jan Koum, resigned earlier this year.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger published, in a blog post, that they will be resigning and said that they plan to take some time off and "explore their creativity and curiosity" before they embark on their next venture.
Instagram is Facebook's most successful acquisition – Zuckerberg bought it for $1 billion, and it is worth far more than that today. Other than the monetary value, Instagram has more than one billion active monthly users. That’s a lot of wannabe photographers…
"Mike and I are grateful for the last eight years at Instagram and six years with the Facebook team," Systrom says. "We’ve grown from 13 people to over a thousand with offices around the world, all while building products used and loved by a community of over 1 billion."
Systrom and Krieger aren’t the first Facebook-acquired founders to abandon their positions. Earlier this year, WhatsApp co-founder, Jan Koum, left Facebook over apparent disagreements about user privacy and data-sharing. Koum's fellow co-founder Brian Acton also left Facebook in September 2017. If Systrom or Krieger share similar misgivings about Facebook as Koum and Acton, they’re not letting on – at least not right now.
Mr Zuckerberg apparently likes taking credit for the massive success of Insta, and many people close to the matter weren't really amused. In the most recent call, Zuckerberg explained that Instagram grew twice as fast being part of Facebook as it could have on its own, a wildly unprovable statement that Insta-insiders were allegedly peeved about.
Facebook recently decided to poach Instagram's chief operating officer, Marne Levine, to become Facebook's global head of business development. Zuckerberg decided to place Adam Mossri, who ran Facebook's News Feed, in the operation position at Instagram, and he will likely be the successor to the current founders.
1/2: A message from our CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “Kevin and Mike are extraordinary product leaders and Instagram reflects their combined creative talents. I've learned a lot working with them for the past six years and have really enjoyed it.
— Facebook (@facebook) September 25, 2018