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by indiesolver 2818 days ago
tl;dr : Zuckerberg - Instagram’s real CEO (from the author's "The difference from Zuckerberg — Instagram’s real CEO — is stark")
4 comments

Systrom and Krieger built Instagram the product, Zuckerberg built Instagram the business
Sheryl Sandberg, a really good sales team, and a bunch of shit-hot engineers in ads built IG, the business.

Zuckerberg tends to avoid monetisation, leaving that to Sales (i.e. Sheryl) and Ads.

Sorry, you got it wrong.

Sheryl is not in to sales. And, zuck is all about business but he don't think about monetisation until that product have at least a billion users [1].

The real person behind instagram's monetisation success - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-helped-facebook-brin...

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-products-need-1-b...

No offence, but Sheryl heads up sales and ops (the head of Sales, David Fischer, reports to her), and will go visit big clients to sell them on FB ads/new products (of which IG was a good case).

I'm aware that Mark (he doesn't like zuck anymore, apparently) thinks that, but he focuses on product much much much much more than monetisation (there's an apocryphal story that suggests he said that ads weren't part of his vision for FB to an internal sales conference in about 2009-10).

Finally, I would credit the engineers in Ads a whole lot more than Mr Weil (to my recollection, all of the stuff that ended up making IG money was in place before he joined).

Source: worked for FB for a long time.

and thus Zuckerberg - Instagram’s real CEO
I would summarize it rather: a good product can yield a large network but only when combined with a good monetization/business plan can it be a successful business.
Your tl;dr isn't _wrong_, per se. But the article is really well written, and I feel like there's more depth to it than what you've said.

Plus, your statement comes off as kind of cynical and snarky ("no shit, guys" is the tone, even though you probably didn't mean it that way). The piece itself makes some pretty interesting, non-obvious points I think.

This tl;dr really skips over the insightful substance of the article.