[lacker]

Much more of the incentive is the desire to make Instagram a cool, popular, successful thing. Even though they sold the company to Facebook, it still felt like their creation the vast majority of the time. They were proud of what they had built and they wanted to make it a really popular thing that people liked to use.

There are plenty of billion-dollar acquisitions that don't work out at all. Instagram grew far bigger than it had been when they were acquired, in both financial impact and impact on the world.