Kevin Weil: A Startup Acquires Superpowers

So can you talk a little bit about the relationship between Instagram and Facebook? It must be quite interesting. How integrated is it and how independent are you?

Yeah, we're very independent, and we get a ton of value from Facebook. And those two things don't seem like they mesh immediately, but it's the best of both worlds. And I. I've never seen anything like it. Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom deserve a lot of credit for how they have set this thing up, because it really is the best of both worlds. So we rely heavily on Facebook for things like infrastructure. They have data centers around the world. They have scalable systems that we can just begin using if they meet our use, if they meet our needs, and that means we can go faster. We leverage their sales team. So if you're an advertiser, you can use the same interfaces you're already using to advertise on Facebook, to advertise on Instagram. If we need business development contacts around the world, Facebook has teams around the world that we're able to use. And so we get all of that value. But then from a product standpoint, in terms of what we build, in terms of how we evolve, Instagram, we're totally independent, so we do what's right for the Instagram community, Facebook does what's right for the Facebook community. And as a result, we get to be this tiny company that has superpowers from being a part of Facebook, but we get to move fast and build what's right for our product, which is not always the same as what's right for Facebook or for WhatsApp or for Oculus or the other things that are a part of overall Facebook. So it works really well. Sometimes you end up doing the same thing, sometimes you end up doing different things. And in the same way that. That somebody else within Facebook wouldn't tell us, oh, no, we're building that. You can't build it. We don't tell anyone else that either. So we work pretty independently, but we look for ways that we can help each other if there are opportunities.