Instagram, on the other hand, was trying to build a premium experience, brainstorming directly with advertisers about their ideas and manually placing their ads. They knew that this system couldn’t work forever, but Systrom and Krieger always urged people to do the simplest thing first, the way they had when they first built the app. Working manually on a small version of the product made more sense than spending precious engineering resources and navigating politics with Facebook’s ads sales team, for a system that might not ultimately work.
