No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Zuckerberg’s “family of apps” plan. Cox told Zuckerberg he needed to let the products build independently and not become too similar. “They’ll compete a bit with each other, but if we have more unique brands, we’ll be able to reach different kinds of users.” He and Systrom had spoken extensively about using Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory of product development, which states that consumers “hire” a product to do a certain task, and that its builders should be thinking about that clear purpose when they build. Facebook was for text, news, and links, for example, and Instagram was for posting visual moments and following interests. But that wasn’t how Zuckerberg thought of it. “We should think of this globally,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re trying to build a global community—not a bunch of smaller communities.” If you added up all the unique people using at least one of the apps in the family, you got a community of 2.5 billion, which was bigger than Facebook. “I just think it’s going to be hard to do,” Cox protested. “These are pretty different teams, and their user bases are differentiated a lot already.” “Aren’t we taking an operational risk?” Systrom added. “If I have to worry about Instagram, but also have to worry about Messenger and Facebook, I’m not sure what that looks like in practice.” “I think it’s a risk we should take,” Zuckerberg declared.

The debate that precipitated the split