Instagram needed to sell to Facebook because Systrom and Krieger had been slow in hiring. They were so particular about picking employees who would be a perfect fit, despite being so frenzied with keeping the site alive. Once they turned down Twitter and raised the $50 million in venture capital from Sequoia, they were still, in the words of one investor, too hungry to eat. They probably needed ten times as many employees in order to grow fast enough to give those investors the hefty return on investment they expected.
