One billion dollars.
Instagram has thirteen employees. At their last round of funding, according to Om Malik, they were valued prospectively at $500 million. Now it’s double that, and on paper, each employee just hit the lotto for about $77 million.
If you didn’t think we were entering a new tech bubble, abandon your misapprehension. Facebook is apparently going compete with Google to be the Microsoft of the new bubble – and they’re using their pre-IPO magic unicorn rainbow money to acquire their way to the top. Om Malik nailed it – Instagram figured out mobile in a way Facebook never has, and represented a legit threat. He doesn’t say as much, but the Android client launch last week simultaneously made an acquisition more plausible and more necessary for Facebook.
I don’t have a lot on Instagram. In fact, I think I took maybe one picture before the Android launch, which was enough to prompt me to go back and look again. But it’s not connected to anything else – I certainly don’t use my Twitter or Facebook as a login credential – and I fully anticipate that Instagram will suffer a similar fate as Gowalla, or Dodgeball, or any number of other companies that get acquired, sublimated, and ultimately digested by their parent. Without going into too many details, I’ve witnessed at fairly close range the process by which a startup gets eaten by a big company – and no matter how independently they profess to run it or maintain its existing culture and whatnot, the fact is that eventually that smaller company will get completely subsumed by its parent. The founders invariably roll out before long – the kind of mentality that drives the person behind a startup is generally HIGHLY incompatible with living as one cell of a larger corporate entity. So if you’re an Instagram fan who doesn’t care for anything about Facebook, you need to start planning NOW for life after Instagram.
Thing is, I think social networking is starting to peak. I don’t know how much further Facebook has to grow if my mother is on it. More to the point, the hip social-networking app in the Valley these days is Path, a sort of one-stop hybrid of Foursquare and Instagram and Twitter that explicitly caps you at 150 friends (go Wiki “Dunbar’s Number” for an explanation of why 150). I can completely see Twitter becoming the mechanism of following athletes and bloggers and landmarks while Path (or a similarly-curated app) is the VIP room for actual two-way social networking. Where Facebook failed – and where Google+ has yet to get traction – is in the concept of more granular social circles, which Facebook utterly failed to provide when it threw open the floodgates after tying one’s real name to the network.
More to the point, though, I think Facebook has crossed the line once too often with the bleeding-edge Valley crowd. The number of people bailing out of FB (or proudly claiming they were never one it) seems to be growing, and Facebook itself is getting more and more of the AOL stench about it. And lest we forget, AOL is selling off intellectual property to Microsoft to raise operating capital – a move Gizmodo compared to “selling sperm to make the cable bill”. I’d be interested to know how much of AOL’s revenue comes from old dialup accounts that people forgot to cancel.
But then, maybe I’m not in the demo for social networking. I was barely on the fringes of Friendster (except for one memorable interview), I never had anything to do with MySpace (hopelessly juvenile by the time it went big), and Facebook – aside from the “rolling high school reunion” effect – has only been of marginal interest in recent years when it’s not trying to whore my personal information out for cash on the sly. Maybe I just don’t know what’s doing with social networking and I’m not the target.
I can tell you this, though: when a 13-man company with one product and no profit strategy is worth a billion dollars, we’re on full-tilt bubble watch.