Instagram founders have no regrets about selling to Facebook

Back in 2012, it was quite a big deal when Facebook forked out $1 billion to acquire Instagram. The photo-sharing app was around for just two years – it was launched in 2012 – but was slowly gaining momentum. In the last seven years, Instagram has become this huge platform and now has over a billion users. It’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger resigned from Facebook last year and shared quite a few interesting tidbits at the SXSW 2019 event in Austin.
According to a report by Techcrunch, Sytrom said that there was nothing negative about selling to Facebook and it didn’t affect having less autonomy. He said, “In some ways, there being less autonomy is a function of Instagram winning. If Instagram had just been a niche app for photographers, we’d probably be working on that app for 20 years as a niche app. Instead, what happened was it got better and better and better, and it improved, and it got to a size where it was meaningfully important to this company.”