Why Zuckerberg's Facebook needs Instagram founders now more than ever

Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, wasn't a 'team player.' That was exactly what the company needed.

Business Standard : This week, Facebook lost an executive who, in a better and different world, might one day have taken the helm of the social networking giant.

On Monday, Kevin Systrom, as well as his longtime partner, Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, quit Facebook. While seemingly out of the blue, it was a long time coming. The reason? Their unhappiness over increasingly aggressive meddling by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, about how Instagram was run.

ALSO READ: After Whatsapp, Instagram founders quit amid tensions with Zuckerberg

This might seem like business as usual in Silicon Valley. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was a wee thing, and helped it surpass a billion users. Fighting over control of tech companies is commonplace, and executive shuffles happen all the time. At Facebook alone in the last two years, the founders of WhatsApp, the messaging product, left amid disagreements over the placement of advertising. So too much of the team that founded the Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality project, as well as a conga line of other founders of start-ups the social media giant has swallowed whole. They all essentially took the money and ran (usually to luxury yachts in Fiji).

But what happened with the Instagram guys is different. A pair of extraordinarily talented entrepreneurs — who multiple sources said very much wanted to stay at Facebook, who have a gift for making great products and whose jewel-in-the-crown unit was driving the future of the entire Facebook ecosystem — had worked hard to make their creation a huge success and had remained at the company for six years already. This is not typical in tech, which is a credit to Facebook.

But then they became so irked by their boss that they up and left without any warning.

“In a perfect world, they wanted to continue to build and were not bored at all,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “But they were frustrated by an inability to take it to the next level.”

Frustrated indeed. Mr. Systrom returned on Monday from a parental leave and his first act was to quit. Think about that. While some inside Facebook are trying to spin the narrative that he’d spent his time away deep in contemplation and simply decided that six years was enough, that’s not the true motivation.

Instead, many sources say, a series of changes imposed from above made it clear to Mr.