Welcome back to this pro rata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, vaping's future just got much hazier, and crypto companies come to Washington, D.C.

But first, the big shakeup at Facebook.

Five years ago, the social network paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram.

The photo sharing app that literally just days earlier was valued at half that by venture capitalists.

The tech press was kind of split at the time, particularly because of that big price.

But today, there is no question that it was a master's stroke by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

Instagram's a huge driver of growth for Facebook, and it helped brush off challenges from rivals

like Snapchat. But last night, the two co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger,

who had stayed with the company, announced that they're leaving.

No word yet on their future plans, except they want to work together on something new.

And we could just chalk this up to two guys who have had their time and have to move on.

But there seems to be an emerging trend here at Facebook.

Several months ago, a co-founder of WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion,

not only left the company, but also its board of directors.

And in late 2016, the remaining co-founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company that Facebook

had bought, also quit.

In short, something smells rotten in Menlo Park, where Facebook used to have a reputation

for being

the big tech company that founders wanted to sell to, the one that let them do things

their way.

It's not yet clear exactly what's changed, but there's speculation, and it's growing

...