Season 4, Episode 3: Instagram Revisited (with Emily White)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2019

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We enter the wayback machine and revisit the subject of Acquired’s second ever episode, Facebook’s bombshell 2012 acquisition of Instagram — this time with the help of then-Facebook executive Emily White, who moved over post-acquisition to become Instagram’s first business head. Together with Kevin and Mike, Emily helped build Instagram's business model, which today accounts for nearly 1/4 of all of Facebook’s revenue. Is this still Acquired’s canonical A+ with an extra 3.5 years of hindsight? Spoiler alert: yes.

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carve Outs:

Ben: Sam Harris on the Joe Rogan Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5_hAEsLkU
David: Boom Town by Sam Anderson: https://www.amazon.com/Boom-Town-Fantastical-Basketball-World-class-ebook/dp/B077RHYC4G

Transcript

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0:00.0	I can't believe that Instawalk tours were a thing. Like Facebook employees were led around campus to use
0:06.4	Instagram and take pictures of things after the acquisition to learn how to use it. Welcome. Welcome to Season 4, episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs.
0:31.0	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:32.0	I'm David Rosenthal. and we are your hosts. On our second
0:36.2	episode ever way back in 2015 we covered Facebook's acquisition of
0:41.2	Instagram and in fact it's the canonical example of an
0:44.8	a-plus that we use on our show. So today we'll dive into the integration itself
0:49.3	how Facebook spent a billion dollars to take something from zero revenue to an
0:54.2	app responsible for almost a quarter of all of their revenue today and we are
0:59.3	super right we are super lucky to be joined by the one and only Emily White who played an important role in making this all happen.
1:08.0	So who is Emily? So Emily today is a venture investor and the president of Anthos Capital in Los Angeles.
1:15.2	But previously in her career was a long time executive at Google where she joined very early,
1:19.5	pre-IPO.
1:21.0	She worked with Cheryl Sandburg for 10 years and she then continued to work for Cheryl by moving to
1:26.4	Facebook in 2010 and then the topic of today's episode joined Instagram Post Acquisition as their first business executive.
1:35.2	She was tasked with building out the business model, which spoiler, she did a pretty good job,
1:39.8	and then became C.O.O. of Snap before transitioning full time over to what David wrote in the notes as the
1:44.8	dark side of investing and now sits on the boards of Lulu Lemon, Greco, Honey, Hyperloop
1:50.8	1, and the X Prize.
1:52.6	Welcome Emily and thank you so much for joining us.
1:55.1	Thank you for having me.
1:56.7	Yeah, you bet.
	...

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