>That feels like real revisionist history to me. He was late to mobile.
I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.
1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure
2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.
As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.
Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.
Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.
I think most of us in the valley were already starting see mobile explode, it seemed obvious, but I think there were 2 things that really obstructed Facebook's "pivot" into mobile.
1. Facebook went public in 2012 with a very strange voting structure
2. While mobile was growing, the sentiment was that mobile could not be monetized as an ad platform.
As I remember it - the investor sentiment (and I mean broader wallstreet, not necessarily VCs), was that facebook was burning money in mobile and zuckerberg was abusing his power chasing it. While you can argue Facebook was late - I think it's only obvious in hindsight that Zuckerberg, a first time, 28yo founder, did the right thing in ignoring the noise and betting on mobile.
Furthermore I think calling Instagram a hail mary is reductive. When it comes to advertising, only Google and Facebook really cracked the code on making mobile ads profitable. No other social network comes close, and almost all the other ad networks have shuttered. Instagram had a 100 million users, thats fine, but so did Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit and none of them have an ARPU like Facebook. You could make the argument that FB made Instagram, instead of the other way around.
Had Facebook been a bit more established in 2012, maybe gone public 2 years earlier, maybe they would have their own Phone OS.