Instagram's Mike Krieger Presentation on scaling its infrastructure with 5 employees

TechCrunch has a post on Instagram's founder Mike Krieger discussing its infrastructure.

How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger

INGRID LUNDEN
posted 5 hours ago
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Mike Krieger

Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have been noticeably silent since their photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion.

In the meantime there has been a lot written about that deal, from praise to backlash, parsing what it meansand why.

But if you’d like to hear a little (actually, a lot) about how Instagram got to where it did, read on.

Last night, Krieger gave a presentation at an Airbnb event for employees and members of the network, part of a regular series called the Tech Talk. The subject was “Scaling Instagram.”

 

 

 

The presentation is here with 185 slides.

The most interesting slides I found at the end.

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Did a Fear Factor motivate Facebook's acquisition of Instagram?

It is interesting what people do when faced with their fears.  NBC's Fear Factor has made a reality show out of this fact.

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Was Mark Zuckerberg's fear factor moment is what happens if Instagram continues its growth, cutting back on Facebook's traffic?

My assumption is Facebook has data that shows how many images showing up on Facebook are linked to Instagram images.  At the rate of growth of Instagram, Facebook can see what happens to its image traffic. With $50 million of new VC money Instagram with 13 employees can add more resources and expand.  Worse case before Facebook IPO, traffic shows a change in traffic due to Instagram's growth.  $1 billion is cheap to absorb your top competition before someone else does or Instagram figures out a business model that allows them to collect revenue.

Washington Post discusses parts of this idea in their article.

Was Facebook’s purchase of Instagram motivated by fear?

View Photo Gallery — Inside Facebook’s Calif. digs: It’s been a little more than a month since the social networking giant finished moving into its new headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. On the 57-acre campus, employees can be found checking their e-mail while running on treadmills or talking on cellphones in telephone booths. Of course, they’re working, too.

By , Wednesday, April 11, 5:12 PM

It’s true — $1 billion really is cool. Just ask the guys at Instagram, who sold their mobile photo sharing app — along with their entire team (all 13 of them) — to Facebook for that astronomical figure this week.

One of the interesting speculations is the Instagram will move out of AWS to Facebook.  Can you imagine what it takes to move 33 million user accounts and data?

Another interesting data point is the Instagram user base is much younger than Facebook.

Instagram users are young and Facebook users are old

A new study shows that the two social-networking sites serve different age groups. Could this be one of the reasons why more people aren't celebrating the buyout?

James Hamilton's post on Solar Panels at Data Centers gets referenced by Forbes,

Forbes goes into depth reusing James Hamilton's post.

Can Solar Reduce The Impact Of Two High-Profile Data Centers? Amazon Engineer Weighs In [Updated]

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The sun sets on the horizon across 42nd street...

Solar arrays may not be able to provide the power density needed by data centers, one expert argues. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Solar power may be not be best way to reduce the environmental impact of sprawling data centers built by companies such as Apple and Facebook, James Hamilton, an Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer argued on his personal blog last Saturday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is Facebook worth $100 Billion? Economist reader survey 82% say No

It will be interesting on how Facebook's IPO goes.  One piece of data is an Economist reader survey with over 11,000 submittals.

The Economist Asks

Is Facebook worth $100 billion?

You voted: NoCurrent total votes: 11217
18% voted for Yes and 82% voted for No

After Facebook's much-awaited initial public offering, many observers expect the firm's market capitalisation to quickly exceed $100 billion. Some think that this is ludicrous: Facebook may be the world's biggest social network, but its revenues (an estimated $4 billion in 2011) and profits are nowhere near enough to justify such a price tag. Others bet that the firm will live up to the hype: it collects huge amounts of data about its 800m plus users, can serve up creepily well-targeted ads and, perhaps most important, could become a quasi-monopolist in the mould of Microsoft. What do you think? Is Facebook really worth $100 billion?

Voting opened on Feb 1st 2012