Should we buy Instagram, Foursquare, or Pinterest?
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Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook engineer
April 5, 2012
Mark Zuckerberg
Around?
Facebook engineer
Yeah
Mark Zuckerberg
If you could buy one of either Instagram, Foursquare or Pinterest, which would you buy?
Facebook engineer
That's a pretty tough question as they all obviously have pros/cons. My first instinct is Foursquare as I think that's the most compelling of the products in a way that would be harder for us to easily replicate
Facebook engineer
However, I think it probably also has the least mass appeal of those three
Facebook engineer
As it's really targeted towards young, urban people
Facebook engineer
Pinterest has the potential for the widest appeal, although I also think we could pretty naturally evolve some notion of spaces on Timeline that facilitated the kind of curation Pinterest does and it's not totally obvious to me not that the team itself would really be that huge of an asset here
Facebook engineer
I don't know too much about Foursquare's product/design/engineering folks
Facebook engineer
I also definitely think that there's a strategic question around who else would be interested in buying these companies and whether they're likely to sell
Facebook engineer
for example, I think Instagram might end up being more compelling than Foursquare from a defense perspective because of the potential for someone like Apple to use them as a foothold
Facebook engineer
what's your thinking?
Mark Zuckerberg
I just need to decide if we're going to buy Instagram
Mark Zuckerberg
I don't think the others are for sale at the moment.
Mark Zuckerberg
It's really expensive -- probably ~$1 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg
I think they're pretty threatening to us, but I'm not sure how much so compared to other companies out there.
Facebook engineer
That's a lot of money. What do you think is the threat model for them? Something more than contention for attention/content?
Mark Zuckerberg
I think it's basically that, but it's pretty major.
Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it depends on how big they'd get.
Mark Zuckerberg
But photos is one of a few core use cases for us.
Mark Zuckerberg
There are different ways to think about the service.
Mark Zuckerberg
On is the ways that things flow through it: News Feed, Timeline, OG, Search, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg
That's a functional breakdown of our site and how we work on it.
Mark Zuckerberg
The other is in terms of core use cases: sending messaging, sharing photos, playing games, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms. It's causing all this negative momentum in a bunch of ways around gamer overall user engagement, ad spend from gamers, overall revenue, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg
If another key use case transitioned away, I think that would be pretty bad for us.
Facebook engineer
Yeah, that makes sense
Mark Zuckerberg
On the other hand, getting a new use case is theoretically as valuable as not losing an existing one.
Mark Zuckerberg
Pinterest and Foursquare are likely more valuable markets than photos.
Mark Zuckerberg
For e-commerce and local, respectively.
Mark Zuckerberg
They're all really immature products though.
Mark Zuckerberg
Instagram can hurt us meaningfully without becoming a huge business though. For the others, if they become big we'll just regret not doing them.
Mark Zuckerberg
Or we can buy them then, or build them along the way.
Mark Zuckerberg
We're kind of already working on building some version of Foursquare.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: "It's a really big deal that we ship this photos app” (September 11, 2011)
Previously: Instagram cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg: “will he go into destroy mode if I say no” (February 13, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Instagram (Circa March 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: “last night we reached an agreement to acquire Instagram” (April 9, 2012)
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Steve Jobs reacts to Wall Street Journal story
Subject: In a Turnabout, Record Industry Releases MP3s
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:19:19 -0800
From: Steve Jobs
To: Executive Team, Eddy Cue, Jeff Robbin, Scott Forstall
I have been expecting something like this for a few months now. The motivation is a bit convoluted - companies feel they need access to the iPod but don't want to be tied to the iTunes store, so they are willing to forgo any content protection to get access to the iPod. I don't expect Hollywood to go this route, but the entire music industry could begin to move in this direction over the coming year or two. Not sure, but its a distinct possibility. I'm not entirely sure if this is good or bad for us. I can argue both views...
Steve
In a Turnabout, Record Industry Releases MP3s
By ETHAN SMITH and NICK WINGFIELD
December 6, 2006
The music industry has long resisted selling music in the MP3 format, which lacks the copy protections that prevent songs from being duplicated endlessly. But now, Blue Note Records and its marquee artist, jazz-pop singer Norah Jones, are selling her latest single through Yahoo Inc. as an MP3 -- despite the risk that it may add to piracy problems.
The move represents a small but significant retreat from one of the central tenets of the music industry's digital strategy. EMI Group PLC's Blue Note and other music companies are beginning to think they will have to sell some MP3-formatted music both to satisfy customer demand and to provide access to Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod for songs that are sold by online stores other than Apple's iTunes Store.
[This document is from The Apple iPod iTunes Antitrust Litigation (2014).]
Further reading from Ethan Smith and Nick Wingfield for The Wall Street Journal (December 6, 2006)
Previously: Microsoft execs on Apple’s music store: “We were smoked” (April 30, 2003)
Previously: Steve Jobs: “We need to make sure that when Music Match launches their download music store they cannot use iPod” (May 8, 2003)
The thing that’s super interesting in the Mark Zuckerberg conversation as someone who works in tech is how common that type of conversation is. I could expect to have this type of conversation on the daily. It would never be about whether or not to buy a company, (much more likely to be about an architecture decision) but it would definitely be about as casual as Mark and the Facebook engineer were acting.