Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…These are big numbers. No one would say this now, but if you go back and read the articles at the time of the Facebook acquisition for a billion dollars, people are like, is Facebook insane? Are they crazy giving them a billion dollars? They've got no revenue and only 30 million users. We knew we're really in a pinch now. These guys are really going to be able to outflank us and bring real leverage to bear against us. They did. It wasn't too long after that that they stopped allowing Instagram photos to appear inside the feed and Twitter. The day of the acquisition, we knew, like, oh, man, that's really going to be a problem for us. Two things happened. I don't remember the order in which they happened. The first you mentioned, I think to this day still, when you post an Instagram link on Twitter, frustratingly it is just a URL. You're like, come on, guys, can't you get along? The other thing is that the social graph stopped working. Instagram no longer could use Twitter's API to help you find your friends to follow. How did both of those go down? Well, I got a call one day. I think it was from Mark. Mark said, hey, I just want to give you the heads up. The Instagram team has decided that Instagram photos need to be viewed on Instagram. The insert of the Instagram photo into the Twitter feed is no longer going to work and it's just going to be a link. I think he said something like they're going to shut that off tomorrow. I was like, that's a bummer.. That's really, really bad.…

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