Bangaly Kaba: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's so funny. Never something people talk about in growth, this partnership. It's always is like, "Oh, there's a couple of companies that really had success from partnerships in BD." How early was this a big part of the strategy? How early in the history of, I mean the partnerships team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up. The partnerships team drove a lot of the word of mouth around Instagram, but it was the partnership's work in combination with the product work that actually helped to allow a lot of that to land. It was our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have a web presence because it was critical for international growth and it also helped with SEO. And so the idea of launching web really drove and actually increased Instagram's growth by 10% the minute we launched it. And it was something that George Wang, who was there before me, had the idea around. It wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed in initially, but we had to prove to them that it was really impactful and one should launch. Then they understood why it was impactful and all of the effect of it. But web was really critical for driving so much SEO, which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work, because now every time creator or celebrity did something on Instagram, every news media article picked it up and it just helped to drive searches in Google searches, which helped to make Instagram part of the cultural zeitgeist. This is so interesting, because everyone imagines Instagram, virality, word of mouth, like SEO and partnerships sounds like a core part of Instagram's early growth, which I don't think anyone ever talks about.…

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