Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. So we’re still on the road to IPO and it’s now April. Facebook has been working on its roadshow and presenting to investors, large institutions who will buy into the IPO. And on April 9, 2012, they come out with a rather shocking announcement at the time that we’ve already covered on this show in one of early episodes, and that is in fact our benchmark of what a great acquisition is. They announced that they’re acquiring Instagram. And we talked about this a little bit on the episode. But just to step back again here and put this into context of how crazy this was, that Facebook had filed their S-1. They’re in the process of going public and they acquire a company that has 13 employees for a billion dollars. This was just crazy. But, underscores how much, how Mark and Sheryl and the team were coming to realize how big of a problem mobile was for them. And the entire rationale for the Instagram acquisition was around bolstering their story and their user base in mobile. I remember trying to rationalize this at the time and talking to friends. I think we even talked about this on the Instagram episode that there were a few things that Facebook held near and dear, one of which was being the source of platform andidentity, and that was quickly becoming really important to them to get a foothold in, that everybody sort of needed a Facebook as infrastructure on the internet. But the killer app for Facebook was photos. It was photo sharing, yup.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.