Instagram

Key takeaways

• Instagram's acquisition by Facebook was a strategic masterstroke, unlocking immense value through technology, business model, and user engagement leverage.
• Platform ownership and owning the primary distribution channel are crucial in modern tech to maintain control over user attention and monetization.
• The deal exemplifies how high-leverage technology acquisitions can rapidly create dominant products with significant revenue potential, often with minimal initial team size.
• Acquiring complementary products can help large tech firms stay ahead in the mobile era and prevent competitors from gaining a foothold.
• The strategic positioning of platforms like Instagram influences not just user growth but the overall ecosystem of social apps and business models, especially in mobile-first markets.
• Effective use of acquisition to foster innovation and stay relevant in changing tech waves is essential for sustained dominance.

Summary

Sponsors

• Anthropic · Anthropic used to have some older infrastructure monitoring that was in place. But if they're massive scale in complexity, they instead adopted Century to help them find and fix issues faster. Century helped them detect bad hardware so they could quickly reject it before causing a cascading problem. Century enabled them to debug massive issues in hours instead of days so they could get back to their training runs. And today, Anthropic relies on Century to track exceptions, assign errors, and analyze failures in real time across all the primary languages used by Anthropics research teams, including Python, Rust, and C++. According to the Anthropic team, Century gives our developers one place where they have all the information they need to debug an issue. And one other fun update in the world of Century is that as of this month, Century now has an AI debugger called SEAR. SEAR is an AI agent that taps into all the issue context from Century and your code base to not just guess, but root cause gnarly issues and propose merge ready fixes specific to your application. We are pumped to be working with Century. They've got an incredible customer list, including not only Anthropic but Cursor, Versatile, Linear, and more. If you want to fix broken code like the over 130,000 organizations using Century from Indie hobbyist to some of the biggest companies in the world, to find and fix broken code fast, you can check out Century.io/acquired to learn more and they are offering two free months to all acquired listeners. That's Century SCNTRY.io/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
• WorkOS · Yes, Work OS is the enterprise ready platform used by open AI cursor perplexity for Cell plaid and literally hundreds of other winning companies. So what are all these companies using Work OS for? Imagine you're a fast growing startup. You've got product market fit and you're getting inbound interest from big enterprise customers. Very exciting. But then they send you their security questionnaire. Yep. And it's like 47 pages long with requirements that kind of sound like alphabet soup. Do you support sample 2.0? Can you integrate with our Octa? Do you have skim provisioning SCIM? What about our block RBAC and you're thinking I have no idea what these acronyms even mean? Let alone how to implement them? So here's the thing. These are not nice to have. These are deal blockers. Without SSO, without skim, without RBAC, without audit logs, you simply cannot close enterprise deals. Period. But none of these features make your core product better. They don't make your beer taste better to use our favorite analogy here on acquired. So if you're building like a design tool spending six months building sample authentication doesn't make your design tool more powerful. So this is where Work OS comes in. They've built stripe for enterprise features work OS turns enterprise authentication requirements into drop-in API's abstracting away as much unnecessary complexity as possible. So instead of your team spending months reading sample specs, you can implement enterprise SSO in minutes. Work OS handles user provisioning permissions, audit logs, all the check box items that enterprise IT requires. So whether you are a seed stage company trying to land your first enterprise customer or already big and expanding globally, Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready. Just visit workOS.com or just message their slack support. They have real engineers in there who answer questions fast. And when you get in touch, just tell them Ben and David send you.