Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s six-foot-five co-founder, was then 28. He often walked laps around the wood-and-iron swing set in South Park Commons while taking calls or talking product ideas with employees. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter who identified as more of an art kid than a techie, also hung out at the same South Park playground and mused to friends about ideas that eventually became his social media app.
This was still the era in which social apps were dismissed as playthings, for posting latte art or telling people what you were having for breakfast. WhatsApp, which was growing quickly internationally, was a text messaging app without a business model. And clones of these apps were plentiful, such as Color, Flickr and VSCO in photo sharing, and Kik, Skype and Viber in messaging.
Even Facebook faced questions then about whether it was a viable business. Two months after the Silicon Valley company announced it was buying Instagram, it held one of the most disastrous tech initial public offerings since the late 1990s dot-com era.
By the time Mr. Systrom testified three months later to the California Department of Corporations — a condition of closing the deal with Facebook — shares of Facebook had fallen by nearly half from their I.P.O. price.
But in Silicon Valley, fortunes rise and fall quickly. Companies go from frivolous fancies to juggernauts in just a few years. And what may look like a shrewd business move by an executive one moment can be quickly ridiculed as a misstep the next. (Half of the aforementioned apps are dead, dying or were sold for parts long ago. My favorite kimchi burrito place is also no longer around.)
