This week, Facebook lost an executive who, in a better and different world, might one day have taken the helm of the social networking giant.
On Monday, Kevin Systrom, as well as his longtime partner, Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, quit Facebook. While seemingly out of the blue, it was a long time coming. The reason? Their unhappiness over increasingly aggressive meddling by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, about how Instagram was run.
This might seem like business as usual in Silicon Valley. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was a wee thing, and helped it surpass a billion users. Fighting over control of tech companies is commonplace, and executive shuffles happen all the time. At Facebook alone in the last two years, the founders of WhatsApp, the messaging product, left amid disagreements over the placement of advertising. So too much of the team that founded the Oculus, Facebook’s virtual reality project, as well as a conga line of other founders of start-ups the social media giant has swallowed whole. They all essentially took the money and ran (usually to luxury yachts in Fiji).
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