The article mentions they have a team of 3 engineers. You don't pay that much cash for 3 dudes who managed to boot some instances on EC2 and install an off-the-shelf open source stack.
You are depreciating their work in a way that is not that of a real gentleman. Maybe you are also working on a startup and would like to make it to where Instagram guys are? Me too, you know.
And for their tech stack what its impressing is that they chose very wisely IMO: if I had to build from scratch any Web or mobile app I wouldn't do differently (Python n PostgreSQL, etc)
> You are depreciating their work in a way that is not that of a real gentleman.
I do the same exact kind of work. So am I depreciating myself? I may be brilliant and handsome to boot, but I don't think I'm worth 333 million dollars. Which was my point.
Oh sure, I might be worth several mil. I'm that good. But that's still a tiny fraction of what Facebook paid. So no, it wasn't about the brains.
There are stories around of Google spending 5mil or more to acquire (or in some cases, keep) great engineers.
I wonder what the real "market value" for a proven team of 3 great engineers who were the technical base that allowed a company to grow from nothing to $1billion in under 2 years?
It wouldn't surprise me to find those three guys as a team offered 20 or more million if the right company thought they were on the market.
Lars Rasmussen made out like a bandit when he went to FB a few years back, and that was after the "failure" (at least relative to Instagram) of Wave, and before the current "bubble" as well.
IMO, getting bought for $1B is not really the same as "growing to $1B". They may have grown to a ton of users and may have raised some VC money. But that is not the same. Did they even have a revenue stream? People with insane amounts of money overpay for shiny new toys all the time. Have you ever seen MTV Cribs? lol
