Instagram, a cautionary tale

The key protagonist of this story is Kevin Systrom, a Stanford graduate, who built a mobile website called Burbn in 2009

Sometime in April 2012, cofounder of Instagram Kevin Systrom gathered his team at 8 a m in the start-up’s Silicon Valley office to make an important announcement — that the company was being acquired by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion. Employees of the tiny start-up were stunned.  Some reacted with gasps and surprise, others with laughter and tears. But mostly, they were in disbelief that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was paying such a steep price for a photo-posting platform that had, till date, managed to generate a great deal of hype but no revenue.

This incident marks a