Instagram, every mention

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every year anyone Ben Gilbert 62David Rosenthal 60Daniel Ek 2Mark Canlis 1Jason Calacanis 1Howard Marks 1Eric Vishria 1Doug DeMuro 1Dara Khosrowshahi 1Ben Miller 1

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Instagram comes up

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Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired Apr 14, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:50:41 Ben Gilbert Sometimes I get tricked by Instagram, as my wife says, where I'm scrolling through, and then I find like the perfect ad hitting me at the perfect moment for some product I didn't even know I needed.

Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired Mar 5, 2026 · 3 mentions

The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio) · Acquired Jan 27, 2026 · 4 mentions

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 10 mentions

  • ▶ 46:22 David Rosenthal It's just in the YouTube feed, and then Facebook borrows it, and they hire Jan LeCun, and they start Facebook AI research, and then they bring it into Instagram, and then TikTok and ByteDance take it, and then it goes back to Facebook and…
  • ▶ 46:22 David Rosenthal It's just in the YouTube feed, and then Facebook borrows it, and they hire Jan LeCun, and they start Facebook AI research, and then they bring it into Instagram, and then TikTok and ByteDance take it, and then it goes back to Facebook and…
  • ▶ 54:01 David Rosenthal Is it Instagram?
  • ▶ 1:00:09 Ben Gilbert I mean, this is as good as Instagram or YouTube in terms of greatest acquisitions of all time.
  • ▶ 1:00:16 David Rosenthal So I remember when this deal happened, just like I remember when the Instagram deal happened.
  • ▶ 1:00:25 David Rosenthal It was like, when Facebook bought Instagram, like,
  • ▶ 1:15:51 David Rosenthal The possibility of what it can do at Facebook and for Instagram.
  • ▶ 2:14:47 David Rosenthal Obviously your own site, that's always been true, but now with Shopify you can easily sell on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, Roku, ChatGPT, Perplexity, anywhere.
  • ▶ 2:46:05 Ben Gilbert The productiness wasn't particular the way that, like, Instagram was all about the product.
  • ▶ 3:13:55 Ben Gilbert That was people searching Instagram who accidentally hit a llama model that made some things happen, and they were like, oh, go away.

Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired Aug 26, 2025 · 7 mentions

  • ▶ 1:17:54 Ben Gilbert That's a way worse business than, say, Google search ads or Facebook, who, you know, Facebook has influencers on their platforms, too, all the meta platforms, Instagram, and their rev share, if it's anything, sure isn't 50%.
  • ▶ 1:28:13 Ben Gilbert With Instagram, and you look at Instagram's most used thing Reels, or you look at TikTok, and what do you see?
  • ▶ 1:28:13 Ben Gilbert With Instagram, and you look at Instagram's most used thing Reels, or you look at TikTok, and what do you see?
  • ▶ 3:27:16 Ben Gilbert He's buying Instagram.
  • ▶ 3:27:20 David Rosenthal And he's remaking essentially, you know, Facebook into what meta would become of like, hey, what we used to think of as social networking has bifurcated into two things, public media, i.e., you know, YouTube, Instagram, UGC, and private…
  • ▶ 3:56:24 David Rosenthal The Blue App, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
  • ▶ 4:02:21 Ben Gilbert Some people can make an Instagram, and those people are not Google.

Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired Jun 30, 2025 · 1 mention

Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired Mar 24, 2025 · 4 mentions

Rolex (Audio) · Acquired Feb 24, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 1:03:14 David Rosenthal Yeah, I mean, there's Instagram, you know, and then copying stories from Snap.
  • ▶ 3:52:52 Ben Gilbert And then they're, each AD is using their own mystical portal of waitlist, which really means how many Instagram followers do you have, or are you famous enough for me to allocate one of the

Meta (Audio) · Acquired Oct 28, 2024 · 51 mentions

  • ▶ 2:36 Ben Gilbert Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and now Threads.
  • ▶ 1:46:54 Ben Gilbert I bet the number of photos that someone scrolls through on Instagram is way higher than that, but for the time, that interactivity was just nuts.
  • ▶ 1:54:51 David Rosenthal It was shocking six years later when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars.
  • ▶ 2:22:02 David Rosenthal Which ultimately would be a problem because that's what created room for Instagram, for Snapchat, et cetera, et cetera.
  • ▶ 3:12:38 Ben Gilbert It's funny in this era where I'm now checking multiple feeds every day, Twitter, threads, Instagram, all the messaging services to catch up on my messages, occasionally the blue app.
  • ▶ 3:26:14 David Rosenthal like, well, I don't know, here's this Instagram thing.
  • ▶ 3:38:18 David Rosenthal And then, a week later, on April ninth, 2012, during the quiet period, Facebook acquires Instagram for a billion dollars.
  • ▶ 3:38:54 David Rosenthal They just bought Instagram.
  • ▶ 3:38:59 David Rosenthal Not because Instagram didn't have any revenue on mobile either.
  • ▶ 3:39:07 Ben Gilbert Well, not to mention, Instagram had twenty-seven million users.
  • ▶ 3:39:56 David Rosenthal In the future potential of your company and the combined companies of Facebook and Instagram here to make this move.
  • ▶ 3:40:02 Ben Gilbert Not to mention, on top of it all, we're not gonna go into it here because we had a whole episode on Facebook and Instagram, but this was done over two days, over the course of a weekend.
  • ▶ 3:57:15 Ben Gilbert I mean, flash forward 10 years, I opened Instagram to get great product recommendations.
  • ▶ 4:03:32 David Rosenthal Eventually bring this whole native feed monetization engine over to Instagram, and that works obviously incredibly well there, probably better than even on the Blue app.
  • ▶ 4:03:44 Ben Gilbert And that in particular, the, I mean, I, everyone's gonna laugh when we say this word, the legitimate synergy between going to an advertiser and saying, you can use this dashboard to get placements on Facebook and on Instagram,
  • ▶ 4:04:09 Ben Gilbert If you flash all the way forward to today, the lion's share of Meta's revenue comes from the ads that run on Facebook and Instagram.
  • ▶ 4:07:33 David Rosenthal And in many ways, Instagram was also town square.
  • ▶ 4:07:36 Ben Gilbert The Instagram team noticed over time that even before Snap started eating their lunch that
  • ▶ 4:07:42 Ben Gilbert Engagement would decrease the longer you stayed an Instagram user, because you, over time, being done with these permanent posts, and you sort of saved it for the big announcements in your life, that there wasn't a natural way to just…
  • ▶ 4:08:38 David Rosenthal Snap also in its own way, there was the original Snapchat use case of disappearing one-to-one photo messaging, but Stories really is where it became clear, hey, this is widespread and this is a big problem that is gonna threaten Instagram,…
  • ▶ 4:13:30 David Rosenthal It was called Instagram.
  • ▶ 4:15:09 Ben Gilbert Twenty-twelve, to their then CFO, talking about the time they're sort of discussing the Instagram acquisition, but laying out the idea behind an acquisition strategy.
  • ▶ 4:15:48 Ben Gilbert It's possible someone beats Instagram by building something that is
  • ▶ 4:15:51 Ben Gilbert Better to the point where they get network migration, but this is harder as long as Instagram keeps running as a product.
  • ▶ 4:15:59 Ben Gilbert That is the argument of why to keep Instagram separate and running as its own product is because Instagram's already discovered this fascinating new mechanic around publishing one image at a time with these beautiful filters.
  • ▶ 4:16:15 Ben Gilbert So actually the best thing to do is own Instagram and let it keep doing its thing.
  • ▶ 4:16:50 Ben Gilbert Even if some new competitor springs up buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc., now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.
  • ▶ 4:17:38 Ben Gilbert Hell, Instagram wasn't making any money yet.
  • ▶ 4:18:32 Ben Gilbert And that is what happened with Instagram.
  • ▶ 4:18:43 Ben Gilbert And then with Snap, they tried to buy Snap over and over again, and it didn't work, and so they basically figured out how to bring those mechanics into Facebook's core products with Stories in a way that Snap kept doing their thing, but…
  • ▶ 4:19:05 David Rosenthal And here's what's really interesting about the stories, quote unquote story, in Instagram and then ultimately coming to the Blue app.
  • ▶ 4:19:33 David Rosenthal The heads in the row at the top of your app, Instagram did that.
  • ▶ 4:19:38 David Rosenthal So when Instagram copied quote unquote stories and launched stories, they launched it as the algorithmically ordered row of heads at the top of your app.
  • ▶ 4:20:44 David Rosenthal Yes, so when Instagram, in those early days when it was launching stories, they were optimizing the ranking of heads at the top of the app by how likely you are to tap on that person's head.
  • ▶ 4:23:07 Ben Gilbert So we must, as fast as possible, make something like Reels just to stem the bleeding, and then we can figure out what to do from there and hopefully get to a market stalemate with them.
  • ▶ 4:24:37 Ben Gilbert It's turned into this pretty interesting dual-pronged approach that they now have, which is you open Instagram and you have Reels.
  • ▶ 4:24:37 Ben Gilbert It's turned into this pretty interesting dual-pronged approach that they now have, which is you open Instagram and you have Reels.
  • ▶ 4:39:59 David Rosenthal And then three, they had no way of seeing this at the time, but FAIR and AI actually becomes the way that they can catch up and re-architect to compete with TikTok via Reels.
  • ▶ 4:40:11 David Rosenthal You know, no AI, no Reels.
  • ▶ 4:40:21 David Rosenthal I mean, Reels would not have come out as fast as it did.
  • ▶ 4:40:40 Ben Gilbert I mean, it is magic how the Reels and TikTok algorithms work, and now YouTube was short, that
  • ▶ 4:51:21 David Rosenthal Instagram has now copied Snap and launched stories in that very same year.
  • ▶ 5:25:35 Ben Gilbert WhatsApp and Instagram are in the neighborhood of two billion monthly active users.
  • ▶ 5:28:29 Ben Gilbert Why is it that WhatsApp and Instagram are both increasing in user engagement over time?
  • ▶ 5:35:01 David Rosenthal Somebody who has a ton of Instagram followers has incredible switching costs.
  • ▶ 5:37:45 Ben Gilbert There is love for the brand Instagram.
  • ▶ 5:42:41 Ben Gilbert It is an application that Meta has that uses Llama in the background, but provides meta-specific AI experiences, some of them bundled into apps, like in WhatsApp chat or in Instagram.
  • ▶ 5:52:13 Ben Gilbert They were developing an app called Photos at the same time that they bought Instagram.
  • ▶ 5:57:34 unnamed speaker Myspace and Friendster, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp.
  • ▶ 6:05:13 Ben Gilbert Facebook Places when, I mean, Foursquare was almost on par for a period of time with Instagram and Twitter as plausibly the next social mechanic checking in places.
  • ▶ 6:20:11 Ben Gilbert To Pete Hunt, early engineer who transferred from Facebook to Instagram post-acquisition.

Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired Sep 30, 2024 · 1 mention

The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired Sep 18, 2024 · 1 mention

Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired Apr 22, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:46:41 Ben Gilbert Now you're exactly right in the same way that Instagram today is a much different code base than Instagram and much larger code base than Instagram when it was purchased.

Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired Mar 18, 2024 · 5 mentions

Hermès (Audio) · Acquired Feb 20, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:35:33 David Rosenthal I don't think we want to go down this rabbit hole, but there is a whole TikTok and Instagram culture of Hermes sales associate appointments and Birkin appointments and reveals and all that, and like, you know, it's huge.

Doug Demuro on Analyzing the Car Industry, Creator-Led Businesses, and Porsche Follow Up (Raw Video) · Acquired Sep 20, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:04:15 Doug DeMuro Like, I'm totally cool with the fact that I, I just want to sit in, like, send emails and browse Instagram while it's driving me up the highway.

Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired Sep 6, 2023 · 5 mentions

  • ▶ 12:52 David Rosenthal It turned out that a natural consequence of what these guys were doing was, oh, actually you can use this to surface the next post in a social media feed, on like an Instagram feed or the YouTube feed or something like that, and that…
  • ▶ 17:20 David Rosenthal This is just a couple of years after they acquired Instagram.
  • ▶ 17:27 David Rosenthal Instagram would have been a great acquisition anyway, but it was AI-powered recommendations in the feed that made that into a 102 105 hundred billion dollar asset for Facebook.
  • ▶ 17:42 Ben Gilbert I think that is literally what Instagram is worth to Meta now.
  • ▶ 17:45 Ben Gilbert By the way, I have bought a lot of things on Instagram ads so that the targeting works.

Costco (Audio) · Acquired Aug 21, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 2:40:51 Ben Gilbert Zoom or Slack or these has like basically no bottlenecks to infinite instant growth or Instagram launching threads, you know, instantly has a hundred million members.
  • ▶ 2:57:43 Ben Gilbert Actually, they condemned the pier and took it down because it was like, we were the last year that it was still, I don't know, we probably shouldn't have had an office in it, but yeah, I worked at CoTweet, and above us was the co-working…
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