Zuckerberg's emails about the Instagram deal are worth reading

“These businesses are nascent but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful, and if they grow to a large scale the could be very disruptive to us"
“All the research I have seen is that most deals fail to create the value expected by the acquirer. I would ask you to find a compelling elucidation of what you are trying to accomplish.”

He doesn't get it.
This guy gets it.
“There are network effect around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors 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"
Whoops

“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.
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