The two millennials you meet in heaven
Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg have so much in common — so why did they end up so far apart?
Pitting corporate leaders against one another is a standard convention of the business book genre.
One executive is high-minded, the other ruthless. One executive has the trust of the rank and file, the other a star in Wall Street’s eyes. Sun, moon. Light, dark. And so on.
Sarah Frier’s book “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” chronicles, well, the history of Instagram.
And in this telling, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom occupies the role of the high-minded good guy. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a surprise to no one, is the heel. But Systrom is also the patsy — Zuckerberg eats him and his app alive. Only one of them still works there and only one name is on the door.
And while setting up these two founders as diametric opposites isn’t a surprise given the conventions of the genre, both of these young men do in fact serve as apt avatars of a broad divide I think many of us have seen among millennial men of a certain age.
A generation raised amid rapid technological change that found so much of the culture’s explanatory power encased in a zero-sum competitive logic has left us meeting many versions of Systroms and Zuckerbergs. And we all know which kid is winning.
The Systroms of the world are romantics, aware that life offers you pretty much one pursuit — the accumulation of financial assets — but still believing that it matters how one plays. The Systroms make the aesthetic argument the world of media and content is steeped in, that style is part of substance.
Winning an argument matters as much as making the right kind of argument. It’s why even now the discourse around Michael Jordan continues to be centered on his style of play — not strictly the results of that play — and how it might translate across eras. Winning is not enough for the Systroms; it is important to win the right way. And but of course: if we agreed that only outcomes mattered what would there be to talk about?
The Systroms want to resist the Zuckerbergs, the kids who realized early on that life doesn’t necessarily have meaning beyond this race to accumulate of financial assets. The only pursuit is reaching the last level and beating the game. No one is going to care how you got all those commas. Style is irrelevant. And after you win you get to tell whatever story you want anyway. Zuckerberg studied the classics, after all.
Now, in January Zuckerberg made a surprising admission, essentially telling the world that he’d always kind of wanted to be a Systrom before finally realizing — as we all must do in our own journeys — that all we can ever be is the best version of ourselves.
“My goal for this next decade isn't to be liked, but to be understood,” Zuckberg said on the company’s earnings call. “In order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for.”
Frier’s book is the story of Facebook eating Instagram and continuing to monetize its carcass. But as a young person, this book reads as a story about two dudes we’ve met a thousand times.
So if the Zuckerbergs are hackers, the Systroms are dreamers. Zuckerbergs are ruthless; Systroms get had. And Zuckerberg is still running his company; Systrom is not.
But from a distance, Kevin Systrom and Mark Zuckerberg are essentially indistinguishable from one other. They were born six months apart. They both grew up in well-off suburbs in the northeast, rich kids who knew what rich was without having everything handed to them.
Look closer and you’ll tell me how Zuck never graduated from Harvard while Systrom wound a conventional path from Stanford to Google and through the Valley. Closer still and you’ll bring up Zuckerberg’s technical genius versus Systrom’s consultant-level focus on his project’s vision.
But life isn’t lived under a magnifying glass. Take three steps back and you’ll be shocked that anything could’ve gotten between these two kids who couldn’t have more in common.
If Frier’s book explores the history of Instagram, an initial thought might be: “A history of Instagram? But it’s so young!” Except as the book reveals, there is no Instagram anymore, there is just the Instagram service inside of Facebook. Instagram’s history has been written, in this book and everywhere else. As the official company copy now reads, it is “Instagram from Facebook.”
And one anecdote in this book had me underlining all over. It highlights in the cleanest terms how Zuckerberg and Systrom see the world differently. And it shows why these two frameworks — the only views me and my peers learned were available in this world of power, and money, and high-speed internet — aren’t worthy opponents. Someone here is getting screwed.
The ask is simple: shortly after Facebook bought Instagram, Zuckerberg wanted photo tagging added on Instagram. And fast. Photo tagging had, after all, been a huge part of Facebook’s early growth and the app with just 80 million users Facebook had just paid $1 billion for was going to start putting out.
But Zuckerberg wasn’t ready to go full Zuck just yet. Instead he uses this opportunity to give the Instagram guys something that feels like a win even though it’s just a setup. It is but the first of many opportunities to show the Instagram team that how you win doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you do.
Systrom wanted to prioritize photo tagging, too — but subtly, not in the way Facebook expected. Systrom and Krieger balked at the idea of sending their users emails about whether they’d been tagged in something, or emails at all. They didn’t want to be annoying or trade the trust they had gained with their community for a temporary boost. They also didn’t think the activity merited sending anyone a push notification, which would then produce a red badge on users’ phones that they'd have to clear. If Instagram used notifications too much, they would become meaningless, the founder argued.
That was the benefit of being smaller. At Facebook, the news feed was full of competing features. Every product manager working on every aspect of the social network — events, groups, friend requests, comments — wanted their team’s tool to be granted an opportunity for a red dot, or a push notification, so that they would get a fair shake at meeting their growth goals and getting a good performance review. The idea that one might not add a notification with a new feature was a foreign concept — Facebook championed growth at all costs.
Instagram got its way, because Zuckerberg had insisted on allowing the division to think independently. As a result, when Instagram introduced photo tagging, it did nothing to boost growth. But using the app remained a pleasant experience, whatever that was worth. And people could now see a helpful record of the pictures they were in beyond their own feeds.
Krieger and Systrom started to understand the strengths of their position: they could learn all of Facebook’s tricks, and then they could understand the pros and cons of those moves by looking at how Facebook’s own product had succeeded or failed. Then, hopefully, they could decide to take a different path if they thought it necessary.[1]
On balance, Frier is nice to Systrom in the book but this entire passage is basically making fun of him. And it should. He is the CEO of a social app not optimizing for growth. My only question is when Systrom relayed this period in his company’s history at Facebook to Frier, was he in on the joke?
And, yes, the world was different in 2012, but thinking that Facebook would benevolently be teaching its little brothers at Instagram what things are good or bad so these tactics could be selectively applied to an arty photo sharing app is comically naive.
In hindsight, you almost cringe reading this, imagining the earnest brainstorming sessions at Instagram in which they literally outlined how they would learn what Facebook does well and apply it selectively to their product. And that’s sort of the whole game right there, the entire generational divide in one misunderstood merger of unequals.
While the Instagram team was fretting over the cleanliness of its users’ notifications, Facebook was mining every possible edge to exploit the dopamine hit these notifications actually give their app’s users to feed them ads.
Systrom thought that how he intended to build his company mattered; Zuckerberg already knew it didn’t. Growing as fast as possible at all costs allows you to figure everything else out later. And by then you won’t care. Zuckerberg knows it doesn’t matter if you own the world’s biggest, ugliest house; no matter what it’s still the biggest. And you own it.
So in a book full of “he did, he does” moments that cleave apart the Systrom/Zuckerberg millennial worldviews, this passage shows how early on in their professional relationship Zuckerberg was operating on a plane Systrom chose to never access.
Because another takeaway from Frier’s book is that nothing intentional scales. Nothing curated, artistic, and deeply human will ever work as a salable product in the rip-and-run world of user growth social networks reward.
Systrom is the millennial we’ve all met who believes — or, more precisely, was taught somewhere along the line — that the way you do things matters, that the process itself can effect change. That the things you do are what make you you and so be careful about what you do and why. Curate those experiences because they’re all you’ve got.
As someone who sympathizes with the Systrom worldview — as a romantic and an idiot — it’s clear that Zuckerberg is, and has been, winning. We don’t award style points for how a company acquires users and serves them ads. The only thing that matters is they do.
But it seems that Systrom never moved off the idea that Instagram had to be done the right way to be successful. And in a way, he’s still right.
Instagram right now kind of sucks. Every Facebook product sucks. Everyone knows this, too. They’re mostly slicker versions of the “click the right ‘X’ to kill this popup” internet we first encountered in the 90s.
But, once again, joke’s on us: we still use everything Facebook feeds us constantly and the company prints money, which is the only thing that matters. I don’t think Systrom was ever going to really get that. Or at least, he’d never get it on his terms. So he left.
Maybe now Systrom can do a free newsletter about cycling, something he seemed more interested in than working at Facebook anyway. This is something intentional that will definitely not scale. It will, however, let you do what makes you happy.
And for some of us that’s good enough.
I drafted this piece over the course of the last week, and so of course on Saturday morning the New York Times dropped an excellent feature on the current state of Facebook.
A deeply reported piece like this brings the usual number of delightful tidbits, none more hilarious than imagining the Facebook all-hands on Halloween 2019 in which an employee dressed as Pikachu challenged the world’s sixth-richest person on the company’s policy regarding political ads on the platform.
But this Times piece twice contains a phrase I found myself compelled to use, an idea that holds the key to understanding Facebook and the logic of its millennial founder: zero-sum.
The Times uses this phrase — first written, second quoted — in reference to Sheryl Sandberg and the suggestion from some corners of the Facebook leadership world that she has been sidelined as Zuckerberg consolidates power during the current crisis.
With the attention of a quarter of the world’s population to sell to advertisers, Facebook is so colossal that org-chart moves have the effect of creating powerful new characters on the global policy stage. Mr. Zuckerberg has elevated lieutenants to win over hostile territories — the Republican operative Joel Kaplan in Washington, and the former deputy prime minister of Britain, Sir Nicholas Clegg, in the eurozone. And his more hands-on approach has caused, by the zero-sum logic of corporate clout, an effective sidelining of Sheryl Sandberg, his chief operating officer and the most high-profile woman in technology.
[…]
But privately, Ms. Sandberg has worried that she was being pushed aside and that her role at Facebook has become less important, said two people who work within her department. Through a spokesperson, Ms. Sandberg declined to comment.
Facebook disputes that the relationship has changed. “There’s a clear structure. Mark is driving the product side of things, while Sheryl is running the business side of things,” David Fischer, Facebook’s chief revenue officer, said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean it’s all or nothing — it’s not zero-sum between them.”
And if there is another way to characterize the divide that was never bridged between Zuckerberg and Systrom — and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Systrom’s co-founder Mike Krieger and WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Action, all of whom have departed Facebook — it is that Zuckerberg never doubted the world he operates in is zero-sum.
If in its first iteration Instagram wanted to build a community that elevates its members doing the most interesting work, Facebook’s earliest goal was just to rank its members one against the other.
Work that continues to this day.
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1: Anyone who is even a little bit familiar with the politics of engineering culture and how this industry’s rewards impact the products we ultimately come to hate over time will see just about every internal debate run through these same paces.