Instagram Co-Founder Claims Zuckerberg Starved It of Resources After Acquisition

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified Tuesday that the photo-sharing app was starved of resources after being acquired by Meta due to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fear that its growth could cannibalize Facebook.

“Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth,” Systrom said, according to reports from inside the court room.

Systrom’s testimony comes on day six of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms, which has previously featured turns on the witness stand by Zuckerberg and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Contradicting Zuckerberg’s claims on the stand that Meta’s acquisition helped fuel Instagram’s growth, Systrom said the app could have grown, and added video and messaging, if it had remained independent. If anything, he claimed, the acquisition worked to slow Instagram’s growth.

“The first slowdown that we had was maybe a year into being at Facebook,” he said under questioning by the FTC’s attorney. Although Meta did assign a few members of its growth team to Instagram, Systrom acknowledged, “I woke up one day and they were gone.”

Systrom’s testimony came one day after Sequoia Capital director Roelof Botha, and early investor in Instagram, told the court that he believed Meta significantly overpaid for the startup. He claimed that if he had suggested a $1 billion valuation for Instagram at the time Facebook acquired it in 2012, he “probably wouldn’t have gotten support” from his partners. “It wasn’t obvious you could make a great return,” at that price, he said.

Read more: Zuckerberg Weighed Spinning Off Instagram Amid Antitrust Concerns, Trial Reveals

Botha recalled telling Instagram’s founders that if they wanted their “payday” from Facebook that was up to them, but “if your ambition is to build an independent company, then you should partner with people like us.”

Systrom testified that from the beginning, Zuckerberg harbored mixed feelings about having Instagram in the fold that only grew more intense as Instagram grew and Facebook’s growth slowed.  “My experience of him is that he was always very happy to have Instagram in the family,” he testified. “But also, I think as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook, and I think there were real human emotional things going on there.”

Systrom said he left Facebook in 2018 after concluding Zuckerberg was not investing in Instagram because he ultimately saw it as a threat to Facebook.

A 2018 internal document presented in court showed a list of features Meta integrated between Facebook and Instagram, such as cross-posting and notifications, along with how they had impacted the two apps. According to the document the integrations had the effect of boosting Instagram’s active users by millions each year while their impact on Facebook was largely neutral.

Systrom testified that Zuckerberg decided to cut those integrations that largely impacted Instagram.