Did you know that Instagram, a photo sharing service for iOS, has hit 9 million users in half the time it took Foursquare to reach the same milestone? Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, an analyst with BI Research, attributes this expansion to what Bing Gordon has called “Zuckerberg’s Law”:
Kleiner Perkins partner and early Zynga investor Bing Gordon just tweeted that he’s declaring “‘Zuckerberg’s Law’: [the] quantity of social sharing doubles every 12 months. [The t]rend has held at [Facebook] for 4 years.” Whatever the numbers, it’s absolutely clear that the new social platforms enable breakneck growth. Instagram is growing twice as fast as Foursquare which is growing faster than Twitter did which grew faster than Facebook did. This is because as social platforms grow, the amount of sharing that goes on them grows exponentially, which means new services can be distributed even faster. And you can’t even find Instagram photos on Google: you can find the app’s site, but if you search for a particular user’s Instagram page, you can’t find it on Google. Google was once the overwhelmingly important platform for a startup’s growth, and no it’s not just #2 but utterly irrelevant to the fastest-growing notable startup.
More impressive still is Instagram’s extreme capital efficiency:
Instagram has 5 or 6 full-time employees. For such a huge, fast-growing service, that’s just crazy. We keep hearing about how the cloud, open-source software, etc. makes startups much cheaper and easier to run, but this effect seems nearly impossible to overstate. Even a few years ago it was impossible to imagine a company that could serve millions of people with less staff than it takes to run a Chipotle franchise.
Of course, Instagram isn’t monetizing its network yet, as Gobry notes, and we can expect its headcount to expand considerably when it does.
It’s a safe bet that Instagram’s handful of employees are the kind of people who flourish in less structured environments.