📚 Mark Zuckerberg Emails Outline Plan To Neutralize Competitors

An anonymous reader shares a report: In late February 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed his chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to float the idea of buying smaller competitors, including Instagram and Path. "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," he wrote. "Given that we think our own valuation is fairly aggressive and that we're vulnerable in mobile, I'm curious if we should consider going after one or two of them. What do you think?" Ebersman was skeptical. "All the research I have seen is that most deals fail to create the value expected by the acquirer," he wrote back. "I would ask you to find a compelling elucidation of what you are trying to accomplish." Ebersman went on to list four potential reasons to buy companies and his thoughts on each: neutralizing a competitor, acquiring talent, integrating products to improve the Facebook service, and "other." It's a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. "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." Zuckerberg continued: "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. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won't get much traction since we'll already have their mechanics deployed at scale." Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks. "I didn't mean to imply that we'd be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way," he wrote. The emails between Zuckerberg and Ebersman were revealed today during the House antitrust subcommittee's hearing on antitrust issues in tech, as Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) questioned Zuckerberg about the Instagram acquisition. The emails, along with several other messages and documents from 2012, show that Facebook -- and Zuckerberg, in particular -- wanted to buy Instagram to avoid competition, the committee argued.

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