Ep. 007: Sarah Frier

Polymathic Audio by 2PM Inc.

Instagram is one of the most relevant platforms in all of eCommerce industry. Brands depend on it, retailers advertise with it, influencers sell through it. Sarah Frier may be the new expert on the platform. Her deep research into the Facebook acquisition is incredibly informative.

Sarah Frier is a notable reporter on social media companies for Bloomberg News where she's an expert on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and Twitter. Her work is featured in Businessweek and a Bloomberg Television. Prior to Bloomberg, she attended the University of North Carolina, where she studied journalism and edited for the university's school paper. This is her first book. The New York Times cites the relevance of the book with:

A sequel to The Social Network.

Here's a summary of the book via Simon and Schuster:

In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured through your phone look more beautiful. The cofounders started to cultivate a community of photographers and artisans around the app, but it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram was just 13 employees.

That might have been the end of a classic success story. But the cofounders stayed on, trying to maintain Instagram’s beauty, brand, and cachet, considering their app a separate company within the social networking giant. They urged their employees to make changes only when necessary, resisting Facebook’s grow-at-all-costs philosophy in favor of a strategy that highlighted creativity and celebrity. Just as Instagram was about to reach 1 billion users, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg—once supportive of the founders’ autonomy—began to feel threatened by Instagram’s success.

At its heart, No Filter is a human story, as Sarah Frier uncovers how the company’s decisions have fundamentally changed how we interact with the world around us. Frier draws on unprecedented exclusive access—from the founders of Instagram, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a plethora of influencers, from fashionistas with millions of followers to owners of famous dogs worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we shop, eat, travel, and communicate, all while fighting to preserve the values which contributed to the company’s success. No Filter examines how Instagram’s dominance acts as lens into our society today, highlighting our fraught relationship with technology, our desire for perfection, and the battle within tech for its most valuable commodity: our attention.

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