No Filter: The inside story of how Instagram transformed business, celebrity and our culture, reviewed

Review of No Filter The inside story of how Instagram transformed business, celebrity and our culture by Sarah Frier. Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, available from Penguin here.

In just ten years, Instagram has gone from being a simple photo app to a $100-billion company. The journey has involved ground-breaking innovations, a billion-dollar takeover, and clashes between some of the biggest names in tech. But it’s a story that has never been told – until now.

In No Filter, Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier reveals how Instagram became the hottest app in a generation, reshaping our culture and economy in the process. With astonishing access to all the key players – from Instagram’s co-founders to super-influencers like Kris Jenner – Frier offers behind-the-scenes glimpses of every moment in the company’s life: from its launch, to its unlikely acquisition by Facebook, to its founders’ dramatic disputes with their new boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

No Filter The inside story of how Instagram transformed business, celebrity and our culture, reviewed

This is a great book, telling an interesting story that is worth telling. It did remind us of Nick Bilton’s successful analysis of the story of Twitter and how it was founded and evolved. Unlike Twitter, the founders of Instagram did decide to sell the company to Facebook, for, at the time a briefly impressive amount of $1 billion. As WhatsApp was later bought by the same company for $19 billion, the Instagram purchase looks a better and better deal for FB, particularly once it began pulling in 1/4 of total revenue for the company.

Sadly it could be argued, by Frier, and others too, that while this deal was a good one for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, it was a much less positive deal for the Instagram founders, and maybe also the rest of us too. Frier takes us through the whole story, from conception, to growth, to the founders ultimately quitting, and a little beyond that point too. She tells the story in a way that seems fair and even handed, even as it is clear from Facebook’s terse comments quoted in the book, that Zuckerberg is clearly acting in his own interests and no one else’s.

At a time when so much of what Facebook is doing is deeply questionnable, this book is valuable and useful addition to the genre of founder stories, ‘the rise and fall’ style. We enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to others, it is a worthy inclusion on the short list too.

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