Monday night the news came through that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are leaving Instagram, and my first thought was not about Facebook. It was about the square.
For years the square was the whole argument. Everything the same shape, everything the same size, no way to make your photo louder than someone else's photo. It was a constraint that a lot of people, including me, thought was a mistake. It was not a mistake. It was a point of view, and it was enforced by two specific humans who were willing to keep saying no to the obvious improvements.
They have been saying no less lately. That is not gossip, it is visible in the product.
Here is the part that gets lost in the founder-departure story, which usually gets told as a business story about earnouts and org charts. It is a brand story. A product does not lose its taste in one release. It loses the two people whose job was, functionally, refusal.
Taste in a product is almost never a document. It is a small number of people with the standing to say no, and when they leave, the document they left behind does not say no to anything.
We have watched this run three times at that company inside eighteen months. Brian Acton left, Jan Koum left in the spring, and the thing WhatsApp was defined by, the refusal to carry ads, is now a question rather than a principle. Oculus went the same way. Every time, the guidelines survive and the judgment does not.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I have contributed to the problem. We write the brand book. Forty pages, tone of voice, a section on what we are not. Then the person who actually had the taste gets promoted or leaves, and the book becomes a thing junior people cite at each other in comments while the work drifts, release by release, toward whatever tests well this quarter. Nothing in a brand book has ever killed a feature. A person has to do that.
So the useful question for anyone running a brand is not what are our values. It is a colder one. Who here can kill something, and does everyone know it, and what happens to us the week they leave.
Nothing in a brand book has ever killed a feature.
I sang at the bar off Belmont on Wednesday, badly, with commitment, and the host who calls everyone baby cut a guy off after two minutes because he was doing a bit instead of a song. Nobody had written that rule down. She just had it, and the room was better for it, and I sat there thinking about the square.