In just 10 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.

But this is not just a Silicon Valley story. No Filter explores how Instagram has reshaped global business, creating a new economy of ‘influencers’ and pioneering a business model that sells an aspirational lifestyle to all of us. And it delves into Instagram’s effects on popular culture, rewiring our understanding of celebrity and placing mounting pressure on all of us to perform online – to the point of warping our perception of reality.

The resulting book connects one company’s rise to a global revolution in technology, culture and business. Facebook’s decision to buy Instagram was the best investment it ever made. But we’re still learning about what it has cost the rest of us.

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Listening Length	11 hours and 20 minutes
Author	Sarah Frier
Narrator	Sarah Frier, Megan Tusing
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	April 16, 2020
Publisher	Penguin Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B083Y5DZDD
Best Sellers Rank	#19,626 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #3 in Globalization Money & Finance #13 in Globalization (Books) #21 in Content Creation & Social Media

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Scuba Diver

A Painful and Dangerous Read

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2020

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Sarah Frier's "No Filter" is a painful and dangerous read, especially for anyone who has swung repeatedly for the fences in Silicon Valley and failed. It is painful to read just how easy it was with the right social and educational pedigree(s) to secure start-up funding, competence be damned.

Beautifully written by an accomplished journalist with a sharp eye for irony. Superb background and sad commentary on how "influence" is being peddled by the elite. As to the dangerous part of my review, there are many, many chilling examples of hubris in the House of Zuck (aka Facebook) that should scare any freedom-loving human being.

In retrospect, it is completely amazing how regulators dropped the ball to allow the formation of the Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp monopoly. Thankfully there is enough commentary in this book to reveal the fragility of all of the social network models; one of my favorites was the "emergency meeting" to add video to Instagram, in which one executive commented "It was like being in the room when John F. Kennedy announces you're going to the moon." As if.

Will this marketing machine stand the test of time? We'll see. My money is on future generations actually getting to Mars.

14 people found this helpful

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Paula Seligson

Excellent book not just about Instagram but whole tech industry

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2020

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Sarah Frier's debut book is an excellent read about the history of Instagram. Her in-depth reporting reveals numerous details about how Instagram was founded, the vision that set it apart from other similar apps at the time, the acquisition by Facebook, and the painful tensions that later arose and led the founders to eventually leave. You get the inside perspective on Silicon Valley culture and the personalities and strategies of not just Instagram, but also Jack Dorsey at Twitter and especially Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
As much as this reveals the inner workings of everyone's favorite lifestyle app, it also delves into Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy on growth and competition and the "family" of companies he owns - Instagram and WhatsApp. The story doesn't just provide a narrative of the history of these companies, but also gives important context about where they might be going - especially as they face grave concerns related to privacy and competition.
Writing style is great and easy to read.
I would also recommend this book to anyone feeling pressure about their public Instagram persona. This book shows how much the perfect lifestyle you see in posts is not just fake, but carefully developed and curated by marketing and design experts to make money for influencers and the brands they represent.

10 people found this helpful

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Benjamin W. Slivka

Large companies always crush innovation in search of commonality and scale

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2020

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Great crisp narrative of the founding of Instagram, its sale to Facebook, and how Zuckerberg wasn’t really able to allow Instagram a free hand.

I worked at Microsoft 1985-1999, helped build OS/2 (with IBM), MS-DOS 6, Windows 95, Internet Explorer, and more. I thought in 1995 that the Web would surpass Windows — not a popular view with BillG or SteveB.

As has happened countless times — IBM being a prime example — technology companies have a very difficult time allowing innovators to arise from within. Because the existing technology brings in all the revenue and profits, the folks in charge zealously and rightly protect their market-leading technology from competition: internal as well as external. The Innovators Dilemma!

Zuckerberg felt that Facebook was all-important, and Instagram should be more like Facebook. He is a brilliant billionaire! But — like Bill Gates — had invested so much of himself in Facebook (Windows) - that he could not allow Instagram (the Internet) to pose a threat.

Ms. Frier does an excellent job of identifying and explaining key milestones and conflicts from the founding of Instagram through the time its founders left Facebook (6 years after the acquisition).

Few engineers and entrepreneurs will have the great good fortune to face these challenges. Which is probably why this pattern repeats.

5 people found this helpful

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Alan Ferrandiz Langley

A book you cannot stop reading once you start it

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2020

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I read a lot of business books but in the last years I have become fond of the ones that tell stories and, at the same time, allow you to learn about management. This is one of the books that offers that rare combination. By reading this book you learn about work culture but not as in a theory book but totally applied to reality. I am really impressed by how important it is to be in the right place at the right time, and, in this case, the right place is Silicon Valley. It is funny how Frier relates many important happenings in Silicon Valley, that take place while the story told in the book is developing. I also like how both Zuckerberg and Systrom are portrayed, the first as a ruthless entrepreneur whose decisions are oriented to one only purpose: Facebook growth, in the latter case, a more vulnerable Systrom, who is constantly trying to improve himself and who keeps faithful to his beliefs, despite the fact that several times he admits he was wrong. I read it in 3 days. It would have been less time but I stopped several times to google the names of the people mentioned in the story, in order to get to know more about them. In summary, I loved the book. It is a business book with lots of stories that will keep you captivated from beginning to end.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Boring. Typical acquired then problems narrative

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2020

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There's barely anything truly interesting about this book except that it's about a topic that is very on trend currenyly - Instagram. Company acquired. Growing pains. Egos clash. How they got teens to use Instagram more. This could have been written about any company, it just so happens to be Instagram. I'm sure it is well researched, by nothing that is really insightful here at all. Compare this to Bad Blood by John Carryou. Not only is that an amazing read with drop-your-jaw insights and research, the courage to write that story initially where the author put his career on the line, literally. For this book, I found myself skipping pages or skimming through accounts of how Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift utilized Instagram. Yawn. Very mundane.

6 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Cece

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 16, 2020

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I'll start with what's good about this book. If you need a timeline of how Instagram grew and became established then this would be a very helpful book to reference. Maybe if you were writing an assignment. Also, it was good that there was no angelic underdog vs pantomime villain trope used.

I think the problem is that everything has happened almost completely in public and is well documented online. There are so many interviews, Youtube videos and articles online. Employees of every company (not just tech) share their daily lives online. So I didn't feel I gained anything substantial from this book. The "inside story" read more like padding to be honest. Maybe this minutiae is fascinating to some e.g. Will.i.am playing games on his phone in the middle of meeting and not paying attention. There's no compelling story here because you can already guess at the start what the outcome will be. Can you really muster any sympathy for anyone who sold out to Facebook for $1b and then left because they couldn't do what they wanted? "Systrom worried deeply about losing what made Instagram special." Oh come on!

I think this book tries to do way too much at once when it would be more interesting to focus on just one aspect.

10 people found this helpful

@TheClearCoach

A facinating look at the inception & growth of Instagram - the human story!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 11, 2020

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I guess you can read this book in a couple of ways; firstly as a straightforward look at how Instagram was created, it's subsequent purchase by Facebook and its growth since, along with the other players in the social media space. And secondly, as a human story of one of the co-founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom. Not a biography as such, but the book does give some insights into how Systrom developed Instagram, his constant battles with Facebook once having been acquired, and how along with his team he managed to grow the platform to over 1 billion users.
The book is a page-turner, and kept me enthralled throughout!!

3 people found this helpful

Joe Zhang

Meticulously researched. Good analysis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2020

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A great book. The single-minded and aggressive business approach at Facebook and the idealistic style at Instagram (until founders left) is beautifully chronicled. While I was reading it, I thought about two things. (1) Instagram would have been far smaller without Facebook. It would be like Snapchat and Twitter in financial terms (or worse): bleeding money until one day something happens to threaten its existence. (2) I’m puzzled why no company in China operates with a Facebook business model, and why China’s Instagram look-alike Meitu (1357.HK) has been languishing since IPO four years ago. It looked promising with a peak valuation of US$10bn. China’s social media company such as WeChat or Weibo are very different from Facebook in terms of business model. Therefore, when Meitu Xiuxiu languishes all these years, no suitor has come along to marry a billion users with camera filter. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is a marriage made in heaven.

2 people found this helpful

A peek behind the curtain

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 17, 2020

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If you want to know more about how it is to run a start-up followed by M&A, this is a good place to start. The story touches all points, the high, the low and the controversial. And then this is only for (very) lucky ones that make it this far. It makes you wonder about the definition of success.

Pradeep Mohan Das

A cultural revolution and Corporate takeover rolled into one

Reviewed in India on November 20, 2020

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Inspiring account of birth of an app that brought about a cultural revolution but 1 billion users later got enmeshed in corporate oneupmanship, greed and political subplots. Covers in great detail what it takes to visualize a ground breaking invention, to bring the vision to reality and to sustain that vision in the long run.

Whilst, Mark Zuckerberg has been demonized and painted as a antagonist, it would have been better if FB’s point of view had been highlighted in the book, the book currently features only one side of the story-that of IG’s founders and team

One person found this helpful

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