Technology

Mark Zuckerberg was quick to realize that Facebook, the largest social network in the world, doesn&t have a monopoly on all users nor can it bank on holding its position as top dog forever. Thus he instituted a policy of buying up promising rivals and integrating them into the Facebook ‘group& in a strategy designed to be a win-win for all.

But by leaving Facebook in abrupt fashion this week, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — the founders of Instagram — have shown that the social networkvision of letting acquired businesses operate independently simply isn&t feasible.

Few large-scaleacquisitions run smoothly, so it is to Facebookcredit that Systrom andKrieger remained with the company for six years after Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012.

Thata long stretch by any tech acquisition standard, but it is still short of Facebookvision of entrepreneurs who continue their startup journeys inside its walls.

The Facebook Family

The original idea is a best-of-both-worlds approach: a companyfinances are infinitely secured and it can grow as needed inside the Facebook ‘family,& with access to resources like engineering, marketing, admin, etc.

That was also the plan for WhatsApp, but founding pair Jan Koum and Brian Acton managed four and three and a half years, respectively, at Facebook following their $19 billion acquisition in 2014. VR firm Oculus, another billion-dollar purchase, lost co-founders Palmer Lucky (political scandal)andBrendan Iribe (reshuffled)three years after its deal.Ex-Xiaomi executive Hugo Barra now runs the unit as &Facebook VP of VR.&

In the normal state of tech acquisitions, getting six years — or even just three — from a founder post-acquisition is impressive. It requires a strong vision and autonomy for the incoming business.

Many founders become serial founders, even after an exit has set them up financially for life. Therea thrill in building something new, taking sole charge and growing it. But post-acquisition, the basic dynamics change. As a founder, youcall the shots — you are the boss — rather than part of the company hierarchy post-deal. Going from employee to founder requires adjustment, but back the other direction is oftentrickier — particularly when your business is part of a strategy for a larger one thatrife with politics.

Facebook tried to mitigate that by promising autonomy for its founders.

Instagramduo retained a lot of control — Systrom was the face of the company and hereportedly approved all ads personally — while the same was true of WhatsApp, with Koum made a member of the Facebook board. Indeed,the WhatsApp founders dubbed the acquisition a &partnership& such was their insistence that things wouldn&t change under Facebookownership.

Jan Koum, once a member of Facebookboard, is said to have clashed with the social networkmanagement over its intentions for his WhatsApp service

Independence Vs FacebookInterests

But it didn&t work.

All four founders of WhatsApp and Instagram have left as Facebook inevitably sought further control of their companies in order to advance its wider goals as a business

WhatsApp, for example, has embraced business-consumer communication, is working on payments and has an advertising tie-in with Facebook. These are all features that would have troubled founders Koum and Acton, whose previous public manifesto railed against anything that takes away from a simple user experience, and particularly advertising.

After reported friction with Facebook management,Koum left in April 2018to &do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee.& Acton, meanwhile, quietly exited the year before but then tellingly wrote a $50 million check for Signal, an encrypted chat app that rivals WhatsApp, and publicly backed the #deletefacebook campaign over privacy concerns.

Over at Instagram, a similar situation seems to have happened with Systrom andKrieger. As TechCrunchJosh Constine reports, sources suggested that the leadership&weakening independence& from Facebook was a source of frustration for them that ultimately led to their untimely exit.

Reading the short farewell note from Systrom seems to hammer that home. Thereno thank you for Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg or any other Facebook executive. Systrom instead stated that Krieger and he are keen to explore their &curiosity and creativity again& by building new products.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom continued to be the servicepublic face even after its acquisition by Facebook in 2012

Facebook had a good run with its independence policy, but ultimately these four exits illustrate that founders can&t be caged and tamed. While, on the other side, a buyer is always going to want to get their pound of flesh from billion-dollar acquisitions. Facebook can bend the rules and get a lengthier service from founders than most, but you can&t defy gravity forever.

While it has lost the original founders, Facebook has also seen wild success from its purchases. Instagram went from 30 million users pre-acquisition to over one billion today, while WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion active users up from 450 million at the time of its deal.

The important question now is whether Facebookin-house team managing these services can continue to scale them without the inventors in place. Beyond talent, losing that original culture is a blow.These acquired services need to remain differentiated from Facebook from a consumer perspective, otherwise the entire point of owning them — the bet that the future of social networks may not be Facebook — is moot.

Open source software is now a $14 billion+ market and growing fast, in use in one way or another in 95 percent of all enterprises. But that expansion comes with a shadow: open source components can come with vulnerabilities, and so their widespread use in apps become a liability to a companycybersecurity.

Now, a startup out of the UK called Snyk, which has built a way to detect when those apps or components are compromised, is announcing a $22 million round of funding to meet the demand from enterprises wanting to tackle the issue head on.

Led by Accel, with participation from GV plus previous investors Boldstart Ventures and Heavybit, this Series B notably is the second round raised by Snyk within seven months — it raised a $7 million Series A in March. Thata measure of how the company is growing (and how enthusiastic investors are about what it has built so far). The startup is not disclosing its valuation but a source close to the deal says it is around $100 million now (itraised about $33 million to date).

As a measure of Snykgrowth, the company says it now has over 200 paying customers and 150,000 users, with revenues growing five-fold in the last nine months. In March, it had 130 paying customers.

(Current clients includeASOS, Digital Ocean, New Relic and Skyscanner, the company said.)

Snyk plays squarely in the middle of how the landscape for enterprise services exists today. It provides options for organisations to use it on-premises, via the cloud, or in a hybrid version of the two, with a range of paid and free tiers to get users acquainted with the service.

GuyPodjarny, the companyCEO who co-founded Snyk with Assaf Hefetz and Danny Grander, explained that Snyk works in two parts. First,the startup has built a threat intelligence system &that listens to open source activity.& Tapping into open-conversation platforms — for example, GitHub commits and forum chatter — Snyk uses machine learning to detect potential mentions of vulnerabilities. It then funnels these to a team of human analysts, &who verify and curate the real ones in our vulnerability DB.&

Second, the company analyses source code repositories — including, again, GitHub as well as BitBucket — &to understand which open source components each one uses, flag the ones that are vulnerable, and then auto-fix them by proposing the right dependency version to use and through patches our security team builds.&

Open source components don&t have more vulnerabilities than closed source ones, he added, &but their heavy reuse makes those vulnerabilities more impactful.& Components can be used in thousands of applications, and by Snykestimation, some 77 percent of those applications will end up with components that have security vulnerabilities.&As a result, the chances of an organisation being breached through a vulnerable open source component are far greater than a security flaw purely in their code.&

Podjarny says there is no plans to try to tackle proprietary code longer term but to expand how it can monitor apps built on open source.

&Our focus is on two fronts & building security tools developers love, and fixing open source security,& he said. &We believe the risk from insecure use of open source code is far greater than that of your own code, and is poorly addressed in the industry. We do intend to expand our protection from fixing known vulnerabilities in open source components to monitoring and securing them in runtime, flagging and containing malicious and compromised components.&

While this is a relatively new area for security teams to monitor and address, he added that theEquifax breach highlighted what might happen in the worst-case scenario if such issues go undetected. Snykis not the only company that has identified the gap in the market. Black Duck focuses on flagging non-compliant open source licences, and offers some security features as well.

However, it is Snyk — whose name derives from a play on the word &sneak&, combined with the acronym meaning &so now you know& — that seems to be catching the most attention at the moment.

&Some of the largest data breaches in recent years were the result of unfixed vulnerabilities in open source dependencies; as a result, we&ve seen the adoption of tools to monitor and remediate such vulnerabilities grow exponentially,& said Philippe Botteri, partner at Accel, who is joining the board with this round. &We&ve also seen the ownership of application security shifting towards developers. We feel thatSnykis uniquely positioned in the market given the teamdeep security domain knowledge and developer-centric mindset, and are thrilled to join them on this mission of bringing security tools to developers.&

Program a robotic toy to move and you could be hooked on coding for life. Thatthe idea behind Facebook newest educational initiative called CodeFWD. It provides online coding tutorials for teachers and students powered by Code.org, and if classrooms finish those, they can apply to be sent a free Bolt robot from Sphero, makers of the popular animatronic BB-8 Star Wars toy. Students can then learn how to use block-based JavaScript to make Bolts roll if different directions, light up, and interact with each other.

CodeFWDlaunch comes alongside the debut of the social networknew Facebook For Education website that could help Facebook repair its public image by touting its positive contributions to society. After a year of Cambridge Analytica, election interference, and digital well-being worries, Facebookbrand needs all the help it can get.

Education.fb.comcompiles Facebook programs including TechPrep for easing students into computer science, Oculus Next Gen and TechStart for getting VR headsets into classroom and college programs, Oculus For Good and LaunchPad for supporting philanthropic VR content and diverse creators, and Facebookown tools like Workplace and Groups for teachers.

One more new program launching this month called Engineer For The Week teaches teens applied computer science after school. Students build chatbots and games to support a local cause while learning the fundamentals of computational thinking over a three-week regimen of collaborating with Facebookown engineers. Engineer For The Week runs four times per year with the next cycle starting October 1st that culminates in a two-day hackathon at Facebook HQ.

Beyond bolstering Facebookbrand, the coding education programs could supply Facebookengineering needs a decade later. &We know that itimportant to make sure we&re supporting the next generation of diverse talent. It can really widen the pipeline& says Facebook Educationdirector Lauryn Hale Ogbechie. &I think itof benefit to any tech company and the industry more broadly. If we&re able to support students staying computer science . . . that will benefit everyone down the road.&

Right now, FacebookUS staff is just 4.9 percent Latinx and 3.5 percent black. Looking at technical roles iteven worse, with just 3.1 percent Latinx and 1.3 percent black. Itonly managed to nudge those numbers up slightly over the past five years.

To drive inclusivity in engineering from a younger age, Facebook has piloted the CodeFWD program attheHarlem ChildrenZone, and Austin&s Latinitas. The company tells me it will continue totarget underserved students, and the program is open to fourth grade to eight grade classrooms with credentialed teachers as well as registered non-profits that have Internet access and computers for students.

Facebook will pay for the $150 Sphero Bolt robot kits which are free for teachers (who need no prior programming experience), though it won&t say how many it plans to distribute. Once they and their classes complete the teacher-only I Do, teacher-student We Do, and student practice You Do coding tutorials and their quizzes, they can apply for a robot. Facebook will prioritize applications that expand computer science education to the underserved. And the company notes that &Facebook will have access to aggregate, anonymous usage data from Sphero& . Italways ready to seize on new types of data.

Facebookphilanthropic efforts like this are often overshadowed by its privacy and political scandals. The companyheart is usually in the right place, even when itnaive, clumsy, or ruthless in its execution. If anything, Facebook would benefit from a broader range of perspectives on which is the right path forward. Hopefully these education programs will see the wealth itaccumulated today contribute to a more diverse set of leaders for tomorrow.