Instagram co-founders appoint long-time Facebook executive Adam Mosseri as new boss

Instagram on Monday announced a new boss, Adam Mosseri, someone who has been within the company for a while now. Mosseri who is currently the VP of product, will take over the reigns of the Facebook-owned image-sharing app, roughly a week after its co-founders resigned. Mosseri, who began his career as a designer and went on to manage his own design consultancy, joined Facebook in 2008 and has previously overseen Facebook’s news feed and spent a decade working closely with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So it isn’t very surprising that Mosseri is being promoted as the new boss. [caption id=“attachment_5298411” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] Adam Mosseri (centre) flanked by Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger (left) and Kevin Systrom (right). Image: Instagram[/caption] In a blog post announcing the appointment, Instagram said Mosseri will oversee all functions of the business and will recruit a new executive team. The new boss was also quick to thank the founder and co-founder of Instagram on Twitter.

As pointed out in a report by The Verge, with Mosseri taking complete control in a few weeks, it is quite likely that Zuckerberg and Mosseri will team up to exert more direct control over the direction Instagram takes and also how it integrates with the main Facebook app. Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger **resigned** as chief executive officer and chief technical officer of Instagram last week without really explaining what triggered their decision. The two plainly stated that they planned to take time off and explore their “curiosity and creativity again”. This does come across as a little strange since Systrom and Kreiger founded Instagram in 2010 which was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion (effective $715 mn) in 2012. A report by Recode also states that the relationship between the two companies had grown less symbiotic and more demanding of late, with Facebook looking up to Instagram as its main product. This could be seen as a major factor as to why the founders decided to let go of an enterprise they built from scratch. Their departure from Instagram, Facebook’s fastest-growing revenue generator, followed the exit of Jan Koum, co-founder of Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp. With inputs from Reuters