Silicon Valley is one of the few places where a 27-year-old Web entrepreneur can parlay a photo- sharing application with no known source of revenue into $1 billion -- in two years.
Evidence of that came yesterday, when Facebook Inc. (FB) announced plans to buy Instagram, a startup co-founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom, a Stanford University graduate and former Google Inc. employee.
The Instagram app, owned by Burbn Inc., fetched $1 billion in cash and stock after building an audience of more than 30 million people, mostly users of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone. That kind of growth was enabled by the spread of social networking and smartphones, and the plummeting costs required to build an Internet company. Instagram has just 13 employees, up from four a year ago, when the app was used by 4 million consumers.
