I'd rewrite the title: "Man who helped Facebook shamelessly copy Snapchat's best features without giving any credit"
What would you have Facebook do? "Well, darn. I guess we can't implement those features, Snapchat beat us to it! Time to just lay over and let them churn our users." This is not how any rational company works, and every major tech company has copied others many times.
Not when you are leveraging monopoly power to gain market share somewhere else. This kind of capitalism tends to degenerate.
Or that it is better for public interest that people prop up companies with multi billion dollar valuations on the basis of trivially copy-able features?
It is harmful to the public interest to allow a company to use its monopoly status as leverage to monopolize other markets. Facebook is competing for image messaging in the same sense that Lance Armstrong was competing in the tour de france.
Monopoly is the degenerate case of capitalism, and this kind of behavior by monopolies is how the degeneracy reproduces.
Almost every companies copies in some form or fashion - you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't - but few really do it well. I would argue that Instagram did it very well and you can see it in the success. The product is well designed, extremely polished, is far more stable, is more engaging (for me), and more complete in my opinion.
I don't think your intended criticism has any value in the real world. It's a tired argument and deeply flawed.
I think the reverse argument is a stronger one. That is to say that SnapChat's core innovations that got them this far were closer to a commodity than is ideal for a business like theirs. This is something that SnapChat acknowledges in their own S1.
What I think investors didn't see or expect is: * The extent to which the SnapChat feature-set was a commodity in a world where several other similar friendship and interest graphs exist. * The speed and potency with which competitors like Facebook would attempt to compete. I think Facebook's strategy was far more successful than people were prepared for and that's reflected somewhat in the SnapChat stock price swings and analyst sentiment swings.
I don't believe copying was inevitable either. Snap's main appeal at that time -- disappearing content -- was seen as completely anathema to FB's practice data hoarding. And adding features of any sort risks alienating the current user base. I confess that as a casual Instagram user, and a non-Snapchat user, I'm completely lost with all the new features and end points to what was a straightforward photo app.
The US does not have moral rights in IP, so you better conduct your business in a way that doesn't rely on their mere existence.
Big deal.