But putting off revenue != built to flip. Having a ton of usage and figuring out how to make money is easy. Getting a ton of usage is hard. They are focusing on the hard problem first, and the easier problem second.
Here's evidence I have: Steve Anderson, one of Instagram's earliest investors and a board member, is also on our board. Just because they're not trying to make money on year 1 doesn't mean they weren't ever planning on making money.
Furthermore, the namedropping of someone you share a corporate interest with is generally an admission of probable bias and using it as an argument in favour of your position isn't particularly convincing.
What evidence do you have to the contrary?
Also, I never alleged that Instagram specifically was built to flip (although I can see little to suggest that it wasn't, although that is not the same thing), I merely pointed out that phenomena such as Instagram encourages a lot of people to enter the market with that as their motive, often enough to drown out other businesses. And that kind of behaviour was a major factor in the death of the last web boom.
In addition, if they wanted to build a large independent business why would the sell out so early?
That sounds more like faith based economics than anything else, of couse some of them must be doing this.
And offering a service for free at point of use can often be much easier than turning it into revenue later, especially if you have millions in the bank from investment already. There are plenty of stale corporate corpses littering that particular road, but with founders that did quite nicely out of it.