Back in 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1B. It's truly one of the greatest acquisitions of all time: today, Instagram is probably worth >200x what Facebook paid for it; in addition, buying Instagram destroyed a potential Facebook competitor, handicapped another (Twitter), and accelerated Facebook's mobile strategy. I'll always remember that deal because it marked an important turning point for me. I always considered myself a traditional deep value value investor (I got my start investing looking for Ben Graham style net-nets), and I generally joined along with my deep value brethren when they mocked companies like Amazon or Salesforce that traded for higher multiples of sales than the multiple of earnings of companies I was interested in (i.e. the tech high flyers traded for 15x sales and I wouldn't buy a company for more than 12x earnings). I was confident that momentum buyers today might enjoy those high flyers, but when the bubble burst I was confident my deep value peers and I would have the last laugh (How quaint! I wish I could go back then and enjoy the momentum buyers!). The instagram deal changed all that for me. Paying $1B for a company with no revenue and a handful of employees (I believe it was 33 employees when the deal was announced)? Insanity to my deep value investors, and I saw plenty of them mock the deal online (in fact,