Instagram has proved itself to be a worthwhile acquisition. It kept up its growth, expanding from 30 million users in 2012 to over a billion by 2018.[970] More notably, Facebook succeeded in bringing targeted ads to Instagram, a platform that originally had no monetization strategy; Instagram ads now pull in over $8 billion a year.[971]

GitHub grew as a bootstrapped company for over four and a half years; the first fundraising it underwent was a $100 million series A round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, skipping many rounds of financing and dilutions that come with it. Three years later GitHub raised a $250 million series B, led by Sequoia Capital, and in June 2018 Microsoft acquire