META Meta Platforms Inc

By Deepa Seetharaman 

Soon after joining Instagram as chief operating officer two years ago, Marne Levine asked to see its annual budget at a team meeting. The room was quiet until another executive piped up: "What do you mean 'the budget'?"

Since the former White House official arrived in Silicon Valley in early 2015, Ms. Levine has been helping Instagram mature into a full-fledged business. The photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc. has hired hundreds of employees, doubled its user base to 600 million, and made significant changes to its product designed to undercut rival Snap Inc.'s Snapchat. It now has a budget to keep track of spending.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram's co-founder and chief executive, calls Ms. Levine "an efficiency guru" who has helped the app avoid some of the pitfalls of rapid growth.

Ms. Levine has skills that are in high demand in Silicon Valley, where startups often struggle to get past their adolescence. Uber Technologies Inc., for instance, is seeking a second-in-command to help founder Travis Kalanick repair the ride-sharing company's image after allegations of sexism and sexual harassment and the departure of several top executives.

"We want to be the 10x company," Ms. Levine, 46, says. "That means we need to think carefully about how we set up our operations, how we grow and how we scale."

Ms. Levine's role as operating chief to Instagram's 30-something founders echoes another famous pairing: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who arrived on Facebook's campus nearly a decade ago to help the startup woo advertisers and expand its appeal.

A seasoned manager can instill discipline and order, helping new companies avoid wasting time and resources while adding a veneer of professionalism to attract potential customers. In late 2014, Snap hired Imran Khan, former head of internet banking at Credit Suisse Group, to help build its ad business and prepare for its IPO, which took place in March.

A self-described political junkie, Ms. Levine started her career in Washington, D.C. She made some of her earliest connections at the Treasury Department, including with Ms. Sandberg who was working for Larry Summers at the time. In January 2009, Ms. Levine became Mr. Summers' chief of staff when he was director of the White House National Economic Council during the height of the financial crisis.

"Marne came over, and suddenly order started to emerge out of the chaos, " Mr. Summers says. She created a matrix of "all the positions we had to fill, all the deadlines we had to meet."

At Ms. Sandberg's beckoning, Ms. Levine joined Facebook in 2010 as vice president of global public policy. In her 4 1/2 years in the job, she grew the policy team, which manages Facebook's relationship with governments and responds to privacy laws and regulation, from fewer than a dozen people to more than a hundred. During her tenure, the team also assumed responsibility for how Facebook sets and enforces its content standards.

"Marne is the person where if three things are supposed to get done, she does four," Ms. Sandberg says. "If she says it's going to get done by this date, it's that date or it's ahead."

The two women have long been close friends, taking trips together to places like the Italian Alps and coordinating Halloween costumes. Their families were vacationing together in Mexico in May 2015 when Ms. Sandberg's husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, unexpectedly died. Ms. Levine was by her side at the hospital and helped plan Mr. Goldberg's funeral.

In 2014, Mr. Systrom said he realized he and his co-founder, Mike Krieger, needed help to grow Instagram. Facebook had bought the startup for $1 billion two years earlier, when it had just 13 employees. The pressure was on for Instagram to make money and roll out products at a more rapid clip, and the co-founders saw the need for an executive to manage the expansion.

Mr. Systrom asked Ms. Sandberg for advice and she suggested five or six potential candidates, including Ms. Levine. Instagram's needs dovetailed with Ms. Levine's, who was hungry for a more operational role.

Once Ms. Levine moved over to Instagram at the beginning of 2015, she dove in with the creation of a formal budget, giving the company a comprehensive view of its spending for the first time. Until that point, executives leading Instagram's various teams didn't communicate regularly about their spending, with different teams hiring in different countries without coordinating.

Some Facebook employees in policy and partnerships were working part time at Instagram, Ms. Levine discovered, which she thought was an inefficient arrangement. She successfully lobbied Facebook executives, including Ms. Sandberg, for the resources to hire more Instagram-dedicated staff.

Ms. Levine also pushed to expand the Instagram partnerships team, which manages the app's relationship with public figures, publishers and others to ensure that they continued to flock to Instagram. She helped hire influential figures such as Eva Chen, former editor of Lucky magazine, to oversee its fashion ties, and Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood, who led Beyonce's digital strategy, to run music partnerships.

With Ms. Levine at the helm of the company's operations, the two co-founders had more bandwidth to build an ad business and, later, deal with mounting competition from Snapchat. Last year, Instagram launched more than 20 new features, including Stories -- photo and video montages that vanish after 24 hours -- and live video, to compete with the disappearing-photo app, up from eight in 2015.

Over Ms. Levine's first year, Instagram's prospects brightened. In October 2015, Instagram estimated it would generate $200 million in revenue over the next 12 months, but by December, the estimate jumped to $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the figures. Instagram declined to comment on the figure.

SunTrust analysts now predict Instagram will generate about $3.5 billion in revenue this year.

Ms. Levine also changed the way Instagram worked, executives say. At her suggestion, Messrs. Systrom and Krieger hold a weekly question-and-answer session for employees, like Mr. Zuckerberg does at Facebook. She spearheaded Instagram's move into new offices last year next to Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, Calif., whose space it outgrew.

Ms. Levine's biggest contribution, Mr. Systrom says, is helping Instagram avoid the fate analyst Ben Thompson described: "Companies break every time they double."

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 13, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.