The innocents who change the world
Tiny tech scene taught Instagram co-founder his trade
“THE funny thing about tech,” Kevin Systrom begins, “is all of us founders are 20 ‘slash’ early-thirty somethings . . . but nobody knows what they are doing when they are 20 ‘slash’ thirtysomething. We’re all learning and making it up as we go along . . . And, by the way, we’re making world-changing companies as we do it.”
Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram, the photo-sharing social network that has more than 300 million users. He is 31 and in 2012 sold the 15-monthold company he founded with Mike Krieger to Facebook for $1-billion. Systrom remains its CEO (Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, allows him to run Instagram independently) and Krieger is Instagram’s “technical lead”.
Systrom’s ambitions are lofty (“In five years I hope Instagram is this all-seeing public feed of what’s happening in the world”) and he is phenomenally polished. If Zuckerberg is Silicon Valley’s insular and awkward wunderkind, Systrom is its wellheeled prom king.
Like most wildly successful technology entrepreneurs, Systrom is quick to list his nerdy credentials: standout computer scientist and programmer at the prestigious and very expensive Middlesex boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts, tall and gangly, woeful dress sense. But probe a bit deeper and you will discover another side. “The reason I loved electronic music is because I liked to DJ and I liked to bring people together,” he says. “I was captain of the lacrosse team in my junior year. I loved photography and was president of the photography club. I brought people together through that.”
But you don’t strike me as a nerd, I interrupt. You seem to be more sociable.
“I think that’s why our company works,” he says. “I like to say I’m dangerous enough to know how to code and sociable enough to sell our company. And I think that’s a deadly combination in entrepreneurship.”
He went on to Stanford University in California and spent a term studying photography in Florence. Systrom was told to replace his Nikon with a plastic Holga camera that took square photos, which would become Instagram’s trademark.
He was an intern at podcasting site Odeo for Evan-Williams and his co-founder, Noah Glass. Its founders, plus an engineer at the company, Jack Dorsey, would later launch Twitter.
Systrom graduated in 2006 with a BSc in management science and engineering. Two years at Google followed, before a brief period at Nextstop, a location recommendation startup. By his mid-20s, Systrom had worked for, with and under some of the industry’s most prominent companies and minds.
When people began investing in Instagram, they were investing in Systrom and then the product. “It’s such a small world in the tech scene,” he says. “We all learn a lot from each other’s companies. The most important thing for me was working at Google and Odeo, and meeting people along the way.”
Systrom quit Nextstop to concentrate on an idea for an app that encouraged users to check into locations, make plans with friends and post pictures. But users dismissed Burbn (a nod to Systrom’s favourite drink) as too fussy, too complicated.
And so they decided to “make a pivot” (Silicon Valley-speak for “accept you have made a mistake and move on”).
“I was on vacation with my fiancée, Nicole [Schuetz, a fellow Stanford graduate], in Mexico when we had the aha moment,” Systrom says. “We were walking along the beach and I said that we needed something to help us [the company] stand out. Nicole then said: ‘Well, I don’t want to take photos, because my photos don’t look good. They’re not as good as your other friend Greg’s.’ I told her that was be- cause Greg used filter apps. So she just said: ‘Well, you should probably have filters then.’ ” Systrom spent that afternoon learning how to make a filter — X-Pro II, which still exists, in its original form, in the app.
The picture he took was of Schuetz’s foot, a stray dog and a taco stand. “Had I known it was going to be the first photo on Instagram I would have tried a bit harder,” he says.
Thus Burbn became Instagram, and launched on October 6 2010. Before the launch, Systrom put the app in the hands of influential friends, such as Dorsey, who posted photos shot with Instagram on their own social media channels. Expectation suitably whipped up, 25 000 people downloaded the free (as it will always remain, Systrom says) app in its first 24 hours. By December it had a million registered users. They adored its simplicity and, aside from the addition of the video clip capability, a messenger service between users and additional photo effects, it has remained the same product.
Then came the “selfie” explosion. In response to criticism it encourages narcissism, Systrom says: “I think every bit of our lives is in some way about presenting a certain image. I would say that it’s natural and it’s human and it existed long before Instagram existed.”
When, in April 2012, Facebook completed its acquisition of a company described by CNN as having “lots of buzz but no business model”, 30 million people were using Instagram; it had been crowned Apple’s 2011 App of the Year; it had annihilated all competition and had become a verb. — ©