No One Could Have Predicted His Success
What a crazy story.
Kevin Systrom completed his bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering at Stanford University.
When he was about to graduate from Stanford, most of his friends were interviewing at investment banks. They were getting the six-figure offer letters.
I was like.. Oh my god six figure right out of college is crazy. — Kevin Systrom
When he graduated from Stanford University.
He joined Google. It was one of the lowest-paid jobs of all the offers he had from different companies.
Tech guy took a marketing job
He worked in marketing at Google. He had accepted a marketing job at Google despite the fact that he wanted to be technical against all the jobs he was offered.
He had job offers from a couple of startups along with a job from Microsoft and one from Google.
He took the lowest paying job of all the offers he had because he wanted to work at Google. He didn’t care what kind of job he was going to do. All he cared about was hanging out with amazing people in tech.
He worked in the corporate development role. In that position, he was working with entrepreneurs all the time. He talked to them because at Google his role was to help them buy companies.
According to Kevin Systrom:
“Go to where the actual people are…short-term long-term trade-offs just go to where the people are…being at Google and going to corp dev was an interesting move..because I was like I want to be in startup again..I learned about startup in school but I want to be back in the startup world.”
In the year 2008, the economy went to crap. His boss asked Kevin to just go and play golf since they weren’t buying any more companies.
He left Google frustrated.
The idea behind Instagram
“Instagram started out of a company called as burbn. If we go back in the year 2010 check-in apps were all the rage… The whole idea was to share with the world what you were doing specifically with your friends.” — Kevin Systrom
Kevin wanted to build something but didn’t know what to build. He wondered how he could create a better version of another app called Foursquare.
He thought he can add some extra features to an app like Foursquare. It will be more than enough.
Of those many features, one of them was posting a photo where you were…
He was then joined by his co-founder named Mike Krieger. They decided to attack foursquare and other similar apps. Both Kevin and his co-founder wanted to build something interesting and fun.
When they released the app. Nobody used it because it wasn’t different enough.
People wanted to share photos
Clearly, the app wasn’t getting the kind of traction they were hoping for after launch.
After this, they looked for three things that people liked most about their product that were not part of other products.
Photos turn out to be one of the best.
People wanted to share what they were doing and where they were at any given time. Other products didn’t allow people to share moments of what they were doing at the time.
At that time Facebook was not like what it is now.
“Facebook was like post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago. Twitter allowed you to post photos but there feed was primarily text and they didn’t show the photos in line.” — Kevin Systrom
But people wanted to post photos of what they were doing at the time.
It was actually the beginning of Instagram.
The revolutionary moment for Instagram
Instagram gained huge popularity when its feed turned into square photos.
Why did Instagram introduce a feed containing square photos?
iPhone was released for the first time. The first version of the iPhone was not so good. Still, it was one of the best at the time. The phone had an amazing camera and you could easily carry an iPhone4 with you.
The Instagram team wondered what will change when everyone has a camera in their pocket. It was clear to Kevin Systrom it will be going to be revolutionary since the device not only has a camera but also a connected network.
At the same time, the Instagram team asked what are some of the things that suck about the photo.
First, back then photos used to be blurry, compressed, and not that good.
Second, uploading a photo used to take a long time.
Third, sharing a photo on various social networks was difficult. To upload a photo to any social network, you need to visit them individually and then upload the same photo.
To address the not-so-great-looking photo, the Instagram team introduced filters to the app. The first filter they produced was called the X-Pro II. When this filter was introduced, it made the photo look great.
To address the second problem. Instagram tried to focus on latency in the right places.
When you take a photo and then go to the editing screen. You’re thinking of the caption. The Instagram team made the decision to start uploading the photo in the background while you think about the caption.
They assumed that if you have taken the photo and it is in the editing phase. There is a high chance, you will upload the photo. In this way, they reduced the upload time of a photo.
If you decided not to upload the photo even after the editing phase, they used to stop the upload process and delete it.
“So what ended up happening was people would caption their photo they pressed done or upload and you’d see the little progress bar just go…it was lightning fast…we were no faster than anyone else at the time but by…doing it in background it almost guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned.”
To address the third problem, Instagram provided the mechanism to share your photo on all other social networks.
These things mattered to people. Because they handled all things perfectly, Instagram went viral.
How much technical difficulty was there with the programming?
Lex Fridman asks Instagram founder Kevin Systrom this question.
His answer:
“The only thing that was complex about instagram at the beginning, technically was making it scale.”
What programming language and technology did Instagram use?
The Instagram team was using the old C objective for the client. Instagram was only for iPhone. They were also using Python and a framework called Django for all the back-end work.
Along with Python and Django, they also used Postgres and MySql for all database-related work.
According to Kevin Systrom, using Postgres was an interesting decision. They decided to use Postgres as it has some built-in geographic features.
“We were basically like not only hipster photo company also a hipster tech company.” — Kevin Systrom
They were also using Redis at an early stage. Redis solved a lot of problems for Instagram and Kevin thinks it’s still great. Kevin said programming was easy for the Instagram team, as there was only one signup page and one feed.
They weren’t using any kind of machine learning. They were using all these technologies until they had 50 million users.
“You can get away with a lot with a pretty basic stack. I think a lot of startups try to over engineer their solution in the beginning.” — Kevin Systrom
One thing the Instagram team did that saved them, in the long run, was that they were rigorous about writing the tests from the start.
This helped them move very quickly when they wanted to rewrite parts of the product while also making sure they weren’t breaking other things.
Getting acquired for $1 billion
Kevin worked in corporate development at Google. Corporate development is effectively the group that buys companies.
He had previous experience working with entrepreneurs. He had sat in many of these meetings with entrepreneurs, but Google never acquired any companies when he was on his team.
He had plenty of experience of how much entrepreneurs got when they sold their businesses.
At the time of the acquisition, the Instagram team has a total of 13 employees. They were all young. They went out to raise money and were the hot startup of that time.
They went to a VC and asked for a $500 million valuation. They fail to raise money at this valuation. No VC was willing to offer them a $500 million valuation.
But then comes Facebook. After negotiating with Facebook, Instagram was able to double the requested number. They went from $500 million to $1 billion.
According to Kevin:
“We thought, the resources would help us scale it and in a lot of ways de-risks..the employee lives for the rest of the life including me and Mike…I think I might have 10 grand in my bank account at that time…We were working hard and we had nothing”
The deal was finally done and Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012.
