Being the largest growing social media platform currently in existence, Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and both of them were Stanford fellows. The app had received an overwhelming amount of response right from its initial days. Started in San Francisco, this photo-sharing app is now dominating the globe with its popularity. Back in 2010, the duo had created this app sitting in a co-working space. Little did they know that the app was going to take such a huge shape in a matter of a few years.
Background History of Kevin Systrom – The Main Face Behind Instagram
The overall vision and main idea of Instagram were Kevin Systrom’s. It was under his leadership and Mike Krieger’s help that this photo-sharing app was launched. Kevin was a fresh graduate from Stanford and was 27. He has always been a private person. He graduated with a degree of Bachelors in Management Science and Engineering. It was during his teenage years that he was first attracted towards programming and since then, he has explored the field further and never looked back. He had been able to enter the tech world way earlier than others because of his in-depth knowledge and passion for technology. But what is ironical is that the first job that Kevin ever did was far from the world of programming.
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When Kevin was in high school, there was a certain point of time when being a DJ fascinated him. He became obsessed with becoming one himself. The matter came to such terms that Kevin had even written letters to get a job at a nearby vinyl-record store. But when he came to Stanford, he discovered his interests in subjects like Economics and Finance and he started thinking about doing more practical things in life.
During the junior year of his life, Kevin went to Italy where he pursued photography in Florence. He was there with his high-powered SLR but his teacher there swapped it and gave him a Holga. But it was the beauty of the camera that drew his attention towards artistic inspiration and vintage things. He learned how beautiful vintage photography can be. It was this feeling that later on combined with his knowledge of technology to give birth to Instagram.
He was even selected for the Mayfield Fellows Program at Stanford which is usually limited to a handful number of elite students. It was a work-study seminar where the selected 12 students will get exposure to the world of startups as they were paired with entrepreneurs and VC mentors. The students were taught about the aspects of fundraising, how ideas were born and how deals were made. Because of his involvement with this program, Kevin landed an internship at OdeoInc. This was a startup dealing with Podcasts and was founded by Evan Williams. This was approximately around the time when Facebook was born.
A story was published in Forbes whereby it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg had once approached Kevin to program a photo-service for Facebook which was still in its nascent stage then. Mark had taken Kevin for dinner to Zao Noodle Bar which is located on University Avenue. He even asked Kevin to leave his senior year and work for him but Kevin had denied. Then, in the spring of 2006, Mark went to Palo Alto’s Caffé del Doge and found Kevin making espressos behind the counter. At that time, Facebook was worth $500 million already and Kevin was still making espressos. So, you never know what happens when. Fast forward a year year, Kevin has his own company and developed an app that attracted over one million users right in the first week of its launch.
How Instagram Was Born?
After completing his degree, Kevin started working as an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google. He gained a good amount of experience there and he also worked on a variety of things like Spreadsheets, Gmail, Calendar and Docs. Then, eventually, he was promoted to the Corporate Development Team of Google. But in 2009, Kevin decided to take a big leap not because he wanted to start Instagram but he joined another startup named Nextstop.com. He was assigned the role of product manager. The startup was about offering travel recommendations and was the brainchild of ex-Googlers. It is at this company that he started writing codes and programs all of which revolved around the concept of photos.
When Kevin got some time off, he started developing an app called Burbn which was a photo-sharing app and was location-based. In 2010, Kevin started developing this app on a full-time basis after he left his job on having a successful meeting with Andreessen Horowitz. Baseline Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz were the first to fund Kevin’s ideas and all this happened within a couple of weeks after he left this job. It was around this time that Kevin called up Mike Krieger to run the start-up with him. Mike was a fellow Stanford graduate and both of them started working together since then.
Everything was going well until the app failed to grab the public’s attention and slowly faded away. The app had certain similarities with Foursquare but had its uniqueness as well. But things did not work out the way the duo had planned. Kevin had even stripped Burbn completely and reprogrammed it for iPhone users only. The pictures were all supposed to look artsy because of the different filters that were available in the app.
They had spent about two months tweaking the code and making changes. The platform was refined and thus came Instagram. They had taken the idea of the name from the amalgamation of the two words – Instant and Telegram.
But when the app was launched, within two hours the servers were malfunctioning. The founders feared of failure once more but the bright side was that 25,000 users had signed up on the app right on the first day.
The Roller-coaster Journey of the App and its Founders
With the launch of Instagram, even though the app faced some technical glitches on the first, the public showed interest in it and started sharing their videos and photos on the platform. By the time 9 months had passed after the launch, Instagram had attracted a total of 7 million users worldwide! Even at that nascent stage, the app has some high-profile users like Ryan Seacrest and Justin Bieber.
In 2011, a second version of the app was launched. The updates included a new icon, borders, live filters and rotation. Since the app was now available on the Android platform too, it attracted more than a million users in a single day. It even became one of the most popular and downloadable apps on Google Play at that point of time. The value of Instagram rose to $25 million by the year 2012 and the founders knew that it was a success.
It was then that Mark Zuckerberg noticed the immense popularity and booming growth of Instagram. The competition between Facebook and Instagram was tense and Mark saw that several users on Facebook were drifting towards Instagram. He became concerned but as you already know Mark and Kevin knew each other from Stanford.
During that time, someone had offered to buy Instagram for an amount of $500 million at a conference. Mark took the opportunity and offered Kevin with $1 billion instead in cash and stock. The deal was made.
So, in April 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram during which it had only 13 employees. But even after that, Instagram remained to be a company that is independently managed under Facebook, Inc. With the power of visual storytelling, Instagram is now a trusted platform for celebrities, brands and practically everyone. Every celebrity that you know is now a part of Instagram.
Even though Kevin had declined Mark’s offer all those years ago, it was Facebook which acquired Instagram in the end. Matt Cohler, who is the former VP of Facebook’s product management, has once stated in an interview that he was truly amazed to see how such a small team came up with such an app that a high-scale infrastructure and a huge number of users.
The factor that had boosted Instagram’s growth since the beginning was that the developers did not try to jam everything into one which is usually the case of other apps. Instagram has always been elegant, stylish and smart. The platform has always been user-friendly and with a few taps, your photo will be edited and uploaded on your feed. And the comments and likes functionality which boosted Facebook were also present on Instagram. But Facebook was a bundle of many things whereas Instagram was always about photo-sharing and it perfected the art over time and hence because more popular than ever.
Systrom has mentioned in an interview that his good fortune with Instagram started all the way back at Stanford. It was from there that he got his first internship and gradually moved on to develop codes for a photo-sharing app. It was also due to Stanford that Kevin met Mike with whom he co-founded Instagram. And it was on the Palo Alto campus that he had received his job at Google. But what is even more striking that he had met Zuckerberg through Stanford as well. He went to a study-abroad program and there was a Stanford fraternity party where he met Zuckerberg and his small Facebook crew. Kevin believes that all those moments that he had spent in Stanford did not really make sense at that time but it does now.
So, this was the story of how two fellow Stanford students created one of the most popular apps of the decade – Instagram.
