Find out how Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger trusted their instincts and overcame rookie mistakes on the way to building Instagram, which now gets close to 100 Million photos uploaded a DAY.
Kevin Systrom:
We literally did every single thing you could possibly do wrong to keep Instagram alive and look at where it is today. You too have a chance kids.
Mike Maples:
That's Keven Systrom of Instagram. If you have a smart phone, you might've seen it. If you ever wondered how did they pull this off here comes the real story. We have both Instagram co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mikey Krieger. Let's get their scoop on what happened and without the filters. This is Mike Maples, Jr. of Floodgate and it's go time with the founders of Instagram.
Mike Maples:
Instagram launched in 2010 and had more than 1,000,000 users in two months and 10 million users in the first year. To many, it's one of tech's quintessential lightning strikes. A billion dollar success that seemingly came out of of nowhere. But, Kevin and Mikey have stared down many difficult problems along their path to greatness. Perhaps, most important knowing when not to listen to even their closest of friends who kept telling them they were doing it wrong. So how did they do it? What did they get right that made all the difference? What can we learn from their journey? We're lucky to have a chance to talk to both of them to find out. Let's do this.
Mike Maples:
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, welcome to the podcast.
Kevin Systrom:
Thank you.
Mike Krieger:
Great to be here.
Kevin Systrom:
Excited to be here.
Mike Maples:
Yeah, thanks for coming. I'm excited too, I think so will listeners. Kevin, maybe we should start with you. You didn't start a company called Instagram or at least that wasn't the initial idea. How did you start with a check-in app called Bourbon and end up pivoting it to Instagram?
Kevin Systrom:
It wasn't even a pivot, it was an unintentional not getting to the finish line. It was a fun little check-in app and it was HTML only, so it worked in the browser. It wasn't an app you could download. You'd just send someone a link. I had about 80 people using it at the time and one of them was actually Mike. When I went to raise money, I happened into about a half of million dollars of funding which, by the way, at that time was as a lot of money. Raised that money basically on the idea that I would find a technical co-founder because I think the writing was on the wall that I could get things to an interesting product point, but not to the point they needed to be. That's when I ran into Mike.
Mike Maples:
So you approached Mike. Mike, when you connect with Kevin, it's still Bourbon?
Mike Krieger:
It's still Bourbon. We're at coffee shops on the weekends. I'm working on side projects and Bourbon is still a side project becoming a company for Kevin at that point. It felt like a product or a product area that had a lot of potential and was still untapped.
Kevin Systrom:
I think you were excited because you were a user initially right?
Mike Krieger:
Absolutely. It was the first take on location-based service, which was so powerful. It was a catch word at the time or buzz word. But this was the first take of it that I was like, "Oh, I can see this working."
Kevin Systrom:
Once you finally landed I remember your first official day, we were sitting outside and I was just ... I was like, "Oh man, Mike, we're going to have to not do Bourbon." And he was like, "What?"
Mike Maples:
Okay. How old were you at the time?
Kevin Systrom:
26, 27 probably.
Mike Maples:
Okay. How old were you?
Mike Krieger:
24.
Mike Maples:
Now you're back at Bourbon, but no, not exactly because maybe you've decided it's not going to be Bourbon.
Kevin Systrom:
Right. Mike was like, "Okay, tell me more about what we're not going to be" ... Every time I give Bourbon to someone that isn't a friend, they don't use it. Every time I give it to a friend they love it. I was like, "This is a problem. We got to grow beyond the 80 people that I happen to know." At that point, we decided, okay, we went back to the office at Dogpatch Labs and sat in front of this whiteboard and we wrote out the things that Bourbon did well. What were the core components? One was plans. You could make a plan to go hang out with people basically. It was a future check-in. I thought that was pretty neat, right? There was some other things that it did. I don't remember what we wrote down. But the last one was photos because we were like, "Yeah, that is pretty cool." No other check-in app does photos. We talked about it and we talked about it and we were like, "You know what? Photos seems like the area that's ripe for a lot of work." We circled it and then we just decided that's it, we're going to get rid of everything part of Bourbon that isn't the photos and we're just going to take the photos. We're going to make the check-in optional. So it's going to be photo leads, check-in is an optional add on to the photo.
Kevin Systrom:
What's funny is, I remember getting that app, which was basically Instagram V1 to people who were using Bourbon at the time and they're like, "What are you doing messing around with this? This is-
Mike Maples:
It had the magic.
Kevin Systrom:
This is terrible, Bourbon's great. Why?" The sinking feeling of getting feedback on something that you're trying to make happen in the world by your early customers who love this other thing. I mean, listen if we have listened, there would be no Instagram today. I don't know why we didn't listen. I think it was just because we knew where Bourbon was headed. We knew it couldn't expand beyond these 80 people, but we knew Instagram had something that the world needed and we believed in it. You were passionate about photography, I was too. We really wanted it to exist in the world and I think that just slightly overcame the inertia.
Mike Maples:
But in hindsight, though, Kevin, you had a previous relationship to the topic of photos from your time in Florence, I think. What's up with that?
Kevin Systrom:
I have always loved photos. It's funny looking back at Instagram, of course, this is the company we would've started and I would've run. Mike, you were into photography too. You look back at you personality and you're like, "Of course this is the thing we worked on." That's because I was so passionate about photography in the past. I remember a specific instance, I was in Florence studying abroad my junior year. I took a photography class and I showed up with this beautiful camera that I had saved up for and it was a nice lens and I was going to take all these really sharp, detailed photos.
Kevin Systrom:
My photography teacher, Charlie takes my camera and he says, "You're not going to use this this quarter." He's like, "Use this instead" and it was this plastic camera called a Holga and I took square format film ... medium format film, but square in aspect ratio. It had this blurry lens. It was a plastic lens and maybe cost $4 for the camera, right? He said, "Just use this for the next few weeks and then we'll talk about it." I learned you could take a bad lens, a bad camera, take blurry photos and then he was showing me how to develop them. He was like, "Hey, you can add these chemicals to change the tone of these photos" effectively like a filter, right? I remember loving those photos. They were artsy and beautiful. I mean they weren't perfect. It was like beauty and imperfection. That was in my junior of college, so this is now many years later. But when we were looking at the iPhone at the time the camera just wasn't that great. I mean I know people take it for granted now if with three lenses and everything. Back then it was barely a photo. It was blurry. But I was like, "Oh, if we kind of like go after this old school square format look with filters maybe that'll feel right."
Mike Maples:
It's like a vintage feel.
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah. What you end up doing you end up looking back on your history and the things that've inspired you and you ask how you can incorporate those learnings into your business. In this case, it just happened to work because it turns out people loved the idea of filtering their photos and having it be square. It's okay that the photos weren't that good because they were artsy statements. What's funny is Instagram today I don't think people talk about filters at all. What mattered then doesn't matter now but, man, did it matter at the moment. I think it was because the cameras were so bad.
Mike Maples:
And were you calling it Instagram yet or was it Scotch or what was?
Mike Krieger:
It was Codename, literally Codename.
Kevin Systrom:
We learned we were bad at naming. It had an icon at that time that I think was just like a ... I don't even think it was the cool camera yet. I think it was a like a lame icon and it just said Codename. We had people use it enough and, of course, they were nonplussed about it. The real magic came when I was exhausted, Mike was exhausted. Our users are telling us ... all 80 of them are telling us they don't want to use this thing, right? I was like, "All right, I need a break." My wife and I went to Todo Santos, Mexico. It's near-ish to Cabo and it was great. We were in the middle of nowhere and I was soul searching about what to do. Actually, I was down there and that's when I got the call that the company I had been at was acquired. I was like, "Oh man, what am I doing? This makes no sense."
Mike Krieger:
I didn't realize that.
Mike Maples:
I could've been a contender.
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah, I could've been. I went on this long ... It's not metaphorical, it was a real beach walk with my wife or at the time girlfriend, Nicole. We were walking on the beach and I was just like, "Oh, I don't really know where this is going. Do you think you're going to use Codename?" She's like, "No, I don't think I'm going to use Codename because I don't really like how my photos look. I'm embarrassed by the photos that I take." And I was like, "Why?" And she's like, "Well, all your friend's photos are so good. They're all like nice and interesting." And I was like, "Oh, that's just because they filter their photos." She's like, "Oh, you should probably add filters then." And I was like, "Oh my god, you're right, that makes total sense." Filters should just be built into the app because then it would be really easy to make these terrible iPhone photos look great.
Kevin Systrom:
I went back to the room, I worked on what was effectively dial-up internet, in Mexico to research on stack over for how to change an image's look and that day wrote the first filter, which was expert two. I checked in the code. I showed it to Mikey. The first photo ever on Instagram is of my wife's foot, a stray dog, and a little bit of a sign of a taco stand in Todo Santos, Mexico. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is cool." I actually want to take lots of photos with these filters. It created an urge to want to create and I think the rest was history. I came home and we worked on about three or four more filters and it was probably a few weeks until we launched at that point.
Kevin Systrom:
Upon reflection, I think understanding that you need to solve someone's deep problems that they have with technology or in their life with your solution is how you understand whether or not it's going to go well. When we started Instagram, worked on Instagram, we wrote down the core problems with photos at that time. One was everything was slow. Everyone could agree in theory that you wanted to share a photo with a friend, but no one wanted to because you would take it on your phone and you'd be like, "God it takes forever to upload over the mobile network." At that time, it was 3G. There was no LTE, there was not 5G, none of that, right?
Mike Maples:
Yup.
Kevin Systrom:
Speed was one of them. The second was my photos don't look good. I'm embarrassed to share this photo because it should look good if I'm going to share it, so that was the second problem. The third was there were so many places to share a photo that if I shared it on Twitter then I wasn't sharing it on Facebook. If I was sharing it on Facebook then I wasn't sharing it on Four Square or Posterous or whatever existed at that time that we shared to, right? We're like, "All right, we want to make this extremely sharable." We had those three problems. We literally designed the entire product around those three things. To make it fast, we uploaded the photo in the background while you were entering the caption. I don't know if it still does it today, but basically people take enough time entering their captioning, thinking about what they want to say that by the time you're done entering the caption and you click done and upload, it's already uploaded.
Mike Maples:
So it felt fast?
Kevin Systrom:
It felt lightning fast. I remember everyone using it the first time was like, "Oh my god, how did you get it to ... like it's so fast" when in fact it took exactly the same amount of time, we just used your time more efficiently. The second one was we made filters, right? We let you take your photos and make them "better" or more shareable. The last one was not only helpful for our growth, but also it solved a consumer problem, which is people wanted to share across many places all at once so we integrated sharing into Twitter, Facebook, Posterous. What were the other ones?
Mike Krieger:
Tumblr.
Kevin Systrom:
Tumblr. Yeah, so we had the whole list. With one click, you could share to all these places all at once. I think when you understand what a human wants to do and what hurdle you have to overcome you just solve for those hurdles and then it turns out people really love your product.
Mike Maples:
When did you come up with the name Instagram because that has a better ring to it than Codename?
Kevin Systrom:
That was those two weeks. By the way, this is a theme in our company. Mike has the hard job, I have the dumb job. Mike was doing all the technical stuff at this point, polishing the edges before it would go out, making sure it was production ready and I was researching names. I would sit there making a list, making a list. I remember one of them was Instalux. Do you remember that? With an X. I came across some blog post somewhere where it said something like instant gram and it was about photography. I was like, "Ah, that's it." I remember the feeling of going, "Yes, that." I pulled Mike over and I was like, "How about Instagram?" And we were like, "Yes."
Mike Krieger:
My wife was in advertising at the time. I asked her and she was like, "Yeah, I think that could work with the right brand around it I think it'll go." I was like, "Okay, multiple people feel like it's an okay name." It's already scary when you tell somebody the name that you're going to give a product, right? But I think it resonated [crosstalk 00:13:48].
Mike Maples:
There's a dozen reasons to talk yourself out of any name.
Kevin Systrom:
Maybe that's one of the more interesting themes that we went through. It was just like there are a dozen reasons to talk yourself out of everything. I found even in our own current pursuits it's like you want to go work on an idea or an area and there are going to be 50 people lined up with reasons to not do that. I remember when we told people we were pivoting to photos we were really nervous because this Bourbon thing is what they invested in and this photos thing was new. Everyone was like, "Why are you going to go work on photos? There's no money in photos."
Mike Maples:
Everybody's doing photos.
Kevin Systrom:
Well, no, at the time it was like, I don't know, Treehouse and Picplease and a few others.
Mike Maples:
Never been a big exit.
Kevin Systrom:
Exactly.
Mike Maples:
Got like Flickr, 25 million bucks, who cares?
Mike Krieger:
Exactly.
Kevin Systrom:
Yes. It was like who cares. This is going to be meaningless. Man, I don't know why we didn't listen to them, but we didn't. I think we just loved the idea so much that we came up with the name and then two weeks later we launched. I remember sitting in my bed, it was midnight. We had decided to launch it at night so that it was like a soft launch. We had a bunch of press lined up the next morning. We had told The New York Times. We had told everyone, right? I pressed the submit button for the app store and instantly people started signing up. Mike and I were watching the logs and we were like, "What's happening? It's midnight. This makes no sense." It's like now it's 12:30 and wait more people are signing up. I was like, "Mike, let's look at the logs." We were looking at email addresses. Do you remember this?
Mike Krieger:
Yeah.
Kevin Systrom:
I was like, "Oh-
Kevin Systrom:
Google Mail dot DE. I was like, "Oh, that's right, it's daytime somewhere in the world." This is how naïve we were as founders. We had totally forgotten that midnight in the US doesn't mean people don't sign up because it's daytime.
Mike Maples:
You're like, "Nobody is awake in San Francisco right now."
Kevin Systrom:
Right. We just had people pouring in from overseas because we had done three or four weeks of promotion. We had given it to a handful of people early, I remember.
Mike Krieger:
We would run this contest on Twitter where we would give people one invite to the pre-release beta. We didn't have a playbook that we were operating on, we were just every week doing what we could. You mentioned reaching out to journalists. We literally just got a list of maybe 50 to 100 reporters and wrote them an email. Not like oh this person I already know. It's like, "Hey we built something we think is cool, do you want to try it out?" We have some beta invites to come and join-
Speaker 5:
Instagram.
Mike Krieger:
Enough wrote back.
Kevin Systrom:
In fact, most of them did. I remember telling someone in the PR world we were going to email The New York Times and they were like, "You're crazy. Why would The New York Times talk to you?" I was like, "I don't know. I'm going to email them." And they're like, "Don't email them." I was like, "I'm going to email them." I remember emailing and I still remember her name. Her name was Claire. The-
Mike Maples:
Claire Cain Miller?
Kevin Systrom:
That sounds-
Mike Krieger:
That's right I think, yeah.
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah.
Mike Maples:
Huh, I'll be darned.
Kevin Systrom:
Yes, I think it was. I remember she came to Dogpatch Labs, interviewed us and she was like, "Okay." And we were like okay, we have no idea, is this going to be like a story or not? What's interesting is that day we launched it was a story and it literally brought the site down. We had so much attention because had reached out to all the ... It was The New York Times, the LA Times, Washington Post, and they all answered yes and wanted to write about it. I don't know why, by the way, but they did and that amount of attention that quickly, we spent the next three days literally just trying to keep the site running.
Kevin Systrom:
What's funny is now, if I were to go back and do a startup now, I would probably convince myself ... forget that we did Instagram for a second. Imagine just like I worked at a company for 10 years or whatever and left. I don't think I would ever think to email The New York Times because I'd be like there's no way they're going to email back. Part of the naivete of a founder is the important part because it turns out some do write back and it's really important to try because you don't lose anything if they don't write back.
Mike Maples:
Yeah and some things that can go right do go right.
Kevin Systrom:
Totally. Honestly, taking those changes on believing in the idea, believing in the name, believing in the founding team and also believing that someone would care led to basically the first three days just not sleeping.
Mike Maples:
Yeah. You launched and now it blows up. You can't keep the servers running.
Mike Krieger:
At first it blows up for a bunch of dumb reasons. You know the little fave icon you put in your browser when you visit a website? We had forgotten to set one or just didn't get around to it. No big deal it just shows up blank, right? Except that it issues what's called a 404, not found, not found. We had it configured to email us every time there was a 404. Literally every time somebody visited Instagram.com for a good hour on launch day we got an email saying file not found, so that took down the site once.
Kevin Systrom:
Right. Because it was so busy trying to email the both of us that we didn't have an icon set and the problem was we had the same server that was serving our website that everyone looked at from The New York Times, et cetera, was also serving the service for the app, so it took down both if that makes sense. The stupid icon. I can't remember how we figured out that it was the icon.
Mike Krieger:
And it took a while too. We're on a single server in LA on one of these shared hosting provers. We're not only AWS. AWS was a thing but not really a huge thing yet. I remember calling them and saying, "Hey, we launched this thing, it's blowing up, we need another server" and they're like, "Cool, it's about four-day turnaround for the server so we'll get back to you when it's ready." I'm like, "You don't understand, we're on like Daring Fireball and TechCrunch. You got to like fix it now."
Kevin Systrom:
We've become a thing.
Mike Krieger:
And they're like, "Oh, yeah, we got an express option it'll take four hours." Meanwhile we're talking like, "Do we need another server? I think we need another server, let's do it."
Kevin Systrom:
I got so frustrated because I was penny pinching. I was like, "We don't need another server." Mike was like, "We do." I think I count that as literally the one fight we've ever had as a co-foundership. That was a heated debate whether we needed another server or not. I am gladly on the wrong side of history on that one.
Mike Krieger:
The funny part is actually we had so much the clown shoes we called them. We just gotten so much wrong on that first one. Because we were just trying to get a product out the door we weren't super worried about scalability. We actually ended up not even getting that second server and survived with a single server and then moved to AWS. You were actually right in the short term, but in the longterm we obviously needed.
Mike Maples:
Basically you've got several days of no sleep. What is each of you doing while you're not sleeping?
Kevin Systrom:
Well, we're both trying to figure out what's going wrong with the site. It's this fun ... Well, I shouldn't call it fun. It's this challenging, interesting detective work of oh it's the fave icon or oh it's ... and we would find these things and then there would be relative points of calm because generally everyone would go to sleep. Mike would be like, "All right, we've got to get this other thing done before tomorrow, before the sun rises and everyone starts using this thing again." But I was like, "How can I be useful right now?" And then there was a moment where I was just so out of my league in terms of technical ability that I was like, "I think Mike needs Red Bull." I literally just ... I went to the store across from Dogpatch Labs and I just bought a bunch of Red Bull, some animal crackers because I think Mike likes animal crackers and I bought some Doritos. I came back just with like a lot of Red Bull.
Kevin Systrom:
I was like I feel bad, but this is the one way I can be useful right now and just provide fuel for Mike to fix the servers. Anyways, so we're sitting there and he's like, "Wait, it's happening again. What's happening?" It was that Japan ... The sun was rising in Japan and turns out Instagram had actually taken off, for our scale, in Japan.
Mike Krieger:
This was like the dial an expert or whatever on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I knew a couple people Meebo that had worked on systems and we were calling my friend Shawn. I'm like, "Shawn, I'm looking at my server and there's this number called a load average and right now it says it's like 128." He's like, "0.128?" I'm like, "No, no, no, 128." He's like, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That number needs to be sub three on a good day." He came over and looked at it and was like, "Oh, there's like all these things that you guys need to do."
Kevin Systrom:
So we're like, all right, we got to get onto AWS, apparently that's the key. I had called Adam D'Angelo, who's one of our angel ... or was he an angel investor at that point?
Mike Krieger:
I think he was just a friend.
Mike Maples:
Adam from Quora?
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah, well, from Facebook at the time.
Mike Maples:
Oh, he hadn't started Quora yet?
Kevin Systrom:
I think he had just started, but he was ex-Facebook CTO, so it was like this guy knows how to scale things, right? He was like, "Oh, I'm surprised you guys aren't on AWS." I was like, "What's AWS?" I'd just like to point out, think of every fact you've now heard in this podcast, ask yourself would you have invested in this group of people, okay? We literally did every single thing you could possibly do wrong to keep Instagram alive and look at where it is today. You too have a chance kids.
Mike Maples:
You're feeding Red Bulls and animal crackers to Mike and this is going on now for several days. How many hours of sleep did you get, Mike, in those days where-
Mike Krieger:
I think we got like maybe a stretch of four hours a night where we would go. There was a couch at Dogpatch Labs. I remember because somebody lived on that couch. Remember that guy? He was somebody that just basically lived here and so we had to kick him out and basically napped there for a few hours. That was three, four days. Finally I remember, I think, Saturday morning. We launched on a Wednesday maybe. Saturday, we're like, "All right, the site's stable, we just need to go home and get some sleep." I needed to go home because my girlfriend and I had just moved in together and I hadn't even been to the new apartment we had moved into yet. I remember it's like getting Muni, riding Muni, and being like, "All right, I'll see you in like a day or two." Of course, we saw each other probably within six or seven hours because the site went down again because Japan woke up. Four days basically, no sleep. Got underwear delivered. It was like the crazy-
Mike Maples:
Just four days of just whack-a-mole triage. Oh, Japan likes it what are we going to do about that?
Kevin Systrom:
Learning on the spot. It was a crash course in how to keep something running. It was life support.
Mike Maples:
Now Instagram's starting to work, but over time you were willing to question some of the core assumptions, right? I remember you guys have told me that you had sacred cows that you had to revisit, Android or square photos of the first place, a bunch of things. What sacred cows were you forced to face over time as this thing took off?
Kevin Systrom:
We'll tackle the Android one first. This is 2012, so we've been around for a little less than two years actually. We realized, hey, if we want to grow internationally and really serve the people we want to serve we actually do need to be on Android. The Android devices have evolved but the cameras were no where near at the time where the iPhone was and it took several more years for them to catch up. Telling the community like, "Hey, we're going to launch in Android" you'd expect that people would be like, "Oh, great, my friend who has an Android phone can join now." We got huge backlash, huge.
Mike Maples:
It's the lowest common denominator. You're going to ruin-
Kevin Systrom:
You're going to ruin the photos, they're going to look bad. In Brazil, they called it people are going to come and ruin our party and it's like, "Whoa." I think there's actually a lot of classism built in there if you really peel it back. But we were like, "Why wouldn't you want everybody in the world to be able to use this thing?" Even internally I think there was some pause around do we want to do Android? The photos aren't going to be as good. They're not going to be as beautiful and it's going to ruin the brand. There's no world in which we shouldn't have built an Android app.
Mike Maples:
It was funny now to think it was even a decision, but I remember being involved with a lot of mobile firsts, gaming companies across the board and it was a serious debate should we be on Android. It takes a lot of resources, new knowledge. It wasn't an obvious.
Kevin Systrom:
Well, at the time, it was crazy because we decided to only be on the iPhone because I had this belief that we needed to move as fast as possible to understand product market fit. Everyone at the time, every other competitor had both an iPhone and an Android version and they were telling investors like, "Why would you ever go with these guys who only have an iPhone app when we've got both?" I remember hearing the argument. You guys should really think about both because you have to be available to everyone everywhere.
Mike Maples:
Then you've got the square photo sacred cow?
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah, I remember. First of all, when you wake up in the morning as a CEO of a company and you look at the app store and the app store is full of apps about your app but to fix the feature of your app, which is that you only allow square photos and all these apps were like ... I don't know what they were called, but they would add white or black bars to the size of your photos to basically make them fit into a square. You're like, all right, we're missing something here. We're not taking our own lesson, which is to look at what problems people have and solve them. I immediately realized we had to change what we thought was Instagram, which was square photos only, if we were going to cater to a larger audience that didn't want to post a square photo always, didn't want to crop out their friend.
Kevin Systrom:
I remember the internal groups at the time. Someone commented, "Is this the end of Instagram as we know it?" And the answer, by the way, was yes. It turned out we changed it in a fundamental way, just not in a terrible way. I remember leading on the product side you just said what do I want to the future to be? One where people are annoyed and have to download these helper apps to fit their photos on Instagram or one where we just help people do what they want to do? I just decided the latter and I think that served us well in every case. The other thing I remember seeing is there are a lot of companies who had been around for a while that hadn't changed anything about their core product and they just got stale.
Mike Maples:
Probably one of the biggest sacred cows then was do you compete with Snapchat. What was your thought process there because they were pretty different value proposition from Instagram, at least at the time?
Kevin Systrom:
I think a lot of it's watching what people are doing. The behavior we started seeing there were a couple of things that really stood out. One would be people would post a photo in Instagram. Let's say that it could be a celebrity who's at an event and it would say, "Hey, I'm at the Grammys, for the rest of this go to my Snap." And we're like, "Huh?" And you talked to them like, "Why are you doing that?" And they would say, "It's not cool to post more than once a day."
Speaker 5:
On Instagram.
Kevin Systrom:
We weirdly built this product on Instagram was self limiting. The social norms had been built around the feed where ... you talked to teenagers and they would have the same feeling. They would say, "You never double Insta." I remember this interview we did. They were like, "You never double Insta except on prom and maybe graduation, maybe," right? We looked at this and we're like, "Wow, we've built a product with such a high quality bar for its main content surface that we're limiting everybody from being able to share more." What are they doing instead? They're finding avenues. It's just like water escaping like a pipe. They're like, "Oh, we could go to the Snap thing where the norms are post 20 times a day. We have stories. It's like normally."
Mike Maples:
Yeah, you had streaks.
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah. You want to post a bunch, but then you talk to people and they're like, "And it's a pain." I already have an audience here and but I have to go rebuild an audience and there's no real search over there. What they're telling you implicitly is your product is not serving some core need they have that is very adjacent to the other thing that you are serving. In the end, the design aside and that was the thing we ended up spending a lot of time is how to make it really Instagram-y. The reason it was a conversation at all about what to do is that we were literally dropping photos on the floor for people. There's an old saying what got you here won't get you there and unless you shift your perspective on some of those closely held beliefs you won't actually get to the next level. I saw folks not change things and then go flatline for a long time or let someone like Instagram come along and just gobble up a part of their lunch.
Mike Maples:
I've heard, it's interesting and it's resonated with me multiple times in this talk so far this idea of a product having jobs to be done, right? Kevin, I've heard you talk about this before, this Clay Christensen theory of jobs to be done. Were you guys thinking about that as it related to Snap at that time?
Kevin Systrom:
We were, but I'll tell you when I read ... so I read Clay's book called Competing Against Luck. Yeah, I think it's called that. Actually, I take that back. I read a different ... it was a paper by him that mentioned this idea about jobs to be done. Basically, for those listening if you think about what job a product solves in your life. If you drink a bottle of water it's serving to help you not be thirsty, right?
Mike Maples:
To die ... not to die.
Kevin Systrom:
Not to die. Let's double-click on that for a second. Why do you drink Smartwater versus Calistoga water versus VOSS, which comes in like a really nice glass.
Kevin Systrom:
Right. It turns there are markets for all of these because VOSS, when I'm hosting a dinner party, do I want a beautiful, nice, glass-looking thing on my dinner table or do I want some plastic athletic bottles, right? When I'm working out do I want some plastic athletic bottles? Yes. Do I want glass? No. You have to start asking yourself what job are you hiring the product for and it goes beyond its core use case. It goes to maybe a social use case, like I want to impress other people or utility-wise, I want to just be able to stick a bottle in my backpack when I'm working out and not worry about it. You start asking what jobs does someone hire this product to do in their life. I looked at Instagram and I was like, "I wonder what job people are hiring Instagram for" and we came up with some simple ones. It was like one, people really want to share the joy of a moment with other people. I think at that moment, and this sounds a little bit like a bad business school blog post title, but are you a mission/jobs-driven company?
Mike Maples:
Yup.
Kevin Systrom:
Or are you a product-driven company? If you're a product-driven company, you identify with the product you've [inaudible 00:31:30] and you're like that's that, right?
Mike Maples:
This is what we are.
Kevin Systrom:
This is what we are. Tesla is just the roadster, right? Or are you a mission/jobs-driven company when you're like actually we just really want to help people get from point A to point B without using fossil fuels. I'm not sure that's what they shoot for but let's go with that for a second. Then you realize actually it doesn't matter. There are some families, like my own, that need an SUV. There are some families that want a smaller, cheaper, more efficient version. There's some people that want the luxurious version. That's all within the same job that you're being hired for. Instagram was being hired to share these wonderful moments with people on the go. It turned out stories, to get it back to the original topic, was a great way of doing that, that we didn't serve. It was not just the highlights of your day, but the every moments of your day, right?
Mike Maples:
Do you think it was easier for you to add some of the functions associated with Snap and Instagram or do you think they could've done the same and added Instagram-ness, if you will, to Snap?
Kevin Systrom:
I think it's really hard to play the counterfactual and be an armchair historian. It's really hard for me to look back. But what I will say is that the biggest thing that kept us from adding anything, non-related to the core Instagram product, was the feeling of giving up what we were initially. But the second you realize that's a really selfish thought and what you should be there to do, as a CEO or as a co-founder pair or as anyone who works with a company, is to literally serve the people that use your product day in and day out. You need to just build what they want. Build what they're asking for. Whether it's verbal or not, they're asking for more stuff. Getting over that hump was the hardest thing, because it was like, okay, I'm going to put my pride aside and I'm going to give people what they're asking for.
Kevin Systrom:
We did that and I think it worked really well. Now, I think it worked easily for us because you can always go from being very public to being more private. But there were still hurdles. People thought Instagram's really about just craft and beauty. When we were thinking about adding this I think there was a big debate of whether or not this would ever even work because people just thought about Instagram as highly crafted. Think about how many reasons we would've found to kill it. It's like it definitely hurts content production and feed, right? If you now have two places you can product on Instagram you're probably going to share a little less in feed. But it turns out that you share so much more on stories that it more than makes up for it, but then you're like, "Oh, will we make all our money in feed?" It's almost like you're just putting all these fishhooks out for criticism. I don't know what you would call them but they're the killer arguments that will kill your product. You're just fishing for them.
Kevin Systrom:
The thing is, someone who has a negative argument against doing something bold is always going to have more data than you who are trying to do something new that has no data on god instinct or at least understanding the consumer. In some way, we were like let's bet the farm, right?
Mike Maples:
Kevin, you've read a lot of books and have a lot of opinions about good ones. Are there books that you think are particularly good for founders? We talked a little bit about Clay Christensen. He's got a few, but are there others that you really like?
Kevin Systrom:
Number one would definitely be Competing Against Luck. There are a lot of business books that you can read, but Competing Against Luck. If you're a products person, if you're responsible for selling something to people, whether it's for free like Instagram or just getting it in someone's hands, knowing what job you're solving for people is the most important thing I think a product person can do. The second one, I really enjoyed Principles by Ray Dalio. You don't have to agree with every single thing in the book, but a structured way of thinking about how to make decisions. Mike and I talk all the time about what is the expected value of this decision? What's the variance of this decision? What's the downside case of this decision in front of us? Those types of things that I learned through that book, I think, were extremely helpful as the founder as well.
Mike Maples:
What about you, Mike?
Mike Krieger:
I loved the history and hearing other founder's stories, but especially ones that are not in necessarily identical fields. One I loved, year one or year two of Instagram, when things were hard late nights was ... Did you ever play Prince of Persia? It's a game back in the 90s. The guy who wrote it solo founder, he was alone at the time. At the time, you could make a game alone basically. The whole thing, he did himself. He kept a journal throughout all of that experience and he published it much later. You can go on and just read this guy figuring out things for the first time, solving new problems. When we were like how do we get the database to survive until tomorrow? How do we get filters to work on the new GPU that they have? All these technical challenges that you're facing and then conquering, but then also doing it in the context of building a company and now people depend on me and how's this going to go?
Mike Krieger:
And just knowing that you're not going through a journey for the first time I think is really important. Being able to step back and say not necessarily who's done exactly this, but people who have done things similarly and how do they approach problems? What can I learn from that? How can you say, all right, how do I get to the next challenge? How do I survive this near fatal experience?
Mike Maples:
Fair number of founders out there will be listening here. What is the one piece of advice that you'd give founders that you haven't already?
Mike Krieger:
I think be more open, especially with your co-founders, but with your team earlier and bring them along, that transparency, which was something that I think we'd seen other companies in different molds hold secrets really closely or guard them and not talk about it with the team and not talk about their rationale behind decisions. Over time, I think we became more and more and more transparent rather than less and I think that was actually a superpower of ours. It meant we ended up having all the hard conversations about stories with many people, instead of just being like, "No, we're doing this" and by the way everybody's finding out the day before launch along with everybody else. But, instead it actually meant that I think people felt like they could bring up like, "Hey, I actually am excited to work on this" or "Have you thought about this different perspective?" Transparency is a strength and I think that kind of like honestly and willingness to engage with the team proved to be the way we ran the company over time.
Kevin Systrom:
All great ideas are going to get told no by a lot of people. I could list, and I won't, but I could list the number of investors that passed on our seed round, that passed on our A round, that passed on our B round. It's hard to scale things to a billion plus people, right? Even the things that have grown to that size have detractors the entire way. You have to know that you're going to hear that constantly. Now here's the bad part. The bad part is that bad ideas also get told that they're bad ideas. It is not a sure thing that you hear that your idea is bad.
Mike Krieger:
All is you know is you're non-consensus. You don't know if you're right.
Kevin Systrom:
Exactly. Don't let the negativity get to you. Be open to it and be objective about the feedback that's coming back and ask yourself do I have data to support it or not. I think that's one of the most important things to do because you're going to hear that's a bad idea or you shouldn't do that over and over again no matter what your idea is. Pick a random idea, people are going to say no. Part two is that you're not going to get a lot of data really quickly, so you got to make sure it's something you care deeply about. Instagram it's almost as if it came out of our DNA. It was the thing we wanted to work on so badly that it didn't matter if it was a bad idea, we loved it. Mike and I were talking the other day. We were like, "Do you remember like knowing that Instagram was working or not?" And I was like, "No, I just remember wanting to work on it and thinking it was the coolest thing ever and like I didn't want to do anything else. I just wanted to do this." Have it come out of you rather than go looking for it.
Mike Maples:
Yeah, it's like we like to say sometimes the best way to come up with a good startup idea is to don't try to think of a startup.
Kevin Systrom:
Yeah, go to where the world drives you. Go to where your energy naturally is and double down on it and just hope that it's a good business idea or form it into a good business idea. I'm right on the same page as you, I think. Then it all just ... it comes together. Will it be as big as Instagram? I have no idea. But certainly if it doesn't work out, you'll have had a wild time.
Mike Maples:
Well, guys, thanks for taking the time. It was fun talking to you.
Mike Krieger:
Thanks for having us. Yeah.
Kevin Systrom: It was so fun. Thanks.