- The speaker discusses the potential for success among the audience, emphasizing the tolerance for failure in Silicon Valley.
- He shares his personal journey into the startup world, starting with his love for doing various activities.
- He talks about his experience starting a classified ad site called The Tree List while studying abroad in Florence.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of learning skills and gaining experience, rather than focusing solely on the success of an idea.
- He advises the audience to take action and make progress, rather than waiting for the perfect next move.
- The speaker acknowledges the fear and uncertainty that comes with pursuing a riskier path, but assures that it will all work out in the end.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of accumulating experiences and learning from them.
- The idea for Instagram filters came from a photography class the speaker took, where they learned about using chemicals to change the look of images.
- The speaker advises going where the people are and surrounding oneself with great people to learn from.
- The speaker left their job at Google during the 2008 economic downturn and joined a startup called Nextop, which was instrumental in their development.
- Bourbon, the predecessor to Instagram, started as an HTML5 location sharing app but eventually evolved into a photo-sharing app with filters.
- The speaker's girlfriend suggested adding filters to the app, and they built the first filter, X-Pro2, while on vacation.
- The speaker discusses the success of Instagram's launch and attributes it to great hiring and the relationships they had built in the industry.

- The relationships built over time helped with the launch of the product and gaining promotion from friends
- The importance of being relentless and believing in your own idea, even when others doubt it
- The unexpected success of Instagram's launch, with users signing up immediately from different time zones
- The challenges of handling the influx of users and the need for additional servers
- The importance of community and preserving it as a core value for Instagram's success
- The focus on serving the users and building a strong community from the beginning

The speaker discusses the importance of learning and gaining experience, taking action, and surrounding oneself with great people. They share their personal journey in the startup world and how their idea for Instagram came about. They emphasize the importance of relationships, being relentless in pursuing your idea, and building a strong community.

Kevin Systrom at Startup School Silicon Valley 2014

View the annotated transcript, and add annotations of your own, on Genius: http://tech.genius.com/Kevin-systrom-kevin-systrom-at-startup-school-sv-2014-annotated

Kevin, thanks a lot for joining us today.

I guess, you know, the crazy thing about this audience right here is that There might be the next kind of really successful founder sitting there might be you it might be the ones the person sitting next to you right now I Guess a lot the thing that I loved it here initially is like how did you even come to startups?

You know, at what point did you realize this was something that you could do that you wanted to do?

Well, the first thing I'll say is I challenged that there might be a founder here in the audience that's going to do something big.

There's absolutely the chance that someone in this room here today will be the CEO, CTO, founder of 1 of the world's most changing companies in the next 10 years.

We live in a really special place where people get to work on ideas where failure is tolerated.

I mean, if you travel overseas to other places, there's a reason why Silicon Valley is so different and it's because failure is tolerated.

You asked me a question, which is why did I end up getting into the startup world?

I grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts in a small town very few people have heard of called Holliston.

And it was there that I realized that I loved doing lots of different stuff.

It's not that I loved technology, it was that I loved doing lots of different stuff.

So I went to boarding school, and I was the guy hanging an antenna outside of my dorm room window to do a pirate radio station, right?

Like, I was designing flyers for dances, I was DJing.

I just loved doing a lot of different things.

And when I read required reading in school, our junior year was this book called The New New Thing.

I read that And I said to myself, this feels like an area of the world I can come to and be myself and do lots of different things and see what sticks.

So I was drawn, I did a trip to Stanford just to see the school, cuz I was interviewing at a bunch of East Coast schools.

And I came to Stanford, and I was like, there are palm trees.

And everyone loves working hard on really cool stuff.

And I remember it was 1 of those first beautiful days back in Massachusetts.

Like, you go through the entire winter, and it's gray.

For those of you from Massachusetts, you know what I'm talking about.

And you get to the first beautiful day and I was touring a specific school, I won't name by name, and there was like not a single person outside.

I just said to myself, I wanna be in a place where people want to enjoy life but work hard too.

That's what drew me to being out here and being kind of a little schizophrenic in how I treat different ideas and go from thing to thing.

But that's kind of the ethos of an entrepreneur.

Definitely, and at Stanford, you kind of started your first thing.

It was a classified ad site, is that right?

Yeah, as many people know, and I'm not sure how this has changed to date at Stanford and other schools, but no 1 has money, and all you wanna do is get a fridge for your room, right?

And I'm pretty certain that every single year someone starts this startup, and I caught this trap too, which is just like, how do you allow students to trade goods at the beginning and end of the year.

And there's this interesting mismatch between the end of the year people wanna get rid of the stuff and the beginning of the year everyone wants to buy stuff.

So I sat down and I decided to teach myself Ruby on Rails.

And I was like, this is gonna be a really awesome skill.

So I learned that, learned about databases and learned enough to be dangerous.

And this is like 1 of the lessons in entrepreneurship is that like you don't have to be the best, but you have to be dangerous, right?

You have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea, concept it and show it to the world.

And then it turns out there are lots of other people, including all 170 employees that work at Instagram who are much better at doing all that stuff than I am.

But you need to find people who can, you know, be drawn to the idea that you build, And then they end up taking it and making it even better.

So I worked on a classified ads startup at Stanford called The Tree List.

It was supposed to be like Craigslist, but The Tree is the, it was a really terrible name.

So what's interesting though is I started it not at Stanford, but actually while I was studying abroad in Florence.

So I'd studied in Florence for 3 months, and I remember we didn't have much to do after class because it was the winter, it was cold.

I think the program had 12 students in it.

So you'd go home to your host family and you'd eat an awesome Italian dinner and then you'd sit there without TV and you'd just say, okay, what do I wanna do?

So, WiFi really wasn't a thing in their building and I would have my laptop and I would literally just build this site at the time on my little, it was an iBook.

And what I would do is actually to ship code, I would go outside of the apartment building, down the street, and like I remember specifically 1 day it was snowing, it doesn't snow in Florence very often, so that's why I remember it.

It was snowing and I would go next to the public library and lean with my laptop until I got enough signal and I would like sync FTP to make the files go to the server and then I would send off all my emails promoting it to people back at Stanford.

So I was literally just trying to launch this thing from afar.

There's so much you could learn from even launching this thing that you know a lot of people attempt, but the actual Action of getting it out there like that was probably the first you know first step to a lot of the other things that you did Later

yeah I think what probably helped to you was like the idea that I wasn't on the ground listening to whether or not people liked it gave me enough like ammunition and confidence to like keep working on it.

And then all I had was like, are people using this or not?

And that's really important because what people tell you and how people act are very, very different sometimes.

So the lesson I learned was not very many people were using it.

So we ended up, like I ended up forming the idea more into a less of a overall Craigslist and more of it just a goods transfer.

But again, the other lesson here is sometimes it's not about the idea that you're working on, but instead the skills that you're learning while you work on it.

And that really helped me, well, not only learn to program, but also learn to market a consumer site to people.

And I mean, colleges are probably the best form of marketing because everyone's interconnected and they talk all the time.

So an incredible amount of the groundwork for Instagram started far earlier, kind of in your experiences with previous startups and learning to code, I totally agree.

Just being able to talk to your other founders, be able to build something for other people, it all starts early.

So from there, I guess, a lot of the people in this room are in college or about to graduate, trying to figure out what their next move is.

And so, talk us through where your mind was at when you were graduating and what you were thinking, kind of the first experiences, right, during college and after college?

Yeah, I think everyone's experience is different.

First, everyone in this room has to take the idea that there is a perfect next move and throw it out the window.

There aren't many windows in this room, but throw it out the window.

I had the privilege of going to a Marine base once and talking to Marines about how they plan their next move.

And there's this phrase called bias towards action that I really was taken to.

So the idea that you can spend all of your time thinking about what the perfect next move is, trying to plan am I gonna work at Google, am I gonna work at Microsoft, like which 1, like am I gonna work at McKinsey or Bain, like trying to figure out all, like the next perfect move, and spending a tremendous amount of time trying to figure that out.

The Marines say you can spend all the time you want, but by the time you've figured it out, you're dead.

So like sometimes you need to make a trade-off of what is the action I can take with the appropriate amount of information and risk to move, because moving and progress is what gets us to the next step.

So for me, I mean, when I was in school trying to figure out what to do after college, all of my friends were interviewing at investment banks and Bain and McKinsey and they were getting these offer letters with 6 figures and I was like, oh my God, 6 figures right out of college is crazy.

I like, for a guy that didn't take a start up for the, or sorry, a salary for the first 2 years of founding Bourbon slash Instagram, it was like, it was really harrying to think that people can have such a salary out of college, and you're gonna go like take not a great job, right?

That you're gonna do something that's a little riskier.

It turns out, and I mean don't quote me on this because your parents will kill me, like it's all going to be fine.

Okay, when I told my parents that I was going to go do a startup, and I know we're all a bit older here, but like you know when I told my parents I was going to do a startup, they're like what about health insurance?

I was like oh that's a good point, What about health insurance?

So thank you parents for making me think of that.

And, but that bias towards action was like, there's no perfect next move.

You just need to know that by moving and learning, it all adds up.

That summation of your experience over the last n years is what makes you into the thing tomorrow that will be successful.

And it just takes trying and trying and trying again.

I mean, Instagram filters came from a photography class that I took in Florence, where my photography teacher gave me a square format camera called a Holga.

It's this plastic camera that got kind of hip with hipsters.

And anyway, he handed it to me and he said, you should use this.

And as we were developing the film, he's like, you know, you can change the look of the image if you put these chemicals in the bath when you're developing the print.

So, you know, you put it in and like the colors start changing to this interesting purple.

And I started thinking to myself like, oh my God, this is like awesome, I'm gonna do it on all my prints, and every time I made a print, every 1 of the people in that class were like, the prints are so cool.

So every little experience you have, you may not give credit to, but it turns out is super important for being foundational in your startup going forward.

You'll end up kind of figuring out how it takes form in your startup going forward.

But each and every little experience adds up.

So flash forward a few years, and you're in corp dev at Google and you're kind of thinking about your next thing and you start talking to people about, well, I'm thinking about starting something, maybe photo sharing or perhaps something around HTML5, you know, the initial idea around bourbon starts percolating, like, what was that like initially, and how did you get your first co-founder and team?

Yeah, I'm gonna answer a slightly different question, because I have a better story about that.

Which is that like, I was working in marketing at Google, and I had taken the marketing job, even though I wanted to be technical, against all the other jobs that I had offered.

There were 2 or 3, a couple at a startup, 1 at Microsoft, 1 at Google.

I took the lowest salary of anyone that like any of the offers that I had because I wanted to work in a specific job at Google.

I didn't care what job it was actually, I just cared that it was at Google and I would surround myself by amazing people.

That was the first lesson that I learned, is go to where the people are, and 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 wanna be in our startups again.

I learned a lot about startups in school, but I wanna be back in the startup world.

And I'm not sure how many people remember 2008 in this room, but the economy kinda went to crap.

And I remember looking at my boss and being like, okay, so Can we buy this company?

1 of them, and I won't even name the name, but it was a really interesting company, ended up doing really well.

But the thing is, he was like, we're actually not gonna do many deals now.

And for like a 20-something year old thinking to themselves, like, I want to make a difference in the world, and your boss is telling you to go golfing, like, maybe I should just leave.

So I did, and I actually, There's a chapter in between Google and Bourbon that not many people know about, but I ended up joining a startup of some ex-Google folks called Nextop, which is hugely transformational for me because it's where I cut my teeth learning to program, learning to build a site, and everything I learned in that year at next stop before starting bourbon was actually like it Made me ready to go do bourbon so again every move you think needs to be perfect It turns out just like surround yourself by great people where you can learn the most and great things will happen But I didn't go golfing, and that's rule number 2.

So, Bourbon was initially an HTML5 location sharing kind of app.

Like, at what point did you, you know, come up with HTML5 as kind of a new thing that's happening.

Let's link that to this other thing that I also really want.

I have this thing, I'm sure it exists in other people's minds as well, but it's called combinatorial entrepreneurship.

So just like take a bunch of terms that are hot and swap them around until you get something that's interesting.

It was like HTML5, check-ins, badges, points.

I mean, listen, it ended up being Instagram eventually.

It's a great way to generate ideas, but Bourbon itself was like, okay, I don't� actually, It's funny, I remember pitching to Andreessen Horowitz and being like, HTML5 is the future.

And I'm thinking in my head, I just don't know how to make iPhone apps, so I'm going to make it in HTML5.

But that ended up being like really important for our development cycle, which was like we were able to iterate really, really quickly and like launch new features because it was HTML.

And then the idea was like, okay, no one's using this thing because it's really slow and it's HTML and they can't put an icon on their screen or when they do it's really hard to.

So, we knew we had to go native, but we didn't know when and how.

So, when we decided to do Instagram, what we did was we took Bourbon and we said, okay, no one's using this thing.

So how many absolute users or was it retention metrics?

It's really easy to do select count star on users or whatever, and it returns 80.

It was really easy to tell how many users we had.

Side note, the day that it got really interesting at Instagram was when that query stopped returning.

Because there was a day where I was like, Mike, how many users do we have?

And he was like, Ed, this command isn't returning, so I don't know.

That's how you can tell if you're doing well.

But yeah, now there are tons of tools like to measure daily actives and cohorts and that stuff.

And that was just something that, I mean, it was kind of our own ignorance that didn't allow us to do that initially, but it kept us focused on just building stuff.

But anyway, we had Bourbon and it was a location sharing app.

You could check in, and as part of your check-in, you could attach a photo or a video.

And there were points and badges and achievements and all sorts of stuff, and I had all the game theory books on my desk, and I was like, okay, how can we gamify this thing?

And I was on this vacation because like, it wasn't working.

My girlfriend and I went on this vacation in Mexico, and we're walking along the beach and I'm like, Nicole, I think like, you know, photos are kind of interesting.

Mike and I had talked and we were like, the photos part seems like it's what people love the most.

And she was like, yeah, but I don't like posting photos because they're not that great.

And I was like, what do you mean they're not that great?

And she goes, well, your friend Greg always takes amazing photos.

I was like, well, that's because he uses Hipstamatic and CameraBag.

And I was like, well, you know he uses apps that filter your photos and then you post them.

So actually that day she was like, you should add that.

And I started thinking, I'm like, you know what?

So I went home, well not home, we were staying in this little bed and breakfast that was like $40 a night or something.

And it had dial-up internet, and I basically researched how to change the look of pixels in an image, and I built the first filter that afternoon, which is now called X-Pro2, which a lot of people love and use.

And actually, if you scroll all the way back to my feed in the first image, you actually see X-Pro2 and a little Mexican dog at a taco stand because we were in Mexico.

We did filters, but that wasn't the end of the story.

We had to come back and we cut a bunch of the features, we made it native, and I was like, all right, let's launch this thing.

And it took us about 8 weeks to build the first version of Instagram.

And we launched it, and like, I don't know, like the first day we had 25,000 people sign up, and then it just started.

And I remember leaning over to my co-founder, I was like, Mike, I think like this is gonna be something.

He's the pessimist, not the pessimist, He's the pragmatist in the co-founder pair, and I'm like, you know disillusionist like optimist

like I'd love to really dig in on that because I was literally 1 of the best launches that any app You know even today has seen You know, how did how did you engineer that You had such an incredible amount of support from the right people.

Yeah, first of all, like great hiring for your companies, it starts well before you need people.

I worked at a company called Odeo back in the day, and my first day I showed up and I sat down at my intern desk, and they were like, we'd like to introduce you to the new engineer, his name's Jack Dorsey.

And these are the types of stories where you just meet people along the way, and the valley is really small.

By the way, the valley is smaller than this room, okay?

The people you will meet time and time again in the Valley are probably in this room right now.

And you will meet them in 1 job and in another and in another.

And the relationships we built over time helped us when we got to the point of launching where we were like, hey, can you use this thing and tweet it out maybe?

And my thinking is they're gonna say no, but actually they loved it so much.

So not only do they have to love it, but then they also have to be willing to do, you know, promotion for it because they're your friend or because you have a previous relationship.

But like we created so much buzz up until our launch that like once we launched it, it was this ground swell.

The 1 thing everyone's going to tell you is that your idea is bad and it's never going to work.

And if someone says they're not gonna work, they're generally right.

And because they're generally right, they convince themselves that no ideas work.

But it turns out you have to be your own advocate and you have to believe that it's gonna work.

I remember saying to some people that were helping us with press, I'm going to talk to Claire Kane Miller at the New York Times and I'm going to get her to write about Instagram.

And they were like, there's no way you're going to get her to write about Instagram.

Like she doesn't write about little startups like you.

And I emailed her and like, sure enough, she emails right back and she's like, sure, I'll come over and see what you guys are doing.

She writes this awesome article, our first day of launch.

But it just turns out that like you have to be your own advocate because no 1 else is incentivized to believe that your idea is gonna work.

So you absolutely have to believe or like no 1 else is going to.

So taking a step back right before launch like surely just like anyone else you had crazy pre-launch jitters How did you know that it was ready for other people to try?

I remember is 12 30 a.m October 6 and I pressed the button in the App Store.

And back then, when you press the button in the App Store, your assumption is like, this is gonna take a while, it's probably not gonna go out to the public.

It turns out somewhere else in the world, it's like midday.

So we weren't exactly the smartest group.

So what ended up happening is the first giant set of users on Instagram were all, like, from not China, but, like, Asia, a bunch of, like, German users were signing up, and we looked at the email addresses, and it's, like, hotmail.de, and we're, like, why are all these German users signing up and we're like Oh, cuz it's like, you know 9 a.m.

There like people are actually awake So what ended up happening was a ton of people signed up We were on a single server at a small little COLO facility down in L.A.

That you could, like, rent a physical server.

That was, like, I still remember someone saying to me, like, why are you guys on 1 server?

You all laugh, but it wasn't obvious at the time.

And when we launched, it's like, the little tiny server, which had half of the power of an iPad, basically couldn't keep up.

And we called them and we're like, hey, we need another server, I think.

And they're like, okay, will 4 hours work?

And everyone started tweeting, first of all, never watch Twitter when you launch because it's really demoralizing.

Everyone's like, noobs, they don't know what they're doing.

And I literally thought to myself, we have this great idea, but no 1 loves it because we're down.

And actually, 1 of the guys at the coworking space, like, trolled us and, like, took a picture on Instagram of us trying to keep the site up and tried posting it.

Calling him out by name in front of 1,700 people.

But yeah, we, there were jitters, but it was more adrenaline than anything.

It was like, how do we keep this thing up?

Like how do we make sure that it doesn't topple?

I still think we, I mean, if you ask many entrepreneurs, very few will tell you that they think they were lucky.

I think we're really lucky to know the right people, to be in the right place at the right time, to have devices progress to the point where people wanted to take photos, but didn't want to take photos unless you did something to them.

We were at the right place, right time, with the right team, and I feel forever lucky for that.

But I mean, it takes a lot of hard work once you're lucky.

Kind of a big closing question, because Instagram is not merely technology, it's also an incredible community.

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Kevin Systrom at Startup School SV 2014