🇺🇸Kevin
Systrom

Kevin Systrom learned to program by reading manuals he found in a Borders bookstore near his family's home in Holliston, Massachusetts, copying code onto his family's computer to see what would happen. He was fourteen, and nobody had encouraged him to do this. He simply found computers interesting in the way that some children find things interesting — completely, without needing the interest to be useful. At Middlesex School in Concord, he became interested in photography and design as well as computers, a combination that would eventually define his career. Stanford admitted him, and he enrolled in the management science and engineering program, graduating in 2006 into a technology industry that was just entering what would become its period of maximum transformation.

His first jobs were at Odeo — the podcast company that would pivot into Twitter — and then at Google, where he worked on Gmail and Google Reader. Both jobs gave him a close view of how internet products were built at scale, and both left him unsatisfied in the specific way that good founders are unsatisfied: he could see what the products were not doing, and he thought he knew how to do it better. He left Google in 2009 to start a location-sharing app called Burbn, which was named after his interest in bourbon whiskey. Burbn allowed users to check in at locations, make plans, earn points, and post photos. It was used by a small group of enthusiasts who mostly ignored the location features and used the photo-sharing. Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger noticed.

They made a decision that most founders in their position do not make: they threw away almost everything they had built and kept only the photo feature. The new application, Instagram, launched in October 2010. It was a clean, fast, beautifully designed photo-sharing app with a set of filters that could make an ordinary photograph look, as users immediately recognized, like a photograph worth sharing. In the first twenty-four hours, twenty-five thousand people downloaded it. In the first week, one hundred thousand. Within three months, one million. The app was free, running on two people and a few cloud servers. It was doing something no photo app had done before: it made photography feel like a social language rather than a documentary exercise.

In April 2012, eighteen months after Instagram launched, Mark Zuckerberg called Systrom directly — not through intermediaries, not via investment bankers, but directly — and offered to acquire the company for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram had thirteen employees. It had never generated revenue. The deal, when it became public, was one of the most discussed in the history of the technology industry. Zuckerberg, whose company was preparing for its own IPO, understood that Instagram represented not just a product but a behavioral shift — people were increasingly sharing photos through mobile devices with social networks rather than through email or desktop computers, and Instagram was winning that behavior. He did not want to compete with it. He bought it.

Systrom stayed at Facebook as Instagram's CEO for six years after the acquisition, growing the platform from thirty million users to one billion. He oversaw the launch of Instagram Stories in 2016 — a feature that was openly modeled on Snapchat and that rapidly became more popular than Snapchat's own version of the same thing. In 2018, tensions with Zuckerberg over product direction and data access led Systrom and Krieger to resign on the same day, leaving together as they had built together. Systrom has since been working on Artifact, a personalized news aggregator that uses machine learning to recommend stories. It is, in its directness and clean design, recognizably the product of the same person who once decided that the photo was the only feature that mattered.