Kevin Systrom: Instagram | Lex Fridman Podcast #243

The following is a conversation with Kevin Systrom, co-founder and longtime CEO of Instagram, including for six years after Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now here's my conversation with Kevin Systrom. At the risk of, uh, asking the Rolling Stones to play Satisfaction, let me ask you about the origin story of Instagram.

Sure.

So, maybe some context. You, like we were talking about offline, grew up in Massachusetts, learned computer programming there, liked to play Doom II-

(laughs)

... uh, worked at a vinyl record store, then you went to Stanford, turned down Mr. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, went to Florence to study photography. Those are just some random, beautiful, impossibly brief glimpses into a life. So let me ask again, can you take me through the origin story (laughs) of Instagram, given that context?

Yeah. You basically set it up. Um...

(laughs)

All right. So, uh, we have a fair amount of time so I'll go into some detail, but basically what I'll say is, um, Instagram started out of a company actually called Burbn, and it was spelled B-U-R-B-N.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, a couple of things were happening at the time. So if we zoom back to 2010, not a lot of people remember what was happening in the dot-com world then, uh, but check-in apps were all the rage.

Mm-hmm.

So, this-

What's a check-in app?

Uh, Gowalla, Foursquare, Hot Potato.

So I'm at a place, I'm gonna tell the world that I'm at this place?

That's right.

What's- what's the idea behind this kind of app, by the way?

You know what? I- I'm gonna answer that, but through what Instagram became and why I believe Instagram replaced them.

Mm-hmm.

So the whole idea was to share with the world what you were doing, specifically with your friends, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, but they were all the rage, and Foursquare was getting all the press. And I remember sitting around saying, "Hey, I want to build something but I don't know what I want to build. What if I built a better version of Foursquare?" And I asked myself, "Well, why don't I like Foursquare?" Or, "How could it be improved?"

Right.

Um, and basically, I sat down and I said, "I think that if you have a few extra features, it might be enough," one of which happened to be posting a photo of where you were.

Mm-hmm.

There were some others. It turns out that wasn't enough. My co-founder joined, we were going to attack, uh, you know, Foursquare and the likes and- and try to build something interesting, um, and no one used it, no one cared because it wasn't enough. It wasn't- it wasn't different enough, right? So one day, we were sitting down (laughs) and we asked ourselves, "Okay, it's a come to Jesus moment. Are we gonna do this startup? And if we're going to, we can't do what we're currently doing, we have to switch it up. So what do people love the most?" So we sat down and we wrote out three things that we thought people uniquely loved about our product that weren't in other products. Photos happened to be the top one. So sharing a photo of what you were doing, where you were at the moment was not something products let you do really. Facebook was like, "Post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago."