The phrase “photo addiction” didn’t exist until more than ten years ago. The era of smartphones with better camera opened the gates for this new concept. On October 6, 2010, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom launched Instagram in order to capitalise on the newly discovered market. Within a few hours of its launch, Instagram was flooded with over 10,000 new users and within a month, the platform had amassed 1 million users. Today, Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users, more than 500 million daily active users, and more than 500 million Instagram Stories shares per day.
Focusing on one thing and doing it really, really well can get you very far.
#instagood, #selfies, #followme, #picoftheday and many new hashtags became the order of the day. Instagram became the social mirror and harnessed the creativity of a common man. Instagram proved to be the Cristiano Ronaldo of Silicon Valley; eventually, Facebook proved to be the Real Madrid and bought this photo sharing Giant for a whopping $1 billion. A number of celebrities ranging from sports stars to politicians are Insta’s active users.
Kevin Systrom achieved the epitome of success obtained through a combination of luck and hard work. In 2022, he went to Stanford University to earn a lucrative Bachelor of Science in Management Science and Engineering. Being a techie, he had always dreamt of pursuing impossible jobs. Kevin’s mother, Diane Systrom, worked as a marketing executive at Zipcar, as well as other well-known companies such as monster.com and sawpit.com. His father, Douglas Systrom, worked as a Vice President in Human Resources at TJX Companies.
Birth Date: December 30, 1983, Holliston, New York.
Net Worth: $1.2 Billion (As of December 2022)
This billionaire honcho has everything: the mind of a nerd, looks of a model and the most importantly the ‘Midas Touch’. Let’s dig deeper into his fascinating life:
- At the tender age of 12, when the other kids love playing the game, Kevin used to enjoy editing the levels of the game. “I’ll credit Doom II for everything,” he said. His fascination with computers began at this point.
- Kevin Systrom’s first encounter with computer programming occurred while he was a student at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.
- He got his first taste of the entrepreneurship when he was selected as one of the twelve students to participate in the ‘Mayfield Fellows Program‘ at Stanford University. Through this fellowship, he was able to secure an internship at Odeo, Inc., the company that gave birth to Twitter.
- Twitter later showed interest in purchasing Instagram. While at Odeo, Kevin shared the desk with Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) for three months.
- Mark Zuckerberg expressed interest in hiring Kevin in 2006, and even requested him to ditch his senior year at Stanford in order to work on developa photo service for his newly founded social network “The Facebook”. Surprisingly, Kevin turned down the offer, and chose to focus on his photography studies.
- Kevin’s brilliance and early internships landed him incredible job opportunities at Google and Microsoft. In July 2006, Kevin joined Google as the ‘associate product marketing manager’, managing the functions of Gmail, Spreadsheets, Docs, and other products.
- After leaving Google in January 2009, Kevin joined Nextstop as Product Manager. Nextstop is a travel App that recommends exotic places to its users. In 2010, Facebook Inc. acquired Nextstop.
- Realising his dreams: In an interview, Kevin Systrom disclosed “The story starts when I worked at Nextstop. While I was there working in marketing, I started doing more and more engineering at night on simple ideas that helped me learn how to program (I don’t have any formal CS degree or training)”.
- After acquiring the necessary knowledge, Kevin stepped into entrepreneurship with his first venture ‘Burbn’ with Mark Krieger. Within two weeks of leaving Nextstop, Kevin received his first funding of $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz who liked his path-breaking idea.
- Failure of Burbn: ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, the same thing happened to Burbn. It had many features, ranging from sharing locations, posting pictures, to future check-ins. The creators soon realised that in spite of having the variety of features, Burbn lacked user-friendliness.
- The ‘lightbulb’ moment: Once while on vacation, Kevin Systrom and his fiancée – Nicole Schuetz (fellow Stanford Graduate and founder of ‘Sutro Energy group’) were discussing prospects that will make his company (Burbn) stand out. Nicole suggested him to use some filters since her friend Greg also uses filters to enhance the image when the original one doesn’t look good.
- The re-development of Burbn led to creation of Instagram. X-Pro II was the first filter on Instagram and the first ever photo that was posted on Instagram was of Nicole’s foot – a stray dog and a taco in Mexico.
- Instagram-‘Instant’ and ‘telegram’: After realising their mistakes in their first venture, Kevin and Krieger decided to focus on only one feature – the photo sharing. In an interview, Kevin Systrom said “Instagram is a form of communication which is an ideal mode of sharing photos, status and updates with other people. It also keeps you to get connected with other social websites like Twitter, Facebook, etc.”
Great Products sell themselves.
- Billion dollar deal: On April 12, 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Kevin Systrom stake remained at 40% or $400 million. On the day of the deal, Instagram was a mere 22 months old company with only 14 employees.
- Rivalry?: Jack Dorsey – Founder of Twitter was keen on buying Instagram but offered half the price of what Facebook was paying. Eventually, Instagram was sold to Facebook since then Dorsey hasn’t posted anything on Instagram.
- Awards and Recognition: In 2012, the ‘Founder of the Year’ was awarded to Kevin Systrom at the ‘6th Annual Crunchies Awards’. In 2016, he was listed in America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40.
- In an interview, Kevin shared his expectations from Instagram, “One of the things I love about Instagram’s photos is they are there, they stick around. It means historians are going to be able to look back at humanity at this point in time and engage and understand what has happened and what people were seeing”.
- Kevin has so far invested around $130 million in companies that include: Blue Bottle Coffee, Even, and Sparks.
- In September 2018, Kevin Systrom resigned as CEO of Instagram.
If you’ve got and idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going.
The post is a part of a B’day Series where we celebrate the birthday of renowned personalities from Tech Industry, very frequently. The series includes Entrepreneurs, C-level Executives, innovators or renewed leaders who moved the industry with his exponential skill set and vision. The intent is to highlight the person’s achievements and touch base the little known, but interesting, part of his life. You can see the list of all earlier celebrated tech personalities, including Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayor, Sean Parker, Andy Rubin, Julian Assange, Sir Richard Branson, Sergey Brin by following this link or subscribe to your daily newsletter.
