Mobile has created a totally different dynamic for discovering apps. You're sitting in a bar, and your friend is taking some pictures, and then you ask what app they're using.
— Kevin Systrom
I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you're getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera. Someone who does this wonderfully well is Lena Dunham.
I think it's hard to compare 'Twitter' and 'Instagram'. Twitter has a more mature business.
When you're introducing a mobile app, you look around and say, 'We could be doing 15 different things, but how do we communicate to someone why they would want to download and even sign up for this thing?'
I don't foresee a future where people don't have some sort of phone that's like a computer. I don't foresee a future where those phones don't have cameras in them. That spells a future where smartphones are the status quo. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives.
There are a lot of apps that are fun to use - they're utility apps; they're fine. But there are a fraction of apps that are in the cream of the crop. You just need to be in the cream of the crop to get noticed.
It helps to see the world through a different lens, and that's what we wanted to do with Instagram. We wanted to give everyone the same feeling of discovering the world around you through a different lens.
It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
Our goal is to allow people to use whatever app they want to get photos into 'Instagram'.
You can build a filter app get people really excited, but the way to keep them is to provide long-term value. Long-term value is, in fact, being its own network.
If you're a journalist, and you want to see live photos happening at any location in our system, you can simply type in the location, and up comes the page.
'Instagram' is definitely becoming a new entertainment source for people day after day.
Just so everyone knows, we're not a photo-sharing company. I don't see photos on 'Instagram' as art. They're much more about communication.
I try to list the top three things to get done every day, and I'll be lucky if I hit all three, but it's amazing what that does to keep you on track.
I own a Canon 20D, though I don't remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I've been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.
One of the earliest requested features was to do premium filters where a brand could sponsor a filter. It's just not in our wheelhouse. It doesn't feel 'Instagram'-my in the way that the high-quality brand ads do.
I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I'll let other people be awesome at it.
I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way.
If you focus on producing a great experience for anyone, that's how you get big.
Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on 'Instagram' to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram.
Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.
It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.
A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.
Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.
I'm a huge fan of what 'Hipstamatic' is doing and all they've accomplished.
Imagine the power of surfacing what's happening in the world through images, and potentially other types of media in the future, to each and every person who holds a mobile phone.
People are hungry for what's happening right now in the world.
A platform is the base from which something big happens. In our case, we're an entertainment platform in the sense that there are people signing up like MTV, Burberry, folks like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. And why? Because it's their channel to control their entertainment to their fans.
Back in the day, I actually studied photography in Florence for a few months, and my photography teacher took away my digital camera and said, 'No, use this - it's analog and it's square.' It was a Holga camera, a very cheap $3 or $4 plastic camera. And that's what inspired 'Instagram'.
Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.
'Instagram' Direct is a really interesting feature because it's grown significantly since we launched it. People continue to use it to communicate more privately.
'Instagram' doesn't exist in a vacuum. We're not a bunch of siloed individuals. It's a bunch of people coming together on topics, fashion, you know, youthful teens, creatives, photographers, foodies, everyone coming together and building a community around the things they love, communicating visually.
A lot of the earliest 'Instagram' celebrities took really beautiful photos. But you're starting to see a change where it's not about beauty; it's about the story that you tell.
Good companies are always fundraising. Whether you're meeting people or considering firms, you're always fundraising.
I like to compare 'Instagram' to the Library of Congress.
Our goal is really to make sure that 'Instagram', whether you're a celebrity or not, is a safe place and that the content that gets posted is something that's appropriate for teens and also for adults.
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
'Instagram' is a media company. I think we're about visual media. I explain ourselves as a disruptive entertainment platform that enables communication through visual media. I don't think it's just photos.
I like to say that the one thing that all people who succeed in changing the world have in common is that they at least tried.
Traditional businesses can say, 'We're going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.' But new business models are hard.
The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.
'Instagram' reached 13 million users in just 13 months.
Most photo apps before asked something of the users. They said, 'You produce, act, and perform.' 'Instagram' said, 'Let us take care of the secret sauce.'
All of us in social media and regular media, we're all competing for the same thing, which is this gap between something happening in the world and you knowing about it.
Really, we're just taking people and shifting them from taking photos anyway to taking them on 'Instagram'.
Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.
There's a natural set of constraints with mobile phones that force you to be a better photographer by acknowledging and observing the world around you.
When you open up 'Instagram,' you need to know that you're seeing the real Tony Hawk, the real Taylor Swift, the real Burberry.
As a kid, creation was something that I always loved. Creating worlds for video games, creating businesses that didn't make any money, selling lemonade, etcetera. In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.
