There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You're starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like 'Instagram'.
— Kevin Systrom
'Instagram' is great if you want to share photos, but you're not that technical. Or, if you're not interested in sharing publicly, 'Instagram' becomes a place where you can not only consume photos and videos from musicians, or whoever, but send them directly to your friends.
I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.
Photos were seen as the most private type of content, and 'Instagram' really flipped that on its head and said photos can be really public.
The way people communicate is changing, and no one knows this better than teens. We are using images to talk to each other, to communicate what we're doing, what we're thinking, and to tell stories.
I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.
People don't work in a dotcom because they have to. There are many professions that don't require that sort of time. But people sign up because they want to make world-changing differences, to build something that affects millions of people.
I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.
I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.
When people say that college isn't worthwhile and paying all this money isn't worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.
People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.
I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram - whether it's super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I'd never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I've ever met.
It's wonderful when you pair entrepreneurs together because they can share experiences and in some ways push each other to build better products going forward.
I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.
Facebook's campus has a lot of creative spaces: an analogue print shop, a candy store. It's a dynamic place and one of the best environments I've been in, period.
If it's one thing we do really well as a company, it's that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.
There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.
Whether it's an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on 'Instagram'. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.
Calling 'Instagram' a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. 'Instagram' is less about the medium and more about the network.
Instagram is a media company. I think we're about visual media.
The major reason why Instagram works is that you can follow anyone out there and start following their photos immediately.
In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.
Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.
I believe photos is one of the underlying things in every social network that becomes successful.
Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.
I don't think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can't see it becoming a business.
'Instagram' can engage generations of people that may not be on Facebook yet. I think that's true with 'WhatsApp,' and I think that will be true with things like Oculus.
Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric.
On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their 'Instagram' feed. What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.
It is cool to see that the fashion world has really taken to 'Instagram,' but, again, it is one of the many examples of many communities, whether you are a chef, a skateboarder, a surfer, a skier.
Brands, musicians, and public figures were among the first to embrace video on 'Instagram', and we've been impressed with how brands have extended their reach with video ads.
There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.
Great products sell themselves.
If you've got an idea, start today. There's no better time than now to get going. That doesn't mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there's always small progress that can be made to start the movement.
I think not focusing on money makes you sane because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.
I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It's a huge part of my life.
Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.
Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time - a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.
