Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric.
Kevin Systrom
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.
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.
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.
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.
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.
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.
I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.
Our goal is to allow people to use whatever app they want to get photos into 'Instagram'.
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.
If you focus on producing a great experience for anyone, that's how you get big.
Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.
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.
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.
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.
'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.
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.
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?'
'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.
It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
I think not focusing on money makes you sane because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.
'Instagram' reached 13 million users in just 13 months.
It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
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.
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.
Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.
Instagram is a media company. I think we're about visual media.
Great products sell themselves.
I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The major reason why Instagram works is that you can follow anyone out there and start following their photos immediately.
'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.
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.
Good companies are always fundraising. Whether you're meeting people or considering firms, you're always fundraising.
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.
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 had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.
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.
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.
'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.
I like to compare 'Instagram' to the Library of Congress.
I don't think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can't see it becoming a business.
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.
