Focus on doing the right things instead of a bunch of things.
Mike Krieger
I'm fascinated with being able to travel the world via 'Instagram' and just be somewhere different.
You have to tailor yourself to everybody. Sometimes people need a firmer hand; some people you can have a laugh with, and they concentrate more. What they needed was more certainty about the future of the company.
Computer vision and machine learning have really started to take off, but for most people, the whole idea of what is a computer seeing when it's looking at an image is relatively obscure.
My dad worked for different companies that made whiskey for a long time, so we were definitely whiskey drinkers. Growing up, my friends would get toy cars, and I would get swag from whisky companies.
In May of 2010, I joined Kevin Systrom, my co-founder, and we created 'Instagram', a mobile social network that today has over 15 million users.
People want to share their photos publicly with lots of people.
Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.
You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.
I think the biggest challenge over time is that we stay creative and making sure that we continue to launch awesome products that people love.
Doing the simple thing first doesn't mean your solution will work forever.
Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.
Since I was born and raised in Brazil, the steps to becoming an entrepreneur in the United States have not always been easy.
I remember, when I was in college, an anonymous donor gave Stanford students a year of 'Yahoo Music Engine'.
It took less time to build 'Instagram' than it did for me to get my work visa. The app was an instant hit, and Facebook agreed to acquire the startup for about $1 billion in April 2012.
Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.
I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.
In high school, one of the things I loved doing was this after-school program where you would teach computer skills to some of the maintenance folks at school.
Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you're likely to get it wrong.
With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.
Hearing 'no' a lot of times usually tells you either you're crazy or you're on the right track, and you don't know which one it is until you finally launch.
Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.
People want to share photos with only their friends and loved ones.
The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem. Chase what you're passionate about; you'll probably already have knowledge in the space.
When I was a student and rushing to finish a project, my gut instinct was usually to keep adding all kinds of features. It's a way of papering over the fact that you haven't quite nailed your concept yet.
In 2010, the night before we launched 'Instagram v1', my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its first day in the wild.
Having a scriptable infrastructure requires upfront work but can pay huge dividends in bringing new engineers onto your infra team, as well as helping in disaster-recovery scenarios.
By 2013, we had 200 million people using 'Instagram' every month and over 20 billion photos stored.
I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and from an early age was interested in technology and engineering.
When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.
Software is like gardening - one day I'll go behind the shed and clean up. But if nobody ever goes there, does it matter a lot?
I love that our engineers are first and foremost 'Instagram' users.
Every year, thousands of startups are founded - not only in technology, but increasingly also in health care, education, and energy.
Innovation happens best when people of different backgrounds come together to solve the world's toughest challenges and, in the process, can create new jobs and opportunities. I'm hopeful that updated immigration policies will encourage entrepreneurs from around the world to help tackle these opportunities in the U.S.
