If there’s one thing that doesn’t need recommendations, this is it Instagram, one of the most popular applications worldwide.
The famous photo app is the intellectual child of Kevin Systrom, now a guru of the tech world and a big name in Silicon Valley.
However, Systrom has a very interesting story to tell, before he even graduated from the great Stanford University, when he was just another kid who was fascinated by the world of technology.
Kevin learned you see code by himself, studying the nights. So the years passed and he entered the university. There he was targeted Mark Zuckerburg, who wanted to hire him in his own application while still an undergraduate student.
Only Kevin said “no”, he wanted to finish his studies you see. And so he kicked out an opportunity of colossal proportions that could have cost him a lot in his life.
Kevin graduated and started making an application with his friend Mike that did not seem like much. As if you crossed it Foresquare and Flickr was, so at least the investors he was talking to told him.
The two youngsters spent 8 weeks developing their app and on October 6, 2010 they were ready to release it to the world.
Just two hours with Instagram on the internet, their servers fell out of motion. Within 24 hours, the app had taken first place in the App Store. In its first month of operation, it set a record, registering 1 million users. Among them are first-rate celebrities such as Justin Bieber.
Today, the 38-year-old co-founder and former CEO of Instagram is the 1664th richest man in the world, with Forbes estimating his fortune at $ 2.1 billion. As for his job, he now has around 1 billion active monthly users.
Only this is not the whole story, as you see somewhere in 2012 the streets of Systrom and Zuckerburg would intersect again.
And 6 years later, the two founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were about to abandon their “child”, causing unrest in the Silicon Valley…
A child named Kevin Systrom
The Instagram photo app sprang from a child’s passion for photography. Long before he established himself as one of the leading self-made croissants in the technology industry, Systrom was an amateur photographer and employee. Google.
Born in an expensive suburb of Boston in December 1983, Kevin lived a comfortable and good childhood. His father was a senior multinational and his mother worked in the technology industry, passing successively to large companies (Monster, Swapit, Zipcar, etc.).
As a teenager, Kevin was passionate about music and vinyl collections. Everyone was waiting for him to become a DJ. His love for music was perhaps surpassed only by his other “glue”, photography.
When he was not on the streets taking beautiful snapshots of the city and not letting his friends sneak into Boston clubs, he was reading his lessons. He was a diligent student. And at night he learned the code himself. It was put you see to be accepted in the top Stanford University and study computer science.
He eventually entered Stanford, but did not graduate with a degree in computer science. An engineer sprang up as he changed course. But he was more interested in photography than anything else.
And so he set up a website to share photos of the members of the student fraternity where he belonged, spending an entire semester in Florence to learn even more secrets of photography.
And as if fate wanted it, it was in Florence who would stumble upon the aesthetics that would define the early moments of Instagram years later: one of his teachers was taking pictures with a Holga, the old film cameras that rendered special, retro-aesthetic images.
Those who remember the first days of Instagram, know well how much this trend affected the application.
Returning to university, Systrom began his internship at Odeo. Odeo was a technology company founded by Evan Williams, who would later co-found Twitter.
The general manager and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, also worked at Odeo and became a very good friend of Systrom…
The proposal he could refuse
It was in 2004, with Systrom still an undergraduate student, when Mark Zuckerberg tried to hire him, who in February had uploaded his own application on the Internet.
Facebook was calling her and now she intends to staff her with talents. Only Systrom said emphatically “no”.
“Unfortunately, I decided I wanted to stay in school. This is one of those decisions that I often return to. “I would have loved to be part of the growth of Facebook in those years, but it was the first time I knew this guy,” Systrom said in 2011.
“He was undoubtedly the forerunner of those who would follow in the future,” he concluded. And he was right. He turned down a job on Facebook before Facebook became Facebook. And he did his internship at the nursery where Twitter would be born, before Twitter.
With things like that on its way, it’s no wonder he created Instagram. But before we get there, there was another milestone along the way: Google. There he went to work with his degree in hand, spending the next three years on the internet giant.
In its marketing Gmail worked and later passed through various sections of Google. He even quit his well-paid job to work for a travel startup called Nextstop.
When he resigned to launch his own app, Nextstop was acquired by Facebook (July 2010).
How do you make Instagram?
Systrom locked himself in a garage, classically, and was working feverishly on his own app. He named it Burbn, after his favorite drink, his bourbon.
The application had two main axes, social networking and photography. Although he had only a first and experimental version in his hands, the big investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures decided to give him $ 250,000 for the development of Burbn.
In the same round of financing, Systrom persuaded two other investors (Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz) to trust him with another $ 250,000.
With hot money in hand, Systrom brought his good friend Mike Krieger to the business endeavor to help him. And immediately made him a co-founder.
The two young men knew each other from Stanford, Krieger graduated two years later from Systrom. He even worked on his own application, which he called Meebo.
The two told them to delete all other Burbn functions and leave only those features that focused on the photo. The moment “I found” would come to Systrom one day he was on the beach with his future wife, Nicole.
As he described them in the Telegraph: “We were walking by the sea and I told her we needed something to help us stand out. Nicole told me ” so I do not want to take pictures because my pictures do not look good. They are not as good as your friend Greg ”. He also used this first product [Burbn]. I told her this was because Greg was using filtering applications. And she said, “Well, then you must have filters, too.”
Systrom sat down to make filters. The first one ever made, the X-Pro II, still exists as an option on Instagram. The two associates officially changed his name app in October 2010.
When it came out live, more than 25,000 people came in to download it, dropping their Instagram servers. Just one month later, the app had 1 million users. Nine months later, it had surpassed 7 million.
Mark Zuckerberg smelled his future success and in April 2012 he made the proposal to the two partners that they could not reject.
He bought Instagram for $ 1 billion and Systrom owned 40% of the app. He was even paid with his shares Facebook…
Life after Instagram
The application was the hottest in internet for a number of years. In June 2018, it reached the milestone of 1 billion users. Despite his terrifying success, however, the CEO of Instagram and the CEO of Facebook did not find them in anything, with the tensions being daily.
Systrom and Zuckerberg clashed several times, mainly over “product direction,” as Kevin revealed. Things got tough in September 2018 and the two Instagram founders abruptly left their company, literally freezing Silicon Valley.
Systrom issued a simple statement saying that both partners intended to “take some time away from everything to rediscover our curiosity and creativity”.
Since then, the two of them have been out of the limelight. In a mysterious move, Systrom went silent on Instagram after 2019. At some point he downloaded all the photos he had uploaded on his page for the last 3 years.
Kevin Systrom is today billionaire. He spends his time traveling, playing golf and cycling. He says that he is now interested in fashion and has recently collaborated with big design names in the field. What he prepares, we will see at some point.
For now, one of his favorite pastimes is helping friends and acquaintances set up their Instagram pages. He did the same in 2016 for him Pope Francis, was flown to the Vatican to build the Holy See page.
In 2015 he married the woman of his life, Nicole Schuetz, a fellow student at Stanford and the founder of a company that invests in clean energy (Sutro Energy Group). The couple has a daughter.
But also a dog, Dolly. And since Dolly is a Systrom dog, it goes without saying that she has her own Instagram account with over 19,000 followers! But again, this page is not updated with content from August 2018.
The last time we heard anything big about him, apart from the application he made with Krieger to record the spread of coronavirus in the United States (rt.live), was a news bomb in September 2020.
The New York Times revealed that he proposed to him TikTok to take the helm. It is not known if there is any interest from Systrom or at what stage the talks are, if the “bang” happens, then Kevin will once again face Mark…
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