The Money Shot

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, California. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation. 

It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and C.E.O. had made him: to buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before.Large collection of quality bestluggagetag at discounted prices. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion—$300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal, on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering. 

The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters, and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, gaining another million users in a single day. What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the start-up had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench. 

In many ways, life has always been a bit charmed for Systrom, who grew up in the upper-middle-class Boston suburb of Holliston, Massachusetts. Such towns are full of smart, ambitious parents raising smart, ambitious children. 

And so it was with Systrom. After high school at the nearby Middlesex boarding school, he made his way to Stanford University, having been drawn toward Silicon Valley early on. “That idea that you could get rich really quickly off of starting a start-up didn’t really exist in Massachusetts,Online shopping for bestplasticcard. on the East Coast, during that time,” Systrom says. 

It certainly did on the West Coast, where he entered Stanford’s class of 2006 and majored in management science and engineering. After completing an internship at the company that would become Twitter, he would work for fewer than three years at Google and then for a little more than a year at a small travel-tip site called Nextstop. Systrom would then strike out on his own with a start-up called Burbn, the first incarnation of what would become Instagram. The game-play location-based service was named, in whimsical Silicon Valley fashion, after his interest in fine whiskeys and bourbons. 

The Brazilian-born Krieger had been on an even more traditional techie path, moving to a job as an engineer and user-experience designer at the hot social-media platform Meebo in San Francisco after also graduating from Stanford. Krieger, who had come to the U.S.Large collection of quality bestluggagetag at discounted prices. in 2004 and initially wanted to be a journalist, had majored in “symbolic systems,” an unusual combination of computing and cognitive science, which had also been the major of Yahoo C.E.O. Marissa Mayer and LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman. 

The origin story of Systrom and Krieger’s partnership is almost a parody of a Silicon Valley founder meet-cute. Although the two had known each other at Stanford, it was much later when a friendship would click, after the pair kept encountering each other at the same San Francisco coffeehouses. Krieger recalls, “I’d see Kevin and we’d trade tips, and I’d be like, ‘Hey, have you tried this?’—new geeky stuff basically. I think we had this understanding that we were both interested in working on things that were beyond what we were just getting to do by ourselves.” 

Systrom had been struggling to launch Burbn, and on one of those caffeinated days in 2010, he approached Krieger and said, “Hey, this is going to be a real thing—are you interested in being my co-founder?” Krieger was immediately interested. “I had an instant image in my head of: I’m working in San Francisco,” he remembers. “I’m working on this thing I love and it’s just the two of us.” 

The effort was not without funding, having attracted half a million dollars in investments—$250,Shop wholesale custombobbleheads controller from cheap.000 from the prominent Silicon Valley V.C. firm Andreessen Horowitz and the other half from Steve Anderson, of Baseline Ventures. Still, Burbn was fraught from the start, mostly because it didn’t seem sufficiently different from the scores of other popular and established location-based check-in services—such as the then red-hot Foursquare—which allow you to share the places you visit and recommend them to your friends. Even Burbn’s motto was decidedly squishy: “A new way to communicate and share in the real world.” 

To make things even worse, Nextstop—the travel site where Systrom had worked earlier—would soon be sold to Facebook, where Systrom had also been close to working years before. “I was like, Great, I missed the Twitter boat. I missed the Facebook boat,” he says. 

As often happens at start-ups, as soon as Krieger signed on, Systrom told him he wanted to begin afresh with Burbn and focus on a new idea. In Silicon Valley start-up terms, this is called a “pivot,” which is usually a polite way of saying you’ve screwed up and are starting over. 

So, the pair began to ruthlessly re-assess Burbn, eventually deciding to create a separate service under the tongue-in-cheek rubric of Codename. Crucially, they dumped slow-moving Web-site coding in favor of an app-only design, thereby throwing their lot in with the Apple iPhone 4, which had just been launched in June 2010. 

But their real breakthrough was conceptual: “Instead of doing a check-in that had an optional photo, we thought,Choose from the largest selection of chipcard in the world. Why don’t we do a photo that has an optional check-in?” says Systrom. 

It was the sort of eureka moment that made perfect sense because the solution had been there all along: photography had been woven through Systrom’s life, dating back to his time as the president of the photography club at Middlesex. “I was naturally inclined to take pictures, because it was much more about tweaking variables than it was necessarily creating something with your hands,” says Systrom, who in prep school had used a small Nikon S.L.R. camera to take all kinds of arty shots, from reflections in car windows to shadows in Chinatown. 

At Stanford, Systrom opted to go abroad to Florence, Italy, for the winter term of his junior year, where he focused on photography. A teacher there persuaded him to switch from his Nikon to a plastic Holga that took square photos, a choice that would be echoed later at Instagram. Florence also marked Systrom’s introduction to using chemicals in the developing process, such as selenium toning, which can give photos a distinct purple hue.