The Birth of Instagram

So this is our first one talking about the birth of Instagram, and in our next episode will continue that story. But today we're gonna talk about an app that started off as a project that was meant to help a young fellow learn how to code, and it turned into a billion dollar acquisition deal. It's one of those Silicon Valley fairy tales that thousands of people chase after, but only a select few ever atchieve. So we're going to

look at the Instagram story. And Instagram was designed by co founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and they launched it in twenty ten. But our story will begin a little earlier than that, because you guys know, I love my history. So let's begin with a quick look at

the backgrounds of the two founders. Kevin Systram was born in nineteen three in Holliston, Massachusetts, and his parents are Douglas Systrom, a vice president of human resources at the department store corporation t j X Companies, and his mother, Diane, is an executive in the marketing department at zip Car

and has worked at other startups. He attended school and Conquered Massachusetts at a private school called Middlesex School, a boarding school or private school rather, which has fewer than four hundred students total, and, according to The New York Times, has nearly as many acres in land as it has students enrolled. So this is not a Rags to riches Dale. This is more of a rich's to Holy Cow, you

are so incredibly rich tale for Mr Systram. In addition to his studies, he became a fan of the computer first person shooter game Doom too, And I talked about that in a couple of episodes way back when when I was covering things like it. The Doom franchise was one of a handful of games that launched level developer tools to the community. That meant that if you liked you could download those tools for yourself and you could

actually build your own maps for the game system. Began to do that and also started studying computer programming, though really only more as an enthusiast. He would not pursue a degree in computer science after school. Systrom enrolled in Stanford University back in two thousand two, studying management science and engineering, so essentially the business classes over at Stanford, and Stanford was or still is actually located near Silicon Valley in California, and it's one of those places where

ambitious students and grew investors often collide. They meet up with each other, they share ideas, and frequently students are looking to get recruited right off school into one of the big tech companies and uh they that ends up just being a rich pool of talent for companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and all the startups as well. Systrom spent a winter

semester at Stanford in Florence. He actually went to Florence to study abroad, studying photography in particular, so he had an interest in photography long before Instagram was ever a thing, and at this time the iPhone had yet to appear and cell phone cameras were fairly primitive, so he was using actual film cameras and higher in digital cameras. In two thousand five, System became part of a special work study program called the Mayfield Fellows Program. Only twelve students

are selected to do this each year at Stanford. Coincidentally, Mike Kreeger, the other co founder, would be selected for that same program in two thousand seven, though at that time sisterm and Krieger didn't really know each other that well. Systems work in the program led to an internship at a company called Odeo. Now I've covered Odio in the past,

but here's a very quick refresher. Odio started out as a podcast focused company, not necessarily to produce podcasts, not a content creator, but rather as a way to publish podcasts, to subscribe to podcasts, and to follow podcasts. But Odio faced serious stiff competition, namely in iTunes, and ultimately the company would pivot to a different project that one of

its employees had been working on for a while. It was a little messaging app that would let users send out a quick hundred forty character message to followers, and it would end up being called Twitter Systrom joined the Sigma New fraternity while he was at Stanford, and he gained a reputation for being creative and particularly talented and

making visually appealing presentations and videos. During his senior year, he was encouraged to drop out of school and joined the Facebook team, which was just really getting started at the time. System actually turned down that offer after chatting with friends and concluding that Facebook was likely just a fad. I think things turned out all right for Sistrom in

the end, however, even though he missed that opportunity. After graduating Stanford in two thousand and six, Systrom joined the ranks of Google in a move that many of his peers felt was a safe but somewhat uninspired decision. Google had already kind of established itself by two thousand six, it was no longer in that crazy start up phase, and System would stay with Google for about three years,

leaving to join a company called next Stop. Next Up was founded by a former Google employee, or actually a couple of former Google employees, and it was a social travel recommendation site. The idea was the site would help people find fun things to do in new locations, so you could post about things that were interesting at different places in the world, and that's where we're gonna leave Mr Systram for the time being. We're gonna switch to the other co founder, Mike Krieger. Krieger was born in

nineteen eighty six and sal Paulo, Brazil. His father is an executive who traveled extensively, and so Kreeger spent time in places like Portugal, Argentina, and the United States as he was growing up. He got his first computer when he was four years old, So yeah, this is also not a rag Store Riches story for Mr Kreeger. By the age of six, Kreeger was already starting to experiment with coding, mostly in an effort to enhance his gaming

experience on his Windows based computer. So you're starting to sense a theme here, kids getting into coding through computer games. By the time he was a teenager, he was acting as a mentor to maintenance personnel in an after school education program at his high school. So he would go attend high school and afterwards he would help teach people how to develop computers skills so that they could get

better jobs. It was kind of cool. When he turned eighteen, he was accepted to Stanford University, and that was in two thousand four. Kriegers major was in symbolic Systems, with a focus on human computer interaction. That discipline combines elements not just of technology, but also psychology and several other important movers and shakers in the tech world graduated with similar degrees, and as I mentioned earlier, Krieger, like Systrom, was part of the Mayfield Fellows program, so he was

also one of those twelve students. While in college, Krieger interned with Microsoft. He would work on power Point as a project manager. He also interned at a company called fox Marks, which creates a browser add on that allows users to synchronize passwords and bookmarks across multiple computers and over there he served as a software developer, and after he graduated Stanford, Krieger went on to work for a

company called me Bo. Me Bo was a web based instant messaging provider as well as something of a social network. So in early System is that next stop, which would later be acquired by Facebook, and Krieger was at me Bow, which in two thousand twelve would be acquired by Google, and System was working on a little side project since two thousand nine that Krieger got a chance to try out because the two knew of each other, but at

that point they hadn't really worked together. And that sets the ground for the predecessor for Instagram, which I'll talk about in just a second, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So before we went to the break, I mentioned that System had been working

on a project since two thousand nine. That project was called Bourbon, but it was spelled b U r b N because it's an app and apps hate vowels, I guess, and Bourbon is apparently System's favorite drink, and he was working on it over the weekends when he wasn't doing his normal work either at Google or then later at Next Stop, and it was a bit of an odd beast.

Systrom had aspirations of launching his own app and potentially his own company, and Bourbon was really the where he was cutting his teeth on app development because that really wasn't what he had studied. He knew about the power of apps, and he was convinced that mobile was going to be the biggest thing moving forward. This was in when Mobile was already doing quite well and Bourbon was in many ways a project that System was using to learn how to develop apps, how to use HTML five,

and what sort of features users would actually want. Now, remember that while System was interested in all this, he still didn't have that degree in computer science or anything like that, and so Bourbon ended up being kind of a hydra, a mini headed creature that was trying to do a lot of things all at once. For one thing, it was a check in service, similar to what four Square used to be. You could visit a place and use the app to check in. He let your friends

know you had visited. You could make recommendations to friends, and you could plan for future get togethers at specific spots, which would earn you points in a sort of gamified element in the app. System had cited the social network game Mafia Wars as an influence on some of the app design, and you could upload photos to the app

and share those with your friends as well. Krieger was an early user of Bourbon, and Systram had conversations with the Krieger focusing on ways to enhance the app's features and make things better. Meanwhile, System continued life in Silicon Valley, which included going to networking events and to try to make connections with other entrepreneurs and developers. At one such event hosted by a startup called Hunch, Systram met a guy named Steve Anderson who was the founder of Baseline Ventures,

which is an investment firm. Anderson looked at a prototype build of Bourbon and agreed to invest in the development of the app to the tune of two fifty dollars is a pretty big of agreement. He also recommended System that he find a collaborator to work with more closely

and not just become a personal echo chamber. In March, System decided to pursue Bourbon as an actual entrepreneurial opportunity, and he quit his job at next Stop, which was a pretty easy decision to make, especially after Mark Andresen added to that initial investment with two fifty thousand dollars of his own, which brought that launch investment up to

half a million dollars. And Systrom was able to convince Kreeger a couple of months later in May to quit his job at me Bo and come work with him on the project, and so the two co founders joined forces. They set up shop at a place called dog Patch Labs, which was a company that offered up shared office space

for the startup tech companies in the Bay Area. Companies that did not yet have an office of their own could rent out space at dog Patch Labs, and before long the two decided that they weren't really on the right track. They had come to the conclusion that Bourbon was just too similar to four Square, which was already an established app at that time, and they also felt the service was just too busy and cluttered. It had so many features that was a little confusing as to

what it was intended to do. And thus, in June they decided to engage in the great tradition of app development, the pivot. And I mentioned a pivot a little bit earlier, but what exactly is that. Well, a pivot in Silicon Valley speak is when you realize you've done messed up

and you need to try something else. So if you ever hear about a company pivoting, what that's really saying is that the people in charge realized that what they had been doing is just not working and they'd better do something else or they're going to face ugly consequences. For Kreeger and Systrom, that meant taking a look at their app and then trying to figure out what they might be able to salvage from it. And while the check in services were sewn up, one thing that stood

out was the idea of a photo sharing app. Their first attempt at building a solo photo sharing app was a failure. It didn't even get a new name, and this was before they had entirely abandoned the hope for a full featured bourbon app. But they got back to it and they began to refine their approach, and one thing that really helped them out was the inclusion of a popular feature in Instagram, the photo filter. Systram tells a story about being on vacation with his then girlfriend

now his wife, Nicole. Nicole was another Stanford graduate, and she explained to Systrom that she never really liked sharing the photos she was taking with her iPhone four because she felt they never looked as good as she wanted them to. And that inspired System to develop a filter for photos taken by the iPhone four camera, and one that would automatically adjust settings in a post processing approach, so you didn't have to do all that messing around

with settings yourself. It would just automatically apply them and make the image better. So it would change the color balance, it would change the contrast, it would soften the edges, adding a little bit of golden light to sweeten the image.

And he taught himself how to create the tools and then developed his first filter, the x pro to filter, And according to both System and Krieger, they would use Photoshop to actually create the effects they wanted to create within Photoshop, and then reverse engineer how to do that within the app how to create those same effects uh as an as a post processing trick with images taken

from a iPhone camera. Ultimately, Krieger and System decided that their new app would allow users to share photos, to leave comments, and to like images, as in you could hit the little like button or the little heart button and say, hey, that was a pretty cool picture. I really enjoy it, and also to use filters. They needed a new name, and they chose Instagram, which is a portmanteau of instant and Telegram and also kind of hearkens back to the instant cameras that Sistram had played with

when he was younger, like a classic Polaroid camera. It took the two about eight weeks to go from the idea to a full fledged app, and before they submitted the app to the Apple App Store, they tested it with their friends. And these were influential friends. It wasn't just buddies who were in the neighborhood. These are people like Jack Dorsey, who was the founder of Twitter. Not bad idea. If you want to get some evangelists for your product, you go after people who already have a

wide following. And a little after midnight on October six, the Instagram app launched in the App Store. When it debuted, it was an iPhone exclusive, and it would remain so for more than a year and a half. The app wouldn't be available on other platforms for a while, so on the first day of it being available, about twenty thousand people downloaded the app. They began taking photos, they

began sharing them and breaking the system. The system load was too much for Instagram's initial servers to handle, and it sent Systram and Krieger onto a little bit of a panic. They tried to figure out who they could contact to get some advice, and they settled on Adam D'Angelo, whom System had met at a Sigma New party at Stanford years earlier, D'Angelo had served as Facebook's chief technology

officer and was a pretty knowledgeable guy. D'Angelo helped out his buddy and talked him through the process of moving the load over to Amazon's hosting services, where Instagram could rent server capacity while building out its own systems. According to Systrom, the conversation took about half an hour and

then things were back up and running. Now, at this point, it was still a two man show, and both Systrom and Krieger made it a habit to always have a computer with WiFi capability handy in case there was a need to jump into the app and patch it so that you could smooth out a bug or fix other problems, which was happening on a fairly regular basis due to the enormous popularity of the app, because within just three weeks that thousand user base had grown to three hundred thousand,

and this was just the start of a wild ride. I have more to say about Instagram, but before I jump into the next section, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor. The same month that Instagram launched, Systrom and Krieger hired their first coworker, Josh Redal. He would become the community manager and led efforts to form

partnerships at Instagram. He had previously worked at next Stop, the same company that Systram had worked for earlier in a month later in November, Shane Sweeney joined as a mobile engineer. Sweeney had become interested in program main through computer games It's sound familiar, and then later through social platforms. He had started working in web development while still in high school. He had moved on to doing work with a company that was called Digital Path that was making

wireless mesh networks. It's a pretty cool technology. I'll have to do a full episode on that at some point. But three months into his stint of working for the company, the funding fell out and one hundred people were laid off, including Sweeney. He would go on to work on personal projects at dog Patch Labs, using that as a workspace, and there he met Sistrom and Sistrom invited him to work on Bourbon earlier in but Sweeney actually said no

when he was invited to work on Bourbon. It was only after Instagram launched that Sweeney reconsidered and joined the team. And in fact I saw an interview with Sweeney where he said there's an ongoing joke at Instagram that everyone says no to Systrom. Initially he asks them to join his project, and they'll say no, and then later on they'll change their minds and say yes, and that this

is just a thematic thing that goes on at Instagram. Well, there wouldn't be another higher until two thousand eleven, so in those initial weeks, Instagram was a four person operation. Meanwhile, the app continued to get thousands of downloads and user activity was increasing on a daily basis. In fact, by December, Instagram had one million registered users. And remember this was before there was any support for platforms like Android or

Windows Mobile. This was purely on iOS. The flagship phone for Instagram was the iPhone four, which had launched in June two thousand ten. The iPhone four had two cameras. The back facing one was a five megapixel camera and the front facing camera was just point three megapixels. And a quick explanation for folks who have heard the term megapixels but they don't really have a grasp on what that's all about. Megapixels are a way to measure image resolution.

A pixel is a point of light within a digital image or a screen. So if you are looking at a television screen, every single little bit of that television screen is made up of tiny little points of light called pixels. So every photo is a collection of pixels. If you only have a small number of pixels, your

image is going to be blocky and ill defined. I've used this example before, but imagine that you've got a bunch of blocks of different colors, and the blocks measure maybe two inches per side, and you're told to make the image of a flower, and you're given fifty blocks to do it. That flower is going to be a little blocking. But let's say you're given two hundred blocks and they're each a half inch per side. Well, that flower is going to be less blocky. It's gonna look

more like a flower. The smaller the blocks are, and the more blocks you have, the more refined the image you can create, So you increase the resolution of your image. Uh, However, that's only part of the quality of a photo. It is true that more pixels generally means higher resolution image, and a megapixel is technically one million, forty eight thousand, five D seventy six pixels that we usually just round down and say it's a million pixels, But megapixels don't

always mean better photos. Like if you have a ten megapixel camera and your friend has a fifteen megapixel camera, it does not necessarily mean the fifteen megapixel images are going to be better than yours. Uh, I mean it matters a lot of other things matter too. System's then girlfriend, Nicole now wife. That's what she was complaining about the

iPhone four camera. Wasn't that the megapixels were bad. It's just that there were other elements that would factor into the quality of an image, like color representation, or contrast and other factors. And that's partly why photo filters became so popular. The filters could compensate for shortcomings in the digital camera sensors that were found in smartphones at the time. Instagram was not the only out to do this, or

even the first app to do this. The app hip Stomatic had already made a name for itself at this time, turning smartphone photos into these little, squared off images that look like vintage photographs, and it had several filters that would automatically apply to each image to give it sort of that vintage feel. But Instagram gave users an easier way to archive photos and keep a record of those images. And unlike hip Stomatic, which cost a dollar ninety nine

to purchase, Instagram was free. What's more, Systrom had said it would always be free and that monetization strategies would not involve users coughing up money to pay for the service. I have to do a full episode and hip Stomatic at some point, because that's another fascinating story of a company that made a huge impact when it launched, only to find itself in troubled waters. A couple of years later, in January twoleven, Instagram rolled out support for one of

its enduring features, hashtags. The hashtag the pounds symbol had already gained popularity over at Twitter, where users had sort of invented and adopted the practice in an effort to

make it easier to follow tweets about specific subjects. You would use Twitter Search and you would search hashtag the term, and that way you would just get the tweets that were specifically including that hashtag, because otherwise, if you just search for a regular word, you get a whole bunch of tweets that were not relevant to whatever it was you were looking for. So it was a way to

narrow things down. Um, So that was how it worked on Twitter, but in Instagram it would do something similar, but this time you allow for another possible application, a group photo album. The way it works on Instagram is that you would caption the photo and you would include one or more hashtags to help describe the photos context, what the photo is about, what's going on in the photo,

something that's more specific than just hashtag photo. Perhaps you attended an event and you wanted your image included with others from that same event, So you might do something like hashtag Jonathan's birthday party, and then other people are using that same hashtag, and it becomes easy to see all the photos taken by all the people at that event by doing a search on hashtag Jonathan's birthday party. You just use that hashtag and boom, your image is

going to join all the others tagged with that same label. Now, granted, the more general the label, the more likely your image is going to be grouped with a bunch of ones that don't really have the same, uh, same perspective, or the same relevance as yours. So you want to get as specific as you can without getting ridiculously long hashtags. It's a bit of a balancing act to do this. You have to make sure you're using those right hashtags. So if you use one variation and everyone else uses

a different one, you're the one who's left out. So let's say again, you said hashtag Jonathan's birthday and everyone else is doing hashtag John Strickland's birthday, then yours is not going to show up with everybody else's. And Instagram elites will tell you that including lots of hashtags to

cover several different contexts is key to discover ability. I've seen guides about best uses, best practices on on Instagram suggesting that you should use no fewer than a dozen hashtags when you're capturing your photos if you want people to see them. I questioned that because I think after a while, if you see that many hashtags, you start to roll your eyes. But then again, I don't have that many followers on Instagram, so who am I to

say whatever? Like I, I can't give strategic advice. But it has led to abuse of the system as people began to use hashtags that were completely unrelated to the photos that they were posting, just in an effort to get those photos seen. It would be disingenuous for me to take a photo of, say the building I work in and tag it with hashtag Beyonce just to see

if I could get more impressions with my image. And as Instagram has grown in popularity, having a lot of followers and engagement in the app has become much more important. It can be a way to get hired as a social manager, for example. So as a result, Instagram has occasionally instituted new policies to help cut down on hashtag abuse, including implementing a policy called shadow banning, which really only became known years later. And a shadow ban still allows

you to post to Instagram. You can still contribute, but it will not share your images with the Instagram community through those hashtags. So let's say that I have been abusing hashtags on Instagram for a while. The algorithms have said, this guy is just using random hashtags that have nothing to do with his photos. We're gonna shadow ban him.

And then I go to see a big event. Let's say I go to, uh, the next Star Wars premiere, and I'm taking a lot of photos from the red carpet, and I want to have Star Wars Premiere hashtag on my Instagram photos so they could be added with everyone else's. I could still post all those photos to Instagram, and if you went to my account, you would actually see those photos, but they would not be shared with all the other Star Wars premiere photos because the shadow band

would keep my hashtag from working. And it was all meant to negate this tendency for people to use hashtags that had nothing to do with the images they were posting, just in an effort to boost the number of views they were getting. In early two thousand eleven, Instagram held another round of investment funding. The apps popularity was skyrocketing, with more than a million and a half users in February and more than two fifty thousand photos shared each day,

and investors flocked to the new company. Adam to Angelo was one of those investors, as was Jack Dorsey. Chris Soaka, who was an early employee over at Google, also invested in the company, and in all, angel investors poured seven million dollars into Instagram, which still had fewer than five people working there, so more than a million dollars per employee, which is pretty darn good. In two thousand eleven, Instagram would continue on its trajectory of growth. The company would

hire three more new employees. Jessica Zolman joined in August eleven as a community evangelist. She acted as part customer service representative and part communicator from the company to the users to explain new features and changes to the app. In October two thousand eleven, Amy Cole joined Instagram to

handle business operations. Cole had previously worked for Sephora in business development, and in December two thousand eleven, Gregor Hachmouth and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name joined the company as an engineer. And he had previously co founded a company called Mody, which presented users with slide shows of art, products, typography, and more, and you would rate the images with various finger swipe gestures. By the end of two thousand eleven,

Instagram boasted ten million active monthly users. Version two point oh of the app had gone live on iOS and incorporated new features, including new filters, some new post processings like borders and tilt control, and more. But the real crazy stuff would happen the following year. In two thousand twelve, Instagram would grow again and it would hold another round of funding. System would talk about how he had no intention to sell the company and then he sold the

company to Facebook just days later. But I'll cover that in our next episode. For now, we're gonna wrap up. Thank you Nellie for the request, and I hope you enjoyed this first episode about the earliest days at Instagram, how it was born out of a totally different app.

And it's interesting because when we cover in the second part, we'll talk about how Instagram's more recent trajectory has sort of put it back in line with what Bourbon was doing earlier in some ways, not exactly the same way, but in ways that make me a little worried is probably the wrong word, but concerned. Let's say, if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, hit

me up since me and email. The address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is tech stuff hs W and hey, you know what, we have an Instagram account. You should follow that and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot Com