6th October 2010 marked the birth of an app that would be embraced by over a billion people including some of the world's most powerful figures and was said to transform the nature of photography. Its arrival in Apple's App Store was accompanied by a brief note outlining, the company's vision to make photographs fast simple and beautiful. The company we are talking about today is none other than Instagram and this is the success story of Kevin Systrom.
Born on 30th December 1983 Kevin is the founder and CEO of Instagram his mother was a marketing executive at zip car and his father was the vice president at the TJX company. He was first introduced to computer programming during his schooling days at Middle school, which only grew further playing games. As he grew in age he began creating programs to prank his friends appearing to hack their AOL instant messenger account. Well this undying love for technology was initially instilled in him from his mother, like entered the tech world during his nascent ages. Although his real job was far from technology.
Kevin began his college life with computer science and then moved to management science and engineering programs, because the classes were more academic than applied. He had a ficus driven approach towards practical subjects like finance and economics. Going ahead he was one of the twelve students who were chosen to participate in the highly prestigious May Field Fellows Program at Stanford University. This is where he got to experience how the startup world felt like. However a year later after completing his degree in 2006, Kevin joined Google and went on to work for them for around three years. He began as an associate product marketing manager on products like Gmail, Google Calendar, Spread Sheets. And later after two years, he moved to the corporate development team. Kevin always had the search of getting into the social space but for some reason he just couldn't. However in January 2009, Kevin finally decided to take the risk and join his startup called Nextstop.com as their product manager. While at Next Stop, it had become very clear to him that entrepreneurship was where he was meant to be. He just had to pursue his passion for photography and social sharing full time.
So in his free time he started working on an idea which was a mix of Foursquare and Flickr. It was an app that allowed location based photo sharing and he called it Burbn. Once the prototype was ready, he presented the same to baseline ventures and Andreessen Horowitz at a party in January 2010. Well luck played its part, within just two weeks of quitting his job, he received $500,000 as seed funding from both baseline ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Once that was done he knew just like all the successful startups he too needed a co founder and he found that in his friend Mike Krieger. Now since Burbn was so close to what Four Square was, they also got a lot of hype in tech blogs but it wasn't really going anywhere. However the one thing that clicked was photo sharing. Kevin had understood Burbn contained too many features and users always want something simple. That is when they decided to focus on one specific feature and that was photo sharing. It was that time Kevin happened to go on a beach walk with his fiance, Nicole. She told him that she would use his app simply because her pictures wouldn't be as good as it would be and also told him that he should add filters to their app which would make the picture look better.
Well this was the last nail in the coffin, they stripped the app completely and customized it only for the iPhone users at first. This was because iPhone 4 was just launched in the market and the phone had high quality built in camera that transformed the pictures and made them look even better. Soon they began working on the idea for eight weeks straight tweaking code and refining the visual design. Finally on the night of 6th October 2010 they push the launch button and Instagram was introduced to the world. The name Instagram was derived from the word "Instant" and "Telegram". Well within just two hours from the time Instagram went live, its servers came falling down because of the rush of the traffic. Out of fear of instant failure they went on to work like crazy all night to get the server's backup and then to keep everyone online and running.More than 25,000 people signed up on Instagram in the first 24 hours of its launch. People just loved the way the app allowed them to make their photographs unique without having to give out personal information. It was just about following others and sharing pictures. Within just nine months Instagram had a record breaking 7 Million users. It also included some of the highly influential tech loving celebrities, like Justin Bieber and Bryne.
Well this is what forced Mark Zuckerberg to take notice of this rising app. He realized that a lot of their users had stopped using Facebook to post photos and instead sharing them on their Instagram feed. since photo uploading had been one of the key elements of Facebook's own initial rise in popularity, it was indeed a matter of concern to him. That is when he thought why not they both be one company and propose the same to Kevin. During the same time Kevin was also invited to Tony Conference run by an investment bank called Allen & Co in Arizona. After talking for a while in front of a campfire over drinks, Jack Dorsey and Ali Rowghani - CEOs of Twitter- proposed that they would buy Instagram for $500 Million. Kevin was also offered a great amount of funds by Sequoia Capital as well. After a lot of thought Kevin decided to go with Seuquoia Capital and remain an independent company. Kevin also contacted Mark to let jim know about his decision, But unlike Twitter he never said no for an answer. He asked Kevin to meet up to discuss his decision in detail. After a deep and healthy discussion Mark finally gave an offer that was double of what Twitter had floated. Well this time this was a deal, Instagram with it's 13 employees was acquired by Facebook for approximately $1 Billion in April 2012. However even after acquisition Instagram would remain an independent company and is growing exponentially surpassing everybody's expectations. The company's now housed at Facebook's main campus in Menlo Park, California.
Today Instagram is valued at more than $50 Billion. It's also known to be a home for all the celebrities. Some of these include big names like Eminem, Ronaldo and many more. Well Kevin still takes care of the overall vision and strategy along with day to day operations of the North Seoul startup. Under his shells, Instagram has gone on to becoming the fastest growing services of all time. He's a man who always believes in simplifying matter and using creativity to solve all the problems. the product is also perceived by many to be home for visual storytelling for the masses.
No comments:
Post a Comment