Kevin Systrom Quotes

Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on ‘Instagram’ to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram.

Above all else, products spread when they’re useful and they’re usable

There’s a natural set of constraints with mobile phones that force you to be a better photographer by acknowledging and observing the world around you.

If it’s one thing we do really well as a company, it’s that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.

I promise you, a lot of it is luck. But you make your own luck by working really hard and trying lots and lots of things.

‘Instagram’ can engage generations of people that may not be on Facebook yet. I think that’s true with ‘WhatsApp,’ and I think that will be true with things like Oculus.

Traditional businesses can say, ‘We’re going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.’ But new business models are hard.

People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

It’s wonderful when you pair entrepreneurs together because they can share experiences and in some ways push each other to build better products going forward.

Our goal is really to make sure that ‘Instagram’, whether you’re a celebrity or not, is a safe place and that the content that gets posted is something that’s appropriate for teens and also for adults.

I really appreciate crafts. I like cooking. I love food and drink. I love owning that through Instagram. Although that can be challenging at times because it doesn’t fit people’s stereotypes of a technical founder.

When you’re introducing a mobile app, you look around and say, ‘We could be doing 15 different things, but how do we communicate to someone why they would want to download and even sign up for this thing?’

The way people communicate is changing, and no one knows this better than teens. We are using images to talk to each other, to communicate what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, and to tell stories.

If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going. That doesn’t mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100 percent from day one, but there’s always small progress that can be made to start the movement.

Photos were seen as the most private type of content, and ‘Instagram’ really flipped that on its head and said photos can be really public.

I’ve always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.

I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you’re getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera. Someone who does this wonderfully well is Lena Dunham.

The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.

People don’t work in a dotcom because they have to. There are many professions that don’t require that sort of time. But people sign up because they want to make world-changing differences, to build something that affects millions of people.

‘Instagram’ Direct is a really interesting feature because it’s grown significantly since we launched it. People continue to use it to communicate more privately.

Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.

I think it’s hard to compare ‘Twitter’ and ‘Instagram’. Twitter has a more mature business.

Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.

I think not focusing on money makes you sane, because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.

What people tell you and how they act is very, very different sometimes.

‘Instagram’ is great if you want to share photos, but you’re not that technical. Or, if you’re not interested in sharing publicly, ‘Instagram’ becomes a place where you can not only consume photos and videos from musicians, or whoever, but send them directly to your friends.

Most photo apps before asked something of the users. They said, ‘You produce, act, and perform.’ ‘Instagram’ said, ‘Let us take care of the secret sauce.’

If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going. That doesn’t mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there’s always small progress that can be made to start the movement.

I own a Canon 20D, though I don’t remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I’ve been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.

There are a lot of apps that are fun to use – they’re utility apps; they’re fine. But there are a fraction of apps that are in the cream of the crop. You just need to be in the cream of the crop to get noticed.

In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.

If you focus on producing a great experience for anyone, that’s how you get big.

I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you’re getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera.

Focusing on one thing and doing it really, really well can get you very far.

You need to find people that are drawn to the idea that you build, and they end up taking it and making it even better.

There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You’re starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like ‘Instagram’.

I’ve always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.

Instagram is a media company. I think we’re about visual media.

I don’t foresee a future where people don’t have some sort of phone that’s like a computer. I don’t foresee a future where those phones don’t have cameras in them. That spells a future where smartphones are the status quo. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what’s in their lives.

You need to fail in order to find the right solution.

Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that’s why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.

‘Instagram’ is a media company. I think we’re about visual media. I explain ourselves as a disruptive entertainment platform that enables communication through visual media. I don’t think it’s just photos.

It’s funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world. If you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it’s so easy to sell your product to the world.

If you’re a journalist, and you want to see live photos happening at any location in our system, you can simply type in the location, and up comes the page.

There’s real beauty in pushing yourself to expose the real you in more ways.

I can’t imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don’t have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.

I don’t think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can’t see it becoming a business.

Imagine the power of surfacing what’s happening in the world through images, and potentially other types of media in the future, to each and every person who holds a mobile phone.

Great products sell themselves.

Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time – a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.

I really love connecting people, creating communities. As a kid, creation was something that I always loved.

The best feature is less features.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. ‘YouTube’ was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

Whether it’s an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on ‘Instagram’. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.