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Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.
The story of Instagram is an overwhelming lesson in how the decisions inside a social media company—about what users listen to, which products to build, and how to measure success—can dramatically impact the way we live, and who is rewarded in our economy.
Inside and outside Facebook, the story of Instagram is ultimately about the intersection of capitalism and ego—about how far people will go to protect what they built and to appear successful.
His introduction to computer programming was creating his own levels in the game.
“You have to learn to love imperfection,” he instructed.
More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.
“symbolic systems”—the famous Stanford program for understanding the psychology of how humans interact with computers.
The founders took over a whiteboard in one of the Dogpatch Labs conference rooms and had a brainstorming session that would serve as the foundation for their entire leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible. Krieger and Systrom started
Instead of continuing to build the app they’d originally promised investors, the cofounders stopped and tried a bigger idea.
They aimed to do just one thing—photography—really well. In that sense, their story is similar to Odeo’s, when Dorsey and Williams switched gears to focus on Twitter.
Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a ...
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later featured onstage at iPhone launches. It became one of the first startups to thrive on Amazon’s cloud computing. It was the easiest way to share photos on Twitter.
Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people
The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
His posturing was perhaps analogous to the modern pressure Instagram would introduce—the pressure to post only the best photos, making life seem more perfect than it actually was. THE CHAOS OF SUCCESS “Instagram was so simple to use that it never felt like work.
Facebook was about friendships, and Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world.
It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.
The first big celebrity to sign up was the rapper Snoop Dogg. He posted a filtered Instagram picture—of himself wearing a suit and holding a can of Colt 45—and simultaneously sent it to his 2.5 million followers on Twitter. “Bossin up wit dat Blast,” he wrote. Blast by Colt 45 was a new kind of fruity, caffeinated drink, clocking in at 23.5 ounces and 12 percent alcohol content.
As Siegler wrote for TechCrunch at the time: “Step one: obtain a ton of users. Step two: get brands to leverage your service. Step three: get celebrities to use your service and promote it. Step four: mainstream.” In his estimation, Snoop put Instagram on step three, just a few months after its launch.
Cohler, an early Facebook employee before becoming an investor, thought Instagram was the first app he’d ever seen that looked like it was designed exclusively for a mobile phone, not a desktop computer. Systrom told Cohler he admired Facebook and wanted to learn more about how to build a company whose product was so ubiquitous.
Systrom had been at Google, where anyone with an advanced engineering or science degree from an Ivy League school was a shoo-in, giving the place its academic feel for always running tests and optimizing. He’d also seen early Twitter, which attracted anarchists and misfits, giving the place its free speech and anti-establishment ethos. Instagram’s top candidates were people with interests beyond technology, whether it was art, music, or surfing.
Using a strategy similar to that he’d employed when he founded the company—picking launch partners like Burberry and Lexus who would get it—Systrom personally approved every ad.
For Facebook, the acquisition was crucial. While people were escaping the watchful eye of their governments,
They had a category called “Oddly Satisfying” that was mostly for videos that were calming and pleasing to watch, like those of people smooshing and stretching homemade slime, carving soap, or slicing kinetic sand.
In 2015, 50 percent of teens in the U.S. were on the app. It became quite important to the structure of their social lives—to the point that it was creating enormous pressure.
“The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”
Facebook plasters its walls with motivational posters, printed on-site, with phrases like “Done Is Better than Perfect” and “Move Fast and Break Things,” which represent the antithesis of celebrating craft. The previous year, in 2014, Systrom had ripped down
