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In fact, every non-journalist who visits Facebook’s headquarters has to sign a nondisclosure contract when they enter through security, before they are allowed to meet with an employee. For that reason, most of my sources provided their interviews, documents, and other materials only anonymously.
Why did Zuckerberg want to buy Instagram? Not the answer in his blog post, but the personal story. What were the steps and triggers that caused him to decide, on a Thursday in April 2012, that he needed to pick up his phone and start a process to acquire the company as soon as possible? And not just buy it, but commit to keeping it independent?
“It’s simple. It was a great service and we wanted to help it grow.”
With the rise of Instagram, Beco do Batman has become one of São Paulo’s top tourist destinations. Via the vacation rental site Airbnb, various vendors charge about $40 per person to provide two hours of “personal paparazzi” in the alley, taking high-quality pictures of people to post on Instagram; the service is a type that’s become one of Airbnb’s most popular for its travelers in cities around the world.
As we talked, and as the chef delivered bites of sashimi and nigiri, Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn’t sure if they were actually living them.
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. I
The way the story ended for the Instagram founders, with their tense departure from the company in 2018, is not the way it will end for the rest of us. Instagram is now so entangled with our daily lives that the business story cannot be detached from its impact on us. Instagram has become a tool with which to measure cultural relevance, whether it’s in a school, in an interest-based community, or in the world. A substantial portion of our global population is striving for digital recognition and validation, and many of them are getting it through likes, comments, followers, and brand deals.
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More than 200 million of Instagram’s users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands, according to the influencer analysis company Dovetale.
Marketing through these people, who are basically running personal media companies through tastemaking, storytelling, and entertaining, is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
By looking at the way commercial spaces, products, and even homes are designed, we can see Instagram’s impact, in a way that we can’t as easily see the impact of Facebook or Twitter.
In Japan, there is a word for this Instagrammable design movement: Insta-bae (インスタ映え), pronounced “Insta-bye-eh.” The more Insta-bae something is, whether it’s an outfit or a sandwich, the more socially and commercially successful it has the potential to be.
There is something powerful about that number—1 billion—in our society. It’s a marker signifying, especially in business, that you’ve achieved some unique untouchable status, graduating into an echelon that inspires awe and merits newsworthiness.
According to Chris Messina, the technologist who was user no. 19 and invented the hashtag, the introduction to other people’s visual perspectives on Instagram was a stunning novelty—perhaps equivalent to the psychological phenomenon astronauts experience when looking at the Earth from outer space for the first time.
They invested heavily in an editorial strategy to show how they intended Instagram to be used: as a venue for different perspectives and creativity. They eschewed some of Facebook’s spammy tactics, like sending excessive notifications and emails. They resisted adding tools that would have helped fuel the influencer economy. You can’t add a hyperlink in a post, for example, or share someone’s post the way you can on Facebook.
With every like and follow, an Instagram user would get a little rush of satisfaction, sending dopamine to the brain’s reward centers.
And because of filters that initially improved our subpar mobile photography, Instagram started out as a place for enhanced images of people’s lives. Users began to accept, by default, that everything they were seeing had been edited to look better. Reality didn’t matter as much as aspiration and creativity. The Instagram community even devised a hashtag, #nofilter, to let people know when they were posting something raw and true.
The account with the largest following on Instagram, at 322 million, is @instagram, the one controlled by the company. It’s fitting, because Instagram holds the utmost influence over the world it has shaped.
He wanted to add photos to the Facebook experience, beyond the singular profile picture, and wanted Systrom to build the tool.
His energetic mother, Diane, was vice president of marketing at nearby Monster.com, and later at Zipcar, and introduced her children to the internet back when the connection took over the phone line.
Systrom spent the winter of his junior year, in 2005, snapping photos here and there in cafes, trying to appreciate a blurry, out-of-focus beauty. The idea—of a square photo transformed into art through editing—stuck in the back of Systrom’s mind. More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.
Williams was already tech-world famous for selling Blogger, a blogging website, to Google.
Nobody cared about the code having beautiful structure, except Systrom.
The added invention, two months later, of tagging friends in photos proved even more fruitful for the company. People who weren’t yet using Facebook were suddenly getting email alerts that photos with their faces in them were appearing on the website, and were tempted to click to see. It became one of Facebook’s most important manipulations for getting more people to use the social network, despite the hint of creepiness.
The team at Odeo was launching a new status update product, called Twttr, pronounced “twitter,” with Dorsey as its CEO.
Most people never get the chance to join an iconic company in its early days. Systrom squandered both of his, choosing instead to do something much less risky.
It was the culture that drove homepage leader Marissa Mayer, who later became CEO of Yahoo!, to famously test 41 shades of blue to figure out what color would give the company’s hyperlinks the highest click-through rate. A slightly purpler blue shade won out over slightly greener shades, helping boost revenue by $200 million a year. Seemingly insignificant changes could make a huge difference when applied to millions or billions of people.
He worked writing marketing copy for Gmail, where the team was trying to figure out how to get users their email faster. Their solution was creative: as soon as a person went to Gmail.com and started entering her username, Google would start downloading the data for her inbox while she typed in her password. Once she clicked to log in, some of her emails would be ready to read, leading to a better user experience without requiring a faster internet connection.
After Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, smartphones started to change the way people thought about going online. The internet was no longer just for accomplishing tasks, like checking email or searching on Google—it
was now something that could be enmeshed with regular life, as people carried it in their pockets.
He argued that without someone else at the top, nobody would tell Systrom when he was wrong, or push his ideas to be better. Systrom said he agreed, and would carve out a 10 percent equity in the term sheet for an eventual cofounder. Just like that, the company that would become Instagram got its start.
Their funding would allow them to do the same thing as Facebook: try to make their product part of a daily habit for its users before trying to make money off them.
Zuckerberg’s lawyers devised a complicated financial transaction to dilute Saverin’s ownership stake, spurring a lawsuit and a dramatic Hollywood adaptation of the story, the movie The Social Network, which would come out later in 2010.
The two of them met near Dorsey’s offices for Square, his latest entrepreneurial adventure. Dorsey was creating a piece of hardware you could plug into your computer or phone, linked to the internet, that would allow people to buy things with credit cards anywhere. The
The cofounders graduated out of their meetings at local coffee shops and into a rickety coworking space called Dogpatch Labs, on a pier near San Francisco’s ballpark, where the other small startups included Threadsy, TaskRabbit, and Automattic, the maker of WordPress.
to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.
Everyone with a smartphone would be an amateur photographer, if they wanted to be. So if photos were the killer feature of the app they should build, what were the main opportunities? On the whiteboard, Systrom and Krieger brainstormed three of the top problems to solve. One, images always took forever to load on 3G cellular networks. Two, people were often embarrassed to share their low-quality phone snaps, since phones weren’t nearly as good as digital cameras. Three, it was annoying to have to post photos in many different places. What if they made a social network that came with an option
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Their first prototype was named Scotch, a relative to bourbon. It allowed people to swipe through photos horizontally and tap to like them, similar to a Tinder before its time.
And then they tried a new concept that would allow people to scroll through photos vertically, showing the most recent post first, like Twitter. All of the photos would use as few pixels as possible, so that they would load quickly, helping solve problem number one—only 306 pixels across, the minimum required to display a photo on an iPhone with 7-pixel borders on each side. The photos would be square, giving users the same creative constraint for photography as Systrom’s teacher in Florence gave him.
There were two different kinds of social networks one could build—the Facebook kind, where people become mutual friends with each other, or the Twitter kind, where people follow others they don’t necessarily know. They thought the latter would be more fun for photos, because then people could follow based on interests, not just friendship. Displaying “Followers” and “Following” at the top of the app, the way Twitter did, made it just competitive enough that people would need to come back to the app and check their progress. People could also “like” something, appending a heart, similar to
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If what people were sharing on this app was photography, would it make sense to allow them to share other people’s art and experiences under their own names? Maybe. But in the interest of starting simple, they decided not to think about it until post-launch.
“No, no, he puts them through filter apps,” Systrom explained. Phone cameras produced blurry images that were badly lit. It was like everyone who was buying a smartphone was getting the digital equivalent of the tiny plastic camera Systrom used in Florence. The filter apps allowed users to take an approach similar to that of Systrom’s professor, altering photos after they were captured to make them look more artsy. You didn’t have to actually be a good photographer. Hipstamatic, with which you could make your photos look oversaturated, blurred, or hipster vintage, would be named Apple’s app of
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He called the filter X-Pro II, a nod to the analog photo development technique called cross-processing, in which photographers intentionally use a chemical meant for a different type of film.
And that, on July 16, 2010, was the first-ever photo posted on the app that would become Instagram.
Rise tested each of his ideas on twenty different images from his camera roll, of sunrises, sunsets, different colors and different times of day. He ended up turning in four filters, which were called Amaro, Hudson, Sutro, and Spectra.
Neither Rise nor the founders thought there was a downside to the fact that filters, when used en masse, would give Instagrammers permission to present their reality as more interesting and beautiful than it actually was.
The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.
A man named Travis Kalanick was in front of an audience of mostly men explaining his company, UberCab, which made a tool that was supposed to help people summon luxury cars with their phones. It would officially launch in San Francisco
“I’m only inviting three angel investors into the deal,” he said. “It’s you, Jack Dorsey, and Adam D’Angelo.” D’Angelo was the founder of Quora and previously the chief technology officer of Facebook, whom Systrom had met when he was a Stanford student.
A lot of the good photo-related startup names were taken, so they came up with “Instagram,” a combo of “instant” and “telegram.”
Once Dorsey was addicted to Instagram, the product seemed so obvious and useful that he wished Twitter had managed to build it first. He asked Systrom if he would be open to Twitter acquiring his company. Systrom sounded enthusiastic. But Dorsey had spoken too soon. When he emailed Williams, telling him about the idea, the rejection was loaded with the bitterness Williams felt toward Dorsey personally. Williams was CEO and was still trying to establish himself as Twitter’s leader. Dorsey’s strategy was not welcome.
