No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

This book is an effort to bring you the definitive inside story of Instagram. It would not have been possible without the hundreds of people—current and former employees, executives and others who built their careers around the app, as well as competitors—who volunteered their time and shared memories they’ve never shared with a journalist before. Instagram’s founders spoke with me both together and separately over several years. Facebook Inc. offered more than two dozen sit-down interviews with current staff and executives, including the current head of Instagram, even after the founders departed their company. Despite tensions between the founders and their acquirer, and despite the flurry of critical stories I was writing about Facebook as a journalist for Bloomberg News, everyone agreed it was important to have this book be as accurate as possible. When potential sources forwarded my outreach to either the founders or the company, asking if it was okay to talk to me, they were generally told yes, even though both the founders and the company knew they would have no control over the ultimate content of this book. I commend them for that decision.

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.

Each month, more than 1 billion of us use Instagram. We take photos and videos of our food, our faces, our favorite scenery, our families, and our interests and share them, hoping that they reflect something about who we are or who we aspire to be. We interact with these posts and each other, aiming to forge deeper relationships, stronger networks, or personal brands. It’s just the way modern life works. Rarely do we have the chance to reflect on how we got here and what it means. But we should. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Businesses that want our attention—from hotels and restaurants to large consumer brands—change the way they design their spaces and how they market their products, adjusting their strategies to cater to the new visual way we communicate, to be worthy of photographing for Instagram. 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.

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. On Instagram, you could dive into the life of a reindeer herder in Norway or a basket weaver in South Africa. And you could share and reflect on your own life in a way that felt profound too. “It gives you this glimpse of humanity and changes your whole perspective on everything and the importance of it,” Messina explained. “Instagram is this mirror on ourselves, and it allows each of us to contribute our own experience to the understanding of this world.”

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. In 2018, Instagram reached 1 billion monthly users—their second “1 billion” milestone. Soon after, the founders left their jobs. As Systrom and Krieger discovered, even if you reach the highest echelons of business success, you don’t always get what you want.

The team at Odeo was launching a new status update product, called Twttr, pronounced “twitter,” with Dorsey as its CEO. Systrom had kept in touch and used the site frequently to support his friends and former colleagues, posting about whatever he was cooking or drinking or looking at, even though the site was text only. One of the guys at Odeo told him that eventually, celebrities and brands around the world were going to use it to communicate. They’re crazy, Systrom thought. Nobody is going to use this thing. He couldn’t imagine what it might be useful for. Either way, they didn’t try to recruit him back. 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. For him, after graduating Stanford with degrees in management and engineering, going to Google was basically like going to grad school.

Later that year, Systrom built something called Burbn, after the Kentucky whiskey he enjoyed drinking. The mobile website was perfect for Systrom’s urban social life. It let people say where they were, or where they planned to go so their friends could show up. The more times a user went out, the more virtual prizes they got. The background color scheme was an unattractive brown and red, like a bottle of bourbon with a red wax topper. In order to add a picture to your post, you had to email it in. There was no other technical way to do it.

From this came Instagram

Dorsey would take breaks for hot yoga and sewing classes. “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter,” Ev Williams said to him, according to Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter. “But you can’t be both.” In 2008, Williams worked with Twitter’s board to take over, ousting Dorsey.

Krieger and Systrom started the exercise by making a list of the top three things people liked about Burbn. One was Plans, the feature where people could say where they were going so friends could join them. Another was photos. The third was a tool to win meaningless virtual prizes for your activity, which was mostly a gimmick to get people to log back in. Not everybody needed plans or prizes. Systrom circled “photos.” Photos, they decided, were ubiquitous, useful to everybody, not just young city dwellers. “There’s something around photos,” Kevin said. His iPhone 3G took terrible pictures, but it was only the beginning of that technology. “I think there will be an inflection point where people don’t carry around point-and-shoots anymore, they’re just going to carry around these phones.” 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 to deliver your photos to Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all at once?

FromBrbn to Instagram

Back at the hotel, he researched online about how to code filters. He played around on Photoshop to create the style he wanted—some heavy shadow and contrast, as well as some shading around the edges of the image for a vignette effect. Then, sitting on one of the outdoor lounge chairs with a beer beside him and his laptop open, he set about writing it into reality. 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. Soon after, he tested his work on a photo he took of a sandy-colored dog he came across in front of a taco stand. The dog is looking up at Schuetz, whose sandaled foot appears in the corner of the shot. And that, on July 16, 2010, was the first-ever photo posted on the app that would become Instagram.

The first Instagram post

A lot of the good photo-related startup names were taken, so they came up with “Instagram,” a combo of “instant” and “telegram.”

Within the first day, 25,000 people were using Instagram. Within the first week, it was 100,000, and Systrom had the surreal experience of seeing a stranger scrolling through the app on a San Francisco bus.

Muni and Instagram

Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. 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.

The filters and square shape made all the photographs on Instagram feel immediately nostalgic, like old Polaroids, transforming moments into memories, giving people the opportunity to look back on what they’d done with their day and feel like it was beautiful. Those feelings were validated with likes, comments, and follows, as the new users built new kinds of networks on the internet. If 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.

He thought Instagram would be stronger if people cared personally about the time they spent there and discovered other interesting people to follow beyond their friend groups. At the InstaMeets, they could talk about their amateur techniques for capturing the world’s beauty. They could bask in modern creativity. There was a millennial optimism to it all. The generation that had entered the workforce during the Great Recession seemed to be saying, with every Instagram post, that they valued being interesting more than they valued the nine-to-five.

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.”

Riedel was hosting more InstaMeets to bring them together in real life. At one summer event in San Francisco, Rise introduced Instagram employees to one of their biggest fans: Jessica Zollman. Zollman worked at Formspring, an anonymous question-and-answer site popular among teens. The site had turned into a cesspool of bullying, as anonymous products usually did. Teens asked their schoolmates what they really thought, and whoever posted was told, often enough, that they were actually nasty and ugly and didn’t deserve to exist. Zollman was the one who handled the communication with the police or FBI when there was a threat of violence or suicide. Instagram was her escape from all this. At work, they called her the “Instagram queen,” making fun of her obsession. Her more artistic friends ridiculed her too, for calling herself a photographer even though she was using her phone to take photos. But she couldn’t help but love Instagram, which seemed like a happier, more creative place on the internet, in a way that felt revolutionary. She was pulling together a conference focused on mobile photography, called “1197,” after June 11, 1997, the day the first camera-phone photo was shared.

According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.

Section 230

Social media moderation

Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.

One billion dollars, Reuters said, “was stunning for an apps-maker without any significant revenue.” Zuckerberg was “paying a steep price for a startup that has lots of buzz but no business model,” CNN echoed, comparing the deal to Yahoo!’s $35 million acquisition of Flickr seven years earlier.

Instagram didn’t make money yet, but Zoufonoun surmised that because the Instagram product provided its users with the ability to endlessly scroll through posts, just like the Facebook news feed, they could eventually develop the same kind of advertising capabilities. They could use Facebook’s infrastructure to grow faster, the way YouTube did at Google.

Systrom gave four reasons. First, he reiterated Zuckerberg’s argument: that Facebook’s stock value was likely to go up, so the value of the acquisition would grow over time. Second, he’d take a large competitor out of the picture. If Facebook took measures to copy Instagram or target the app directly, that would make it a lot more difficult to grow. Third, Instagram would benefit from Facebook’s entire operations infrastructure, not just data centers but also people who already knew how to do all the things Instagram would need to learn in the future.

One Facebook executive would later reflect on the relative importance of the deal: Imagine an alternate reality, in which Microsoft buys Apple while Apple is still small. That would have been tremendous for Microsoft. And that’s what Facebook got with Instagram.

“If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”

Zuckerberg ideology

Dorsey was on his way to work at Square, the payments company he’d cofounded. Despite his wealth, he always enjoyed taking public transportation to absorb the culture of San Francisco. That morning he noticed that he’d have the whole Route 1 Muni to himself. “A simple morning pleasure: an empty bus,” he posted on Instagram, with a picture of the brown-and-tan seats of the car, unfilled, and not even the driver visible.

Dorsey takes Muni

So the Federal Trade Commission started its investigation with a simpler question. Were Facebook and Instagram competing with each other? If they were, it would reduce competition in the marketplace if they were allowed to merge. First, regulators needed a clear picture of what Instagram thought of Facebook and vice versa, based on internal emails and text messages. Oddly, the FTC would not be gathering this documentation itself. The lawyers for Facebook and Instagram—the same ones who had worked on the deal—were now tasked with finding any evidence showing that the deal shouldn’t go through. They were paid by the companies to investigate the companies.

The real value of Facebook and Instagram was in their network effects—the momentum they gained as more people joined. Even if someone enjoyed using an Instagram competitor like Path more, if their friends weren’t on it, they wouldn’t stay. (Path shut down in 2018 after selling to a South Korean company, Daum Kakao, three years before.) Zuckerberg understood that the hardest part of creating a business would be creating a new habit for users and a group they all wanted to spend time with.

Real value of social media

Instagram needed to sell to Facebook because Systrom and Krieger had been slow in hiring. They were so particular about picking employees who would be a perfect fit, despite being so frenzied with keeping the site alive. Once they turned down Twitter and raised the $50 million in venture capital from Sequoia, they were still, in the words of one investor, too hungry to eat. They probably needed ten times as many employees in order to grow fast enough to give those investors the hefty return on investment they expected.

The Instagram team didn’t think that the accounts it promoted should be profiting off their followers’ attention, especially if they were meant to be the models for everybody else. So that summer, Instagram culled its suggested user list from 200 accounts down to 72, in an attempt to quash some of the brand activity. In an email to the members of this suggested user list, the company explained their reasoning: “While we’re excited that people have a large enough audience to start experimenting with [advertising], it’s not the type of content we envision being the right experience for new users.” Instagram was not supposed to be about obvious self-promotion, Systrom said. It was about creativity, design, and experiences. And honesty. “I think what makes it so good is the honesty that comes with the photos,” Systrom said at LeWeb, the French tech conference, in June 2012. “The companies and brands that use Instagram—the best and most successful ones—are the ones where it comes across as honest and genuine.’’

Systrom was coming to terms with the practical realities of the deal’s close. His people, so focused, fast, and passionate, were about to be part of a massive corporation, with all the comforts that entailed in the age of the Silicon Valley talent wars. Free food, free transportation to and from work, free sweatshirts, water bottles, and parties. What if they lost their drive? What if they felt like they’d made it and stopped working as hard? Most outsiders assumed Systrom’s own journey was over. In Silicon Valley, it was common for founders, once their companies were acquired, to “rest and vest”—spend the next four years at the new parent company waiting for their stock options to vest and make them millionaires, without having to do much work. So Systrom would get annoying questions about what he’d been up to since the deal. Are you kidding me? he’d think. I’m still building this thing. Systrom posted a picture on Instagram of his still-small 17-person team in front of the garage door: “First day in the new offices! Can’t wait to show everyone what’s next!” Later that night, he decided to use one of the fire pits.

While Instagram was trying to give people new interests, Facebook was using data to figure out exactly what people already wanted, and then giving more of it to them. Whatever Facebook observed in activity from its users, it could use to define their likes and dislikes numerically, and then adjust those measurements if needed.

“This Journey Is Only 1% Finished,” the posters around campus declared. “The Riskiest Thing Is to Take No Risks.” “Done Is Better than Perfect.” “Move Fast and Break Things.”

Instagram wanted things to be carefully considered and designed before they were released to people. Humans, not numbers. Artists, photographers, and designers, not DAUs, the Facebook term for “daily active users.” They didn’t want to limit people to their likes and dislikes; they wanted to introduce them to things they’d never seen before.

Zuckerberg did have some opinions. Besides sending in the growth team to investigate how big of a threat Instagram posed to Facebook photo sharing, his first ask for Instagram was to allow people to tag each other in photos. At Facebook, product requests were ranked by priority number, with ones and zeroes being top priority. The only thing above that priority level, superseding anything else on the road map, was unofficially called a “ZuckPri,” which meant that Zuckerberg was tracking the progress. Photo tagging on Instagram was a ZuckPri. It had been such a boost for Facebook in its early days, he was sure that it would work for Instagram.

Facebook’s resources helped relieve burdens on employees like Jessica Zollman. Zollman, the Instagrammer who had worked on the earliest community moderation tools and had become so familiar with the threats to its users, was sure she wouldn’t be able to find and solve as many problems as Facebook’s vast army of contractors could. To better serve the millions of people joining Instagram, she worked on transitioning content moderation, so that whenever people clicked to report something awful they saw on Instagram, it would just be funneled into the same system of people who were cleaning up Facebook. Facebook had low-wage outside contractors quickly clicking through posts containing or related to nudity, violence, abuse, identity theft, and more to determine whether anything violated the rules and needed to be taken down. Instagram employees would no longer be as close to their worst content. Their nightmares would be officially outsourced.

White hired a designer to come into Instagram’s building and mount all the photography books, old cameras, and bottles of bourbon on shelves, to make the space a bit more crafty and thoughtfully displayed. (Friends and business partners always gave Systrom bourbon as a gift, as a tribute to the early app’s name.) The design provided contrast to Facebook, where the “journey is only 1 percent finished” motto was reflected physically in open ceilings, exposed pipes, and unvarnished wooden surfaces. Once a week, Instagrammers would roll up their garage door and invite passing Facebookers in for coffee, in an attempt to make friends. (While there was free coffee everywhere on campus, Instagrammers could offer good coffee, the kind that came from the pour-over kits and espresso machines they had learned to prefer.)

Ultimately the team came up with three Instagram values, all of which included not-so-subtle notes of culture clash with Facebook. The biggest was “community first,” meaning all their decisions should be centered around preserving a good feeling when using Instagram, not necessarily a more fast-growing business. Too many notifications would violate that principle. Then there was “simplicity matters,” meaning that before any new products could roll out, engineers had to think about whether they were solving a specific user problem, and whether making a change was even necessary, or might overcomplicate the app. It was the opposite of Facebook’s “move fast and break things,” where building for growth was valued over usefulness or trust. There was also “inspire creativity,” which meant Instagram was going to try to frame the app as an artistic outlet, training its own users and highlighting the best of them through an editorial strategy, focusing on content that was genuine and meaningful. This was a rejection of the self-promotional fakery that was already starting to define some of Instagram’s popular accounts. It was also a very different strategy than Facebook’s algorithmic personalization approach. “We don’t have a voice,” Chris Cox, the head of the news feed, would tell employees. “We give people a voice.”

“We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we haven’t won and that we need to keep making bold moves and keep fighting or we risk peaking and fading away.” —MARK ZUCKERBERG, QUOTED IN THE FACEBOOK EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK

In order to launch the advertising business, Instagram had to dodge an uncomfortable reality: advertising agencies hated Facebook. Teddy Underwood, an early Facebook employee who had just transitioned to Instagram to promote its new advertising products, thought the only way to sell them was to make a case that Instagram was the anti-Facebook. He set up meetings with the largest ad agencies, armed with a polished PowerPoint presentation about the value of inspiration. He told them Instagram was completely independently run, didn’t plug into Facebook’s ad system at all, and had a plan to build better relationships and effective ads, suited to their audience and aesthetic.

Koum was notoriously untrusting, after growing up under surveillance by the USSR in Ukraine. He built an app that was end-to-end encrypted, so the records of what people were saying to each other weren’t readable by anyone—not the police, and not even his company. He promised his users “no ads, no games, no gimmicks,” just a simple tool they could pay $1 a year to use. It would be a stretch to join Facebook, where surveillance of users powered the advertising engine.

Instagram would grow beyond its initial roots as a creative space for photographers and artisans. It would metamorphize into a tool for crafting and capitalizing on a public image, not just for famous figures but for everybody. Every Instagram account would have the chance to be not just a window into someone’s lived experience—as the founders initially intended—but also their individual media operation. The shift would birth an economy of influence, with all of the interconnected Instagram activity at its nexus, in territory uncharted by Facebook or Twitter.

By the time he was at Facebook, Porch had developed a theory about what would attract public figures to social media sites. He would find a way to talk to celebrities directly and personally about their goals, rather than going through their record labels or managers. He knew how to make their posts online sound natural and personal. If celebrities lifted the curtain on some of their private thoughts and experiences, they would build a bond with their fan bases. The online conversation would put celebs in control of their own brands, increasing their relevance and therefore their commercial potential.

Meanwhile, Kris Jenner realized that the fastest way to achieve fame was by being associated with more famous people (the concept would later help Jenner create mini stars on Instagram out of the stylists and trainers and makeup artists who worked with her family).

Mark Zuckerberg started referring to any Twitteresque posts on Facebook as “public content,” and started saying on earnings calls with investors that he wanted to make this type of posting a priority for the company. He wanted Facebook to be better at Twitter than Twitter was. A bonus of this strategy was it gave people more things to post and talk about on Facebook. With every year people were on Facebook, they were broadening their friend networks. It turned out that even if “connecting the world” was a great business objective, synonymous with growth, the side effect was that everyone’s feed was full of loose acquaintances. Almost a decade after the company’s founding, Facebook users were less willing to post about their more intimate observations and life events for this wider audience. Facebook was still adding users and revenue at an impressive clip—but Mark Zuckerberg liked to look at growth problems looming around the corner, and solve them before they became serious.

By the end of 2013, Facebook was making about half its advertising revenue off mobile phones—dramatic progress in just more than a year, thanks to Zuckerberg’s forced laser focus on solving the issue. The social network had 1.1 billion users. Zuckerberg had proved his thesis that wherever there was a growing network, an advertising business would follow.

Despite efforts to market Instagram through its model users, the company still didn’t publicly approve of them accepting money to promote products. Brands overall were paying about $100 million—an experimental sum—for the new kind of work in 2014, but the industry was about to explode. As the Instagram user guidelines stated, in a tone as if talking to a child: “When you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram, it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.… We ask that you keep your interactions on Instagram meaningful and genuine.” “Meaningful and genuine,” in this case, just meant that any kind of branding had to look unforced, like it had been an organic decision on the part of the person posting about it. Celebrities were advised to present themselves as relatable and vulnerable, just as advertisers were told to only submit promotions that were aesthetically pleasing, with no price tags. Instagram employees did want their product to be commercially important, to be big and successful and competitive with Twitter, to contribute meaningfully enough to Facebook that they wouldn’t be swallowed up and ruined by the larger company. It was just better if it looked effortless. No journalist would be asked to profile Charles Porch or the community team; instead, the wins were the magazine covers that featured Instagram photos or users.