The Instagram team was going to try the opposite: launching Stories, at least a simple version of it, to all 500 million of its users at once. They called it a “YOLO launch,” after the acronym for “you only live once.” It was an extremely risky strategy by Facebook standards, but Systrom couldn’t be convinced otherwise. He thought it was such a big change that everyone needed to be able to access it, or else it would be starved of the oxygen it needed to work.
