Kevin Systrom

And so for me, I think it's just a huge compliment when we see someone copy the feature exactly.

And I think that that's actually what was so wise about what Kevin Systrom did with Instagram.

He just came out and said, yep, it's stories.

We're doing the exact same thing because it's great.

Instagram actually started as an app called Burbn, B-U-R-B-N.

So Kevin Systrom, he built this HTMI5 mobile app, which tells you how long ago it was.

And basically he had made this app.

He got a $500,000 seed round.

Before there was Instagram, there was bourbon.

Kevin Systrom, a former product marketer at Google, had raised half a million dollars from some of the most respected names in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline Ventures, to build a location check-in app.

This was 2009 and into 2010, and the check-in wars were the hottest category in mobile.

Foursquare and Gowalla were the darlings of the industry, showing up on every stage at South by Southwest.

By making it effortless to push content out to Twitter and Facebook, Instagram used its competitors' own distribution networks to grow itself.

It borrowed reach it hadn't yet earned, and turned it into reach it eventually owned outright.

Kevin Systrom once reflected that people tend to make life more complicated than it needs to be.

Instagram's entire billion-dollar trajectory was built on refusing to do that.

I graduate in 2006.

My friends in college are Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, the co-founders of Instagram.

You know, Mike met his wife at my, my holiday party ages ago.

Like, these were friends of mine.

One of the kind of interesting, like, I love like these magic tricks, if you will, that people in tech sometimes use to make the user experience better.

And one that always comes to mind for me is Kevin Systrom.

I was listening to him, the Instagram CEO or founder was saying, you know, when you initially were on Instagram, you remember this, you would upload a photo and put it on Instagram and they would literally say, upload it to their servers before you even hit that publish button.

Because then when you did hit that publish button, it would post right away.

He was a real table lay guy where you get above the table and you make, like, an architectural, like, geometric layout and shoot it.

But yeah, so he didn't actually end up meeting with Kevin Systrom, but Systrom reached out.

They missed each other, but then Clerkenwell Boy ended up speaking to people on Instagram.

And from what I understand, like, basically what it was that it was the food content and the restaurant content being so popular was, like, emergent, and Instagram had never planned for it, and they were basically like, "What is this? If it's popular on our platform, like, we wanna understand it because it's, like, retaining users and it's helping us out." But it was like, I think it was something that grew quite organically and then became, like, a real phenomenon.