Kevin Systrom Quotes

I really appreciate crafts. I like cooking. I love food and drink. I love owning that through Instagram. Although that can be challenging at times because it doesn't fit people's stereotypes of a technical founder.

I like to compare 'Instagram' to the Library of Congress.

When people say that college isn't worthwhile and paying all this money isn't worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.

When you open up 'Instagram,' you need to know that you're seeing the real Tony Hawk, the real Taylor Swift, the real Burberry.

I believe photos is one of the underlying things in every social network that becomes successful.

I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.

I like to say that the one thing that all people who succeed in changing the world have in common is that they at least tried.

Videos are a very difficult medium to be good at and also a difficult medium to consume quickly.

People are hungry for what's happening right now in the world.

Teens just understand the world in ways I don't think any of us adults do.

What's awesome about social media is you curate your own experience. That leads to the rise of niche celebrities, who are actually just as popular as mass celebrities, but because there's no incentive for traditional media to invest in them as celebrities, they find a home where people can follow them on Instagram.

A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.

If you've got an idea, start today. There's no better time than now to get going. That doesn't mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there's always small progress that can be made to start the movement.

There's a natural set of constraints with mobile phones that force you to be a better photographer by acknowledging and observing the world around you.

Our goal is really to make sure that 'Instagram', whether you're a celebrity or not, is a safe place and that the content that gets posted is something that's appropriate for teens and also for adults.

I think not focusing on money makes you sane because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.

A lot of the earliest 'Instagram' celebrities took really beautiful photos. But you're starting to see a change where it's not about beauty; it's about the story that you tell.

There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.

I think Instagram at its best is where you feel like you're getting the most authentic version of the person on the other side of the camera. Someone who does this wonderfully well is Lena Dunham.

The way people communicate is changing, and no one knows this better than teens. We are using images to talk to each other, to communicate what we're doing, what we're thinking, and to tell stories.

Brands, musicians, and public figures were among the first to embrace video on 'Instagram', and we've been impressed with how brands have extended their reach with video ads.

You need to fail in order to find the right solution.

I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.

Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.

Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.

It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.

I love challenging the notion that, in order to be a tech founder, you have to be holed up in a dark room wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans.

I own a Canon 20D, though I don't remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I've been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.

The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.

I promise you, a lot of it is luck. But you make your own luck by working really hard and trying lots and lots of things.

I'm a huge fan of what 'Hipstamatic' is doing and all they've accomplished.

I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way.

All of us in social media and regular media, we're all competing for the same thing, which is this gap between something happening in the world and you knowing about it.

On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their 'Instagram' feed. What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.

The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.

What people tell you and how they act is very, very different sometimes.

Calling 'Instagram' a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. 'Instagram' is less about the medium and more about the network.

It helps to see the world through a different lens, and that's what we wanted to do with Instagram. We wanted to give everyone the same feeling of discovering the world around you through a different lens.

I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I'll let other people be awesome at it.

I think it's hard to compare 'Twitter' and 'Instagram'. Twitter has a more mature business.

I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.

On the intimate relationships, I'd say you can be someone who wouldn't normally get attention in traditional media and come onto Instagram and build this massive following.

I really value passion for the product above experience.

Most photo apps before asked something of the users. They said, 'You produce, act, and perform.' 'Instagram' said, 'Let us take care of the secret sauce.'

I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.

Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric.

I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.

One of the earliest requested features was to do premium filters where a brand could sponsor a filter. It's just not in our wheelhouse. It doesn't feel 'Instagram'-my in the way that the high-quality brand ads do.

When you're introducing a mobile app, you look around and say, 'We could be doing 15 different things, but how do we communicate to someone why they would want to download and even sign up for this thing?'

Just so everyone knows, we're not a photo-sharing company. I don't see photos on 'Instagram' as art. They're much more about communication.

Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.

The best products in the world have a point of view. The worst products have none.

It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.

If you focus on producing a great experience for anyone, that's how you get big.

There's real beauty in pushing yourself to expose the real you in more ways.

People have presences, both online and in real life. You can choose to show everything, meaning all sides of you, or you can choose to be selective.

Our goal is to allow people to use whatever app they want to get photos into 'Instagram'.

A platform is the base from which something big happens. In our case, we're an entertainment platform in the sense that there are people signing up like MTV, Burberry, folks like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. And why? Because it's their channel to control their entertainment to their fans.

There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.

Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time - a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.

Photos were seen as the most private type of content, and 'Instagram' really flipped that on its head and said photos can be really public.

If it's one thing we do really well as a company, it's that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.

You can build a filter app get people really excited, but the way to keep them is to provide long-term value. Long-term value is, in fact, being its own network.

Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on 'Instagram' to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram.

It's wonderful when you pair entrepreneurs together because they can share experiences and in some ways push each other to build better products going forward.

Our goal is to not just be a photo-sharing app, but to be the way you share your life when you're on the go.

People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

The best feature is less features.

Whether it's an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on 'Instagram'. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.

It is cool to see that the fashion world has really taken to 'Instagram,' but, again, it is one of the many examples of many communities, whether you are a chef, a skateboarder, a surfer, a skier.

As a kid, creation was something that I always loved. Creating worlds for video games, creating businesses that didn't make any money, selling lemonade, etcetera. In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.

There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You're starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like 'Instagram'.

Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.

In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.

Imagine the power of surfacing what's happening in the world through images, and potentially other types of media in the future, to each and every person who holds a mobile phone.

I try to list the top three things to get done every day, and I'll be lucky if I hit all three, but it's amazing what that does to keep you on track.

Above all else, products spread when they're useful and they're usable