Instagram: Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Mike Krieger** (2:11)
It was nothing more exhilarating than seeing all those people stream in and nothing more crushing than then seeing people posting on Twitter or on their blogs and saying like, oh, another startup that doesn't know how to scale. Like, oh, like so clowny. We were both, I mean, at that point, running on zero sleep for two days, devastated.
And I was like, this is it. We've built this great thing and we totally messed it up. Thank you.

**Guy Raz** (2:41)
From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
On today's show, How a Walk Along the Beach sparked an idea that turned all of us into good photographers, and made Instagram one of the fastest growing apps of all time.
Okay, it's 2009, and Kevin Systrom is just a few years out of Stanford and doing the Silicon Valley thing. He's working at a travel startup by day and teaching himself to code at night. And a friend from college, Mike Krieger, is also in the area pretty much doing the same thing. And after a few months of experimenting, Kevin builds an app. He calls it Bourbon, and it's a check-in app where you can tell your friends you're at a coffee shop or a bar or wherever. And Kevin thinks this app has, you know, some potential.

**Kevin Systrom** (3:41)
I mean, at that time, there were so many check-in apps. There was Foursquare, there was Gowalla, and there were a bunch of others trying to make it. And of course, following, you know, kind of the trend, I was like, there's something here about the devices in everyone's pockets being available to share new types of information. And I was like, location is the type of information people are gonna want to share. I think the insight Mike and I had along the way was that actually there were more types of information. The fact that like these devices had a camera, that would lead to a visual communication revolution where like all of a sudden people weren't just communicating with text and voice, but they had the chance to communicate with an image.
But initially our bet was on location and I'm frankly just very happy that we discovered the image thing along the way.

**Guy Raz** (4:29)
So people were using this app?

**Kevin Systrom** (4:32)
And, you know, it was just compelling enough to get like a handful of beta users, but I would, you know, basically come home at night and just tinker with this idea.
And, you know, along the way, I prototyped it enough that I was willing to give it to a handful of friends. And those friends gave it to a handful of friends. And before you knew it, we had, I don't know, maybe 80, 90 people using it. And only at that moment did I decide that like, hey, maybe this thing could be a company if we actually tried.