Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger – How to Build a Great Product

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:48)
My guests this week are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram. I met Kevin and Mike a few months ago over a shared interest in business and investing. I have found them both to be extremely good people who have a rare talent for finding and solving interesting problems. Indeed, problem solving and jobs to be done is a big part of our conversation.
I realized walking into the podcast that Kevin and Mike also have a rare set of experiences, having both built and sold an extremely successful product from scratch, but then also operated and scaled inside of one of the largest businesses in the world. This means they have unique knowledge to offer just about anybody interested in business and in products. We dig into all those lessons here.
I'm working on hosting more founders and CEOs on this podcast and can't think of a better pair to show you why I want to do so. Please enjoy my conversation with Kevin and Mike.
So gentlemen, we're going to talk about a lot of business related stuff. We'll talk about Instagram for sure because I'm fascinated by what you learned both building the business from scratch and then also operating inside of a massive organization. But I always like to begin with whatever has your interest and attention right now. So you've had some time since leaving Instagram. Last time we were here, we were talking about all sorts of interesting companies that you had seen and data science related projects you were working on. And you just strike me as two incredibly curious and interested guys. So let's just begin there with what have you been tooling away at playing with, learning about since having a little bit more free time?

**Mike Krieger** (2:13)
Yeah, I think for me, it's been getting back into code, which has been very gratifying, a lot of fun. In the last year and a half of Instagram, I was coding less and less because I was still relatively in the technical details, but it's irresponsible to try to code too much at that level of company size. But I think one thing that's been interesting for me recently is seeing how much data has become, I'm going to say, like a first class citizen in programming. And what I mean by that is, I remember when we were first spinning up even some Instagram data pipelines, you have a bunch of ad hoc scripts they run every night, hopefully. Sometimes they fail.
We can tell the story of how our first analytics pipeline ran, because it was seriously duct tape harrowing disaster. And going from that to the point where you have things like TensorFlow be readily available. I've been playing with some data pipeline stuff where it's just much more declarative, much more thought through, much more built for a whole team working together on data rather than that one data analyst in the corner. That's probably the thing that has most changed from when we started Instagram, where the new hotness then was web frameworks that let you spin up a site fairly quickly like Django and Rails to now I think the same opportunity exists in data and pipelines.

**Kevin Systrom** (3:18)
I feel like when we started, we were beginners.
And by the end, we had mastered the game. You can never quite master the game. But by the end, we had figured out our game.
And we had a great run. And we created something that a lot of people love in the world. Over a billion people use it every month. We were really proud of the team we had created. It was over 1,000 people when we left across how many offices?

**Mike Krieger** (3:40)
Three main ones and probably six or seven other ones.

**Kevin Systrom** (3:42)
Exactly. So we had all these amazing people around the world. And to be 35, and I guess Mike is 33, pressing the reset button and starting again is this awesome but harrowing adventure of becoming a beginner again.