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What good is studying art? Who would spend time learning photography – when they could learn something practical? Oh, I don’t know, maybe a co-founder of a little app called “Instagram” …
“In high school … I fell in love with photography, art history, computer science, and I wanted to combine those.”
“I actually thought what I was going to do was be an art restorer. Like go around the world, travel, see art. Use science to like restore chapels and stuff.”
“I actually never thought of computer science as like a passion of mine. It was an enabler to do other things.”
“That’s where Instagram came from, it’s the, like, intersection of art and science.”
“The best business models in the world are the ones where you, like, ask people what they want, and they tell you, and you go and you build it. And every now and then you have to read between the lines …”
“If I knew what I knew now, I probably wouldn’t have started a company. Mostly because I would have been afraid. So actually I think youth is an advantage – you’re like, flexible, you’re like, you just can bounce back from anything …”
“It was like, ‘I don’t want a boss’, ‘I just want to do my own thing’, ‘I want to have ideas’, and I want to be able to be wrong.”
“We didn’t change the tense of photo sharing but we certainly went after the present tense rather than the past tense. ‘This is what I did on vacation’ was like, kind of, the paradigm that exists. ‘This is what I’m doing on vacation’ was the thing that we wanted to tackle.”
“I tell every entrepreneur, if you don’t have, like, the three things you’re focusing on in your company, you’re not going to survive.”
“I still remember the exact room in Dogpatch Labs. Dogpatch Labs was a co-working space over this pier, or, it was on a pier, over the bay in San Francisco. We were in this little room and we had a whiteboard.”
“You just have to figure out ways of reinforcing the business that you work on and then also a portion of like, just experimental stuff that sometimes won’t work out.”
“Can you imagine the feeling inside this company when we were like, ‘Guys, we’re gonna allow non-square photos’. Everyone was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ That’s what makes Instagram, Instagram. I mean the number of articles that were posted day one when we launched non-square photos, they were like, ‘They ruined Instagram’.”
“So we we’re like, o.k., so this is clearly a thing that is not going away, so how can we make it awesome?”
“What drives people? What gets them up in the morning, what, like, where does the fire come from? Because, like, the best people in the world just have a fire about something. Not about everything but about something.”
“Every single day that goes by, it surprises us how people use Instagram.”
“Twenty-five thousand people, day one. I was like, ‘Mike, I think we’ve created something, I don’t know what, I don’t know, like, where it’s gonna go’, but there’s like a spirit, you can, like, feel it, you can feel the momentum.”