YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Systrom

lines on the record: 193
first: 2021-11-23
most recent: 2021-11-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That, I think, has been more like I haven't figured out the meaning of life by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly isn't money. It certainly isn't fame, and it certainly isn't travel. And it's like, and it's way more of like opting into the game you love playing.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. In fact, at least not yet. Listen, I'm like a pilot. Like, I do Crazy things. And I like, no, like, if anything, I'm like, ooh. I got to choose mindfully and purposely the thing I am doing right now. Not just fall into it because you're going to wake up one day and ask yourself why the hell you spent the last 10 years doing X, Y, or Z. So, I guess my shorter answer to this is doing things on purpose because you choose to do them so important in life. And not just like floating down the river of life, hitting branches along the way because you will hit branches, right? But rather like literally plotting a course and not having a tenure plan, but just choosing every day to opt in.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start realizing it's almost like you know the Truman show when he gets the edge and you like knocks against it He's like what like there's this awakening that happens when you get to that edge that you realize oh like sure it's great it's great that we all chase money and fame and success you hit the edge and and I'm not even claiming I hit an edge like like Elon's hit an edge like there's clearly larger scales What's cool is you learn that it doesn't actually matter and that there are all these other things that truly matter. That's not a case for working less hard. That's not a case for taking it easy. That's not a case for the four-day work. What that is a case for is designing your life exactly the way you want to design it because I don't know. I think we go around the sun a certain number of times and then we die and then that's it.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't. And I am in. So the crazy, so the best learning for me has been like, no matter what level of success you achieve, you're still worried about similar things, maybe on a slightly different scale. You're still concerned about the same things. You're still self-conscious about the same things. And actually, that moment going through that is what makes you believe there's got to be more machinery to life or purpose to life and that we're all chasing these materialistic things, but you start.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also, she's like the least impressed about Instagram of anyone. She's like, yeah, it's great, but like, I love you for you. Like, I like that you like a decent cook.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth of it is being able to level with someone about how hard the process is and have someone see you for who you are before Instagram and know that there's a constant you throughout all of this and be able to call you when you're drifting from that, but also support you when you're trying to stick with that. Whatever you want to call it. Also, for someone not to care, I remember Nicole saying, hey, I know you're going to do this Instagram thing. I guess it was bourbon at the time. You should do it because even if it doesn't work, we can move to a smaller apartment and it'll be fine. Like we'll make it work. How beautiful is that, right”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. We didn't go over that story. Everything is a partnership, right? And to achieve great things, it's not about like someone pulling their weight in places. It's not like someone supporting you so that you could do this other thing. It's literally like. Mike and I and our partnership as co founders is fascinating because I don't think Instagram would have happened without that partnership. Like either him or me alone, no way. We pushed and pulled each other in a way that allowed us to build a better thing because of it. Nicole, sure. She pushed me to work on the filters early on. And yes, that's a fun story, right?”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many people that have made a lot of money not operating, but operating is just one of the hardest things on earth. It is just so effing hard. It is stressful. It is you are dealing with real humans. You're not just like throwing capital in and hoping it grows. I'm not undermining the VC mindset. I think it's a wonderful thing and needed and so many wonderful VCs I've worked with. But yeah, like when your ass is on the line and it's your money, it's To me, in 10 years, we'll see how it goes.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really important though. One of the things I think Mark said to me early on that sticks with me that I think is true, we were talking about people who had left like operating roles and started doing venture something. He was like, a lot of people convinced themselves they work really hard. Like they think they work really hard and they put on the show and in their minds they work really hard, but they don't work very hard. There is something about lighting a fire underneath you and burning bridges. That I think we didn't talk about this specifically, but I think you're right, there is. Need to have that because there's this self delusion at a certain scale. Oh, I have so many board calls. Oh, like we have all these things to figure out. It's like One of the hard parts about it being an operator it's like”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm 37 going on 38 next month. I have a long life to live. I'm not definitely not going to sit on the beach, right? So I'm going to do something at some point. And I got to imagine I will help fund it, right? So the other way of thinking about this is you could park your money in the S&P, and this is bad because the S&P has done wonderfully well the last year, right? Or you can invest in yourself. You're not going to invest in yourself, you probably shouldn't do a startup. It's kind of the way of thinking about it.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enable your visiting Mars or something, right? Like that's awesome, great. But I had never really thought of it that way. But also with that comes an interesting dynamic where you don't actually have people who are going to lose that money telling you, hey, don't do this or hey, you need to face this reality. So you need to create other versions of that truth teller. Whatever I do next, that's going to be one of the interesting challenges is how do you create that truth telling situation? And that's part of why, by the way, I think someone like Jack when you start Square, you have money, but you still bring on partners because I think it creates a A truth telling type environment. I'm still trying to figure this out. It's an interesting.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital is plentiful, right? It provides a certain amount of pressure to do the right thing that I think is healthy for any startup and it keeps you real and honest because they don't want to lose their money. They're paid to not lose their money. The problem, maybe I could depersonalize it, but like I remember having lunch with Elon. It only happened once. And I asked him, like I was trying to figure out what I was doing after Instagram, right? And I asked him something about like angel investing. And he looked at me with a straight face and he was like, why the F would I do that? Like, why? I was like, I don't know. Like, you're connected. Like, seems like he's like, I only invest in myself. I was like, okay. You know, like, not the confidence. I was just like, what a novel idea. It's like, yeah, if you have money, like, why not just put it against your bag and like”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think like capital these days is kind of a dime a dozen, right? Like, as long as you're fundable, like it seems like there's money out there is what I'm hearing. It's really important that you are aligned and that you think of raising money as hiring someone for your team rather than taking money.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funding helps as long as it's from the right people. That includes yourself, and I'll talk about myself funding myself in a second, which is like, because I can fund myself doing whatever projects I can do, I don't really have another person putting pressure on me except for myself. And that creates strange dynamics, right? But let's like talk about people getting funding from a venture capitalist initially We raised money from Matt Kohler at Benchmark Amazing guy, very thoughtful, and he was very helpful early on. But I have stories from entrepreneurs where they raise money from the wrong person or the wrong firm where incentives weren't aligned. They didn't think in the same way and bad things happen because of that. The boardroom was always noisy. There were fights. We just never had that. Matt was great.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to live in the next five years, and like, what things can I get out in a year that people will use at scale? So it's just again, those circles, I think, are different for different people, but it's important to realize that market matters, you being good at it matters and having passion for it matters. Your question, sorry.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because you think it's cool doesn't mean that it's a big business opportunity. So what evidence do you have? Again, I'm a fairly strict rationalist on this. And sometimes people don't like working with me because I'm pretty pragmatic about things. I'm not Elon. Like I don't sit and make bold proclamations about visiting Mars. That's just not how I work. I'm like, okay, I want to build this really cool thing that's fairly practical. And I think we could do it. And it's in this way. And what's cool though is like, that's just my sweet spot. I'm not I can't with a straight face talk about the metaverse. I can't. I just, it's not me”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a former engineer who decided to start a startup, and I was like, are you sure you want to start a company versus join something else? Because being a coach of an NBA team and playing basketball are two very, very different things. And not everyone fully understands the difference. I think you can kind of do it both. And I don't know jury's out on that one because they're in the middle of it now. But it's really important to figure out what you're good at, not be full of yourself, like truly look at your track record. What's the saying? Like, it ain't bragging if you can do it. Too many people are delusional and think they're better at things than they actually are or think there's a bigger market than there actually is. When you confuse your passion for things with a big market, that's really scary.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That circle ain't there, it doesn't matter what you work on because there are a lot of startups that exist that just no one needs or very small markets need. But if you want to be successful, I think if you're like, if you're good at it, sorry, if you're good at it, if you're passionate about it, and the world needs it, I mean, this sounds simple, but not enough people sit down and just think about those sorts. These things overlap, and then can I get that middle section? It's small, but can I get that middle section? I think a lot about that personally.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model is three circles and they overlap. One circle is what do I have experience at slash what am I good at? I don't like saying what am I good at because it just seems like what do I have experience in, right? What can I bring to the table? What am I excited about is the other circle? What's just super cool, right? That I want to work on because even when this is hard. Think it's so cool. I want to stick with it. The last circle is like what does the world need”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I would do if I were starting from scratch. And by the way, in some ways, I will do that personally, which is like choose the thing that you get up every morning. You're like, I love this. Even when it's painful”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it position you well for the next experience? That's the advice that I would give to anyone wanting to start something today, which is like, does this meet with your ultimate goals, not wealth, not fame, none of that? Because all of that, by the way, is bullshit. Like you can get super famous and super wealthy and I think generally those are not things that It's easy to say with a lot of money that somehow it's not good to have a lot of money. It's just, I think that complicates life enormously in a way that people don't fully comprehend. So I think it is way more interesting to shoot for, can I make something that people love that provides value in the world that I love building, that I love working on, right? That's”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, you have to choose to do something that even if it fails, it was so fun, right? We never started Instagram knowing it was going to be big. We started Instagram because we loved photography. We loved social networks. I had seen what other social networks had done and I thought, hmm, maybe we did a spin on this, but like nowhere was our fate predestined. It wasn't like it wasn't written out anywhere that everything was going to go great. And I often think that counterfactual, like what if it had not gone well? And I would be like, I don't know, that was fun. We raised some money. We learned some stuff.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoever starts it, it might be some kids in a garage that took these classes from these people, you right? And they're building all of these things with this tech at the core. So I'm trying not to be someone who just throws around reinforcement learning as a buzzword. I truly believe that it is the most cutting edge in what can happen in social networks. And I also believe it's super hard. Like it's super hard to make it work. It's super hard to do it at scale. It's super hard to find people that truly understand it. So I'm not going to say that like. Think it'll be applied in social networks before we have true self driving.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think if you have a company and leadership that believe in doing the right things and can apply this technology in the right way, some really special stuff can happen. It is mostly likely going to be a group of people we've never heard about start up from scratch, right? And you asked if new social networks could be built. I've got to imagine they will be.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can you produce a better, more thoughtful experience using these types of algorithms? And honestly, in talking to some of the people that work at Facebook and old Instagrammers, most people are like, yeah, we tried a lot of things, didn't quite ever make it work. I mean, for the longest time, Facebook Ads was effectively a logistic regression. I don't know what it is now, but like if you look at this paper that they published back in the day, it was literally just a logistic regression. Made a lot of money. So, even at these extremely large scales, if we are not yet touching what reinforcement learning can truly do, imagine what the next 10 years looks like. How cool is that?”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, it's really hard to get it to converge and it's noisy and so there are all these really interesting ideas around building simulators. Know, like, for instance, in self driving, right? You don't want to actually have someone get in an accident to learn that an accident is bad. So you start simulating accidents, simulating aggressive drivers, simulating crazy dogs that run into the street. Wow fascinating, right? Like my mind starts racing. And then the question is okay, forget about self-driving cars. Let's talk about social networks.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascinating thing about reinforcement learning, I think, is that we now have a Neural networks to guess the Q function. Basically the values for any state in action. That is fascinating because we used to just like, I don't know, have like a linear regression, like hope it worked, and that was the fanciest version of it. But now you look at it, I'm like trying to learn this stuff. And I look at it, I'm like, there are like 17 different acronyms of different ways you can try to apply this. No one quite agrees like what's the best. Generally, if you're trying to like build a neural network, they're pretty well trodden ways of doing that. You use Adam, you use relu. There's just like general good ideas. And in reinforcement learning, I feel like the consensus is like it totally depends.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my sense is the next generation of leaders will have grown up having had classes in reinforcement learning, supervised learning, whatever. And they will be able to thoughtfully apply it to their companies and the places it is needed most. And that's really cool. Because, I mean, talk about efficiency gains. That's what excites me the most about it.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to answer your question, I feel like that was fairly unsatisfying, and it's easy to say climate change, but I would say at Instagram everything we applied machine learning to got better for users and it got better for the company. And I saw the power. I didn't fully understand it as an executive. And I think that's actually one of the issues that, and when I say understand, I mean the mathematics of it. Like I understand what it does. I understand that it helps. But there are a lot of executives now that talk about it and the way that they talk about the internet or they talked about the internet like 10 years ago. They're like, we're going to build mobile. And you're like, what does that mean? They're like, we're just going to do mobile. And you're like, okay.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, going through it, I was like, oh, this is fun. Like now they get data about this weird shortcut. And actually, I hit all the green lights and it worked. I'm like, this is a problem.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was definitely the other day part of the epsilon of epsilon greedy with ways where like I was sent on like a weird route that I could tell they're like we just need to collect data of this road.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, getting here, I looked and it was like here's the most energy efficient route. And I was like, I'm going to be late. I need to take the fastest route.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resource planning for servers for peak load using reinforcement learning. I don't know if that was at Google or somewhere else, but like, okay, great. You do it for servers, but what if you could do it for just capacity in general, energy capacity for cities and planning for traffic? And of course, there's all the self-driving cars and Don't know, like, I'm not going to pontificate a crazy ideas using reinforcement learning or machine learning. It's just so clear to me that humans don't think quickly enough.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, listen, if we're going to fight climate change, one really, one awesome way to do it is figure out how to optimize how we operate as a species and minimize the amount of energy we consume to maximize whatever economic impact we want to have. Because right now those two are very much tied together. And I don't believe that that has to be the case. There's this really interesting, you've read it. For people who are listening, this really interesting paper on reinforcement learning and energy consumption inside buildings. It's like one of the seminal ones, right? But imagine that at massive scale. That's super interesting. I mean, they've done...”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the obvious answers are. Climate change, right? Like think about how much fuel or just waste there is in energy consumption today because we don't plan accordingly because we take the least efficient route”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are fundamental issues at Facebook in tone and in approach of how product gets built and the objective functions. And since organizations are not people, so yawn and fair, right? There are a lot of really great people who literally just want to push reinforcement learning forward. They literally just want to teach a robot to touch, feel, lift, right? They're not thinking about political misinformation, right? There's a strong connection between what funds that research and an enormously profitable machine that has trade-offs. And one cannot separate the two. You are not completely separate from the system. I agree. It can feel really frustrating to feel if you're internal there, that you're working on something completely unrelated and you feel like your group's good. I can understand that.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ticks a lot of guts. And I don't love these conspiracy theories about like, oh, she's being financed from some person or people. I don't love them because that's like the easy thing to say. I think the Occam's razor here is like someone thought they were doing something wrong and was like very, very courageous and I don't know if courageous is the word, but like so without getting into like, is she a martyr? Is she courageous? Is she right? Let's put that aside for a second. Then there are the documents themselves. They say what they say. Your point, a lot of the things that people have been worried about. Already in the documents, or they've already been said externally. And I don't know, I'm just like, I'm thankful that I am focused on new things with my life.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Takes a lot of planning and partnership. And it seems like she has a partner at some firm, right, that probably helped a lot with this, but man, at a personal level, if you're her, you'd have to really believe in what you are doing, really believe in it because you are personally putting your ass on the line, right? You've got very large company that doesn't like enemies, right?”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what this does to transparency on the inside of startups that value that. I think that it's a seminal moment. And you can say, well, you should have nothing to hide, right? But to your point, you can pick out documents that show anything, right? But I don't know. What happens to transparency inside of startups and the culture that startups or companies in the future will grow? Like the startup of the future that becomes the next Facebook, it would be lockdown. And what does that do? Right, so that's part one. Part two. I don't think that you could design a more well-orchestrated handful of events from the 60 minutes to Releasing the documents and the way that they were released at the right time.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had this no visitors rule around my office because we always had confidential stuff up on the walls and never was super angry because they were like, that goes against our culture of transparency and like Marx in the fish cube or whatever they call the aquarium, I think they called it, were like literally anyone could see what he was doing at any point. And I don't know. I mean, other companies like Apple have been quiet slash lockdown Snapchats the same way for a reason.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just, I think very helpfully explained the nuance of the situation and why it's so hard to understand. But a couple things. One is Think I have been surprised at the scale with which some product manager Do an enormous amount of harm to a very, very large company. By releasing a trove of documents. I think I read a couple of them when they got published, and I haven't even spent any time going deep. Part of it's like, I don't really feel like reliving a previous life. Wow, like talk about challenging the idea of open culture and like what that does to Facebook internally. If Facebook was built, like I remember,”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to me, it's much more about your actions and your posture post event than it is about debugging the why. Because I don't know, is it? I don't know this research. It was written well after I left, right? Like, It is the algorithm? Is it the Explorer page? Is it the people you might know unit connecting you to ideas that are dangerous? I really don't know. So we'd have to have a much deeper, I think, dive to understand where the blame lies.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But ooh, that did not age well, right? Like, You have to be willing to say, well, maybe there's something there. And wow, like, I want to go look into it and truly believe it in your gut. But if people look at you and how you act and what you say and don't believe you truly feel that way.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go fix them and we're going to be held accountable along the way. I think that people generally really respect that. But I think that where Facebook, I think, has had issues in the past is where they say things like, I can't remember what Mark said about misinformation during the election. There was that like famous quote where he's like, it's pretty crazy to think that Facebook had anything to do with this election. That was something like that quote. And I don't remember what stage he was on.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And, like, the idea that we're going to find a mutually exclusive answer here is crazy. There's not one place. It's a combination of a lot of these things. And then the question is, like, is it true at all? Right. Like, I'm not actually saying that it's not true or that it's true, but there's always more nuance here. Do I believe that social media has an effect on young people? Well, it's got it. They use it a lot. And I bet you there are a lot of positive effects. And I bet you there are negative effects just like any technology. And where I've come to in my thinking on this is that I think any technology has negative side effects. The question is, as a leader, what do you do about them? And are you actively working on them? Or do you just like not really believe in them? If you're a leader that sits there and says, well, we're going to put in an enormous amount of resources against this. We're going to acknowledge when there are true criticisms, we're going to be vulnerable that we're not perfect.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I often question. Where does the blame lie? Is the blame at the people that originated the network, me, right? Is the blame at like the decision to combine the network with another network with a certain set of values? Is the blame at how it gets run after I left? Like, is it the driver or is it the car? Is it that someone enabled these devices in the first place if you go to an extreme, right?”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My point is the fact that I have to learn stuff from scratch or that I choose to, or like, Yeah, I mean, again, I have a lot of advantages. But my point is, it's awesome to be back in a game where you have to fight. That is, that's fun. So being humble, being vulnerable. It's an important aspect of leader, and I hope it serves me well, but like, I can't fast forward 10 years to know. I just, that's my game plan.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I certainly don't live in a world where there are 15 Sherpas following me, like, fetching me water or whatever. That's not how it works. I actually like that I have a sense of humility of like, I may not found another thing that's nearly as big. So I have to work twice as hard. Or I have to like learn twice as much. I have to haven't talked about machine learning yet, but my favorite thing is all these famous, you know, tech guys who have worked in the industry, pontificating about the future of machine learning and how it's going to kill us all. And like I'm pretty sure they've never tried to build anything with machine learning themselves.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's really valuable that. With loads of manage a counterfactual where Instagram became worth like $300 billion or something crazy, right? I kind of like that my life is relatively normal now. When I say relatively, you get what I mean. I'm not making claim that I live a normal life.”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Steve Jobs was wrong on a lot of stuff. The Newton's too early, right? Next, not quite right. There was even a time where he said, like, no one will ever want to watch video on the iPod. Totally wrong. But who cares if you come around and realize you're mistaken fix it”
2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source