YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Systrom

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193
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2021-11-23
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2021-11-23
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  1. “I don't know. Do you think Elon cares about are we going to buy Pinterest or not? I just created a massive capital that allowed him to do what he wants to do. And that's awesome. That's more freeing than anything because when you are an entrepreneur attached to a company, you got to stay at the company for a really long time. It's really hard to remove yourself.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So, this is the cool part, right? If you are an entrepreneur and you own a controlling stake in the company Not only is it really hard to do something else with your life because all of the value is tied up in you as a personality attached to this company, right? But if you sell it and you get yourself enough capital and you like have enough energy, you can do another thing or 10 other things or an Elon's case like a bunch of other things. I don't know. Like I lost count at this point. It might have seemed silly at the time, and sure, like if you look back, man, PayPal is worth a lot now, right?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Actually, I would say something different, which is Elon and others decided to sell PayPal. Not that much. I mean, how much was it about a billion dollars? I can't remember.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's great, by the way. They have really talented people there, but my point is, um, Choice was like take this thing, put it on the side of a rocket ship that you know is growing very quickly. I had seen what had happened when Ev sold Blogger to Google, and then Google went public. Remember, we sold before Facebook went public. There was a moment at which the stock price was $17, by the way Facebook stock price was $17. I remember thinking, what the fuck did I just do? Now at $320-ish, I don't know where we are today, but like, okay, like. Best thing, by the way, is like. The stock is down, everyone calls you dope, and then when it's up, they also call you a dope, but just for a different reason, right? Like you can't win.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah. It's so fascinating, right? We're talking a lot about money, but the real question was. I'm not sure you'll believe me when I say this, but could we strap our little company onto the side of a rocket ship? And like, get out to a lot of people really, really quickly, with the support, with the talent of a place like Facebook. I mean, people often ask me what I would do differently at Instagram today. And I say, well, I'd probably hire more carefully because we showed up just like before I knew it. We had like 100 people on the team and 200, then 300. I don't know where all these people were coming from. I never had to recruit them. I never had to screen them. They were just like internal transfers, right?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Imagine you made one movie and it was great. Would you just like stop making movies? No. Generally you're like, wow, I really like making movies. Let's make another one. A lot of times, by the way, the second one or the third one, not that great, but the fourth one, awesome. And no one forgets, or everyone forgets the second and the third one. So there's just this constant process of can I produce and is that fun? Is that exciting? What else can I learn? So this machine learning stuff for me has been this awesome new chapter of being like, Man, that's something I didn't understand at all, and now I feel like I'm one tenth of the way there. And that feels like a big mountain to climb. So I distracted us from the original question about how when will it return?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and at least meditation is like productive chilling, where you're like actually training yourself to calm down and be, but backing up for a moment. Everything's hard. You might as well be like playing in the game you love to play. I just like playing and winning and I'm still on the, I think, the first half of life knock on wood. I've got a lot of years, and what am I going to do? Sit around. And the other way of looking at this, by the way.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I guess I'm trying to say is slightly different, which is just that no one realizes everything's going to be hard. Even chilling out is hard. And then you just start worrying about stupid stuff, like, I don't know, like, did so-and-so forget to paint the house today or like, did the gardener come or whatever? Like, I'm so angry in my shipment of wine didn't show up, and I'm sitting here on the beach without my wine. I don't know. I'm making shit up now. But”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Really enjoy this life. Not in a hedonistic way because it's like the reinforcement learning, learning short term versus long-term objectives. Can you wake up every day and truly enjoy what you're doing? Knowing that it's going to be painful. Knowing that no matter what you choose, it's going to be painful. Whether you sit on a beach or whether you manage a thousand people or 10,000, it's going to be painful. So choose something that's fun to have pain. But yes, there was a lot of, we have arrived and Some maturation process, you just have to go through.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Everything is super challenging, whether you're like a small business or an enormous business. I say, choose the game you like to play, right? You've got to imagine that if you're an amazing basketball player, you enjoy to some extent practicing basketball. It's got to be something you love. It's going to suck. It's going to be hard. You're going to have injuries, right? But you got to love it. And the same thing with Instagram, which is we might have sold, but it was like, great. There's one Super Bowl title. Can we win five? What else can we do? Now I imagine you didn't ask this, but okay, so I left. There's a little bit of like, what do you do next, right? Like, what do you, how do you top that thing? It's the wrong question. The question is, when you wake up every day, what is the hardest, most interesting thing you can go work on? Because at the end of the day, we all turn into dirt. Doesn't matter, right? But what does matter is, can we?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You know, you win some, you lose some, but the amount you can learn through that process, what I've realized in life is that there is no and there's always someone who has more. There's always more challenge just at different scales. And sounds like a little Buddhist, but”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Which I need to go back and look where I can quote that from, but I remember reading about it at the time. I was like, oh, yeah, that's that. And I remember we had a product manager leave very early on when we got to Facebook. And he said to me, I just don't believe I can learn anything at this company anymore. It's like it's hit its apex. We sold it. Great. I just don't have anything else to learn. So, from 2012, all the way to the day I left in 2018, like the amount I learned and the humility with which I realized, oh, we thought we won, billion dollars is cool, but like they're a hundred billion dollar companies. And by the way, on top of that, we had no revenue. I mean, we had a cool product, but we didn't scale it yet. There's so much to learn. And then competitors and how fun was it to fight Snapchat. Oh my God. Like it was.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think it's all of the above. But to be clear, there was a lot of happiness in terms of like, oh my God, this is great. Like, won the Super Bowl of startups, right? Anyone who can get to a liquidity event of anything meaningful feels like, wow, this is what we started out to do. Of course, we want to create great things that people love. But like we won in a big way. But yeah, there's this big like, oh, if we won, what is like what's next? I don't, so they call it the we have arrived syndrome.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “When we sold, it was tough because, like, literally everywhere I go, restaurants, whatever, like for a good six months after, there was a lot of attention on the deal, a lot of attention on the product, a lot of attention. It was kind of miserable, right? And you're like, wait, like I made a lot of money, but like, why is this not great? And it's because it turns out, you know, and I don't know, like I don't really keep in touch with Mark, but I've got to assume his job right now is not exactly the most happy job in the world. It's really tough when you're on top. And it's really tough when you're in the limelight. So the decision. Right”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's the massive unicorn parade. Okay, so. No, I mean, we knew we were worth quote unquote a lot, but we didn't, I mean, there was no market for Instagram. I mean, it's not you couldn't mark to market this thing in the public markets. You didn't quite understand what it would be worth or was worth at the time. So in a market, in a liquid market where you have one buyer and one seller and you're going back and forth. And well, I guess there were like VC firms who were willing to invest at a certain valuation. I don't know. You just go with your gut. And at the end of the day, I would say. The hardest part of it was not realizing.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Lives for the rest of their lives, including me, including Mike, right? I think I might have had like 10 grand in my bank account at the time, right? We're working hard. We had nothing. So on a relative basis, it seemed very high. And then I think the last company to exit for anywhere close to a billion was YouTube that I could think of. And thus began the giant long bull run of 2012 all the way to where we are now, I saw some stat yesterday about like how many unicorns exist. And it's absurd. But then again, never underestimate technology and like the value it can provide and man costs have dropped and manscale has increased and You can make businesses make a lot of money now, but on a fundamental level, I don't know, like how do you describe the decision to sell a company with 13 people for a billion dollars?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, half a billion. So, in my mind, I'm anchored like, okay, well, literally no one's biting at 500 million. And eventually we would get Sequoia and Greylock and others together at 500 million basically post. It was 450 pre. I think we raised $50 million. But just like no one was used to seeing a $500 million companies then. Like I don't know if it was because we were just coming out of the hangover of 2008 and things were still in recovery mode. But then along comes Facebook. And after some negotiation, we've 2xed the number from half a billion to a billion. It seems pretty good, you know. I think Mark and I really saw eye to eye that this thing could be big. We thought we could, their resources would help us scale it. And in a lot of ways, de-risks, I mean, it de risks a lot of the employees.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “As we started to grow, you know, we were trying to keep this thing running and we were exhausted and we were 13 people. And I mean, we were trying to think back, it was probably 27? 37 now. So young on a relative basis, right? And we're trying to keep the thing running. And then, you know, we go out to raise money. Kind of like the hot startup at the time, and I remember going into a specific VC and saying, our terms we're looking for, we're looking for a $500 million valuation. And I've never seen so many jaws drop all in unison, right? And I was like thanked and walked out the door very kindly after, and then I got a call the next day from someone who was connected to them and said, they said, we just want to let you know that it was pretty offensive that you asked for a $500 billion valuation. And I can't tell if that was.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, I want to provide some context, which is I worked in corporate development at Google, which not a lot of people know, but corporate development is effectively the group that buys companies, right? You sit there and you acquire companies. And I had sat through so many of these meetings with entrepreneurs. We actually, fun fact, we never acquired a single company when I worked in corporate development. So I can't claim that I had like a lot of experience. But I had enough experience to understand, okay, like what prices are people getting and what's the process?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Needs to have a lot of data, and that actually is a challenge for anyone who wants to start something, which is you don't have a lot of data. So how do you compete? But I do think back to your original point, rethinking the algorithm, rethinking reward functions, rethinking utility. Fascinating. That's cool. And I think that's an open opportunity for a company that figures it out.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I mean, but what's interesting is it's one thing to train a game and like, I mean, that paper that where they just took Atari and they used a convNet to basically just like train simple actions, mind-blowing, right? Absolutely mind-blowing. But it's a game. Great So now, what if you're constructing a feed for a person, right? Like, how can you construct that feed in such a way that optimizes for a diversity of experience, a long-term happiness, right? But that reward function, it turns out in reinforcement learning again, as I've learned, like reward design is really hard. I don't know. Like, how do you design a scalar reward for someone's happiness over time? I mean, do you have to measure dopamine levels? Like, do you have to?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And the more I dug into it, I was like, oh, literally everyone's smart is working on reinforcement learning, like literally everyone.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Out, there are like a lot of things you use more that make you less happy in the world, not talking about Facebook, just let's think about whether it's gambling or whatever, like that you can do more of but doesn't necessarily make you happier. So the idea that time equals happiness obviously you can't map utility and time together easily. There are a lot of edge cases. So when you look around the world and you say, well, what are all the ways we can model utility? There's like one of the Please, if you know someone smart doing this, introduce me because I'm fascinated by it. And it seems really tough. But the idea that reinforcement learning, like everyone interesting I know in machine learning, like I was really interested in recommender systems and supervised learning and”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “A way that actually measures someone's happiness that isn't just a, what do they call it, a surrogate problem where you say, well, kind of think like the more you use the product, the happier you are. That was always the argument at Facebook, by the way. It was like, well, people use it more, so they must be more happy.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “That is really hard because invariably you think you're solving for, I don't know, something called meaningful interactions, right? This was the big Facebook pivot. And I don't actually have any internal knowledge. Like I wasn't in those meetings, but at least from what we've seen over the last month or so, it seems by actually trying to optimize for meaningful interactions, it had all these side effects of optimizing for these other things. And I don't claim to fully understand them, but what I will say is that trade-offs abound. And as much as you'd like to solve for one thing, if you have a network of over a billion people, you're going to have unintended consequences either way. And it gets really hard. So what you're describing is effectively a value model that says like, can we capture, this is the thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, can you capture utility?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And you've got this neural network that basically has a bunch of heads at the end, and all of them are between zero and one. And great, they all have values, right? Or they all have probabilities. And then in these meetings, what they will do is say, well, how much do we value a comment versus a click versus a share versus a, and then maybe even some downstream thing, right? That has nothing to do with the item there, but like driving follows or something. And what typically happens is they will say, well, what are our goals for this quarter at the company? Oh, we want to drive sharing up. Okay. Well, let's turn down these metrics and turn up these metrics. And they blend them into a single scalar, which they're trying to optimize.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Say a couple things. One is to Pull back the curtain on daily meetings inside of these large social media companies. Lot of what management, or at least the people that are tweaking these algorithms spend their time on are trade offs. And there's these things called value functions, which are like, okay, we can predict the probability that you'll click on this thing or the probability that you'll share it, or the probability that you will leave a comment on it, or the probability you'll dwell on it. Individual actions, right?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Something that they want to match, and you get the document, and it doesn't have to be text, it could be anything. And how do you matchmake? And that's one of these like, I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I don't claim to have mastered it at all, but I think it's so fascinating about where that will go with new social networks.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “What's so fascinating about this is the field of information retrieval. Like I always talks about as I was studying this stuff, I would always use the word query and document. So I was like, why are they saying query and document? It's like they're literally like if you just stop thinking about query as like literally a search query and a query could be a person. I mean, a lot of the way, I'm not going to claim to know how Instagram or Facebook machine learning works today. You know, if you want to find a match for a query, the query is actually the attributes of the person, their age, their gender, where they're from, maybe some kind of summarization of their interests. And that's a query, right? And that matches against documents. And by the way, documents don't have to be text. They can be videos, however long. I don't know what the limit is on TikTok these days. They keep changing it. My point is just you've got a query, which is someone in search of.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Like, you don't have to be someone that anyone knows, you don't have to have built up a giant following, you don't have to have paid for followers, you don't have to try to maintain those followers. You literally just have to produce something interesting. That is, I think, the future of social networking. That's the direction things will head. And I think what you'll find is it's far less about people manipulating distribution and far more about what is like, is this content good Good is obviously a vague definition that we spend hours on, but Different networks, I think, will decide different value functions to decide what is good and what isn't good. And I think that's a fascinating direction.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, what if you just imagine for a second that why do you have to grab things your friends have shared? Why not just like grab things? That's really fascinating to me. And that's something I've been thinking a lot about and just Why is it that when you log on to Twitter, you're just sitting there looking at things from accounts that you followed for whatever reason? TikTok, I think, has done a wonderful job here, which is like you can literally be anyone, and if you produce something fascinating, it'll go viral.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Typically, that is grabbed from things your friends have shared, right? Then there's a ranking step which says, okay, now given these 100, 200 things depends on the network, right? Let's be really good about ranking them and generally rank the things up higher that get the most engagement, right? So what's the problem with that? Step one is we've limited everything you could possibly see to things that your friends have chosen to share, or maybe not friends, but influencers. What things do people generally want to share? They want to share things that are going to get likes, that are going to show up broadly. So they tend to be more emotionally driven. They tend to be more risque or whatever. So why do we have this problem? It's because we show people things people have decided to share. And those things self-select to being the things that are most divisive. So how do you fix that?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Like, what did those do? Like, they basically distribute it interesting content to you, right? Think the most interesting part or the future of social networks is going to be making them less social because I think people are part of the root cause of the problem. So for instance, often in recommender systems we talk about two stages. There's a candidate generation step, which is just like of our vast trove of stuff that you might want to see, what small subset should we pick for you, okay?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Matchmaking between content that exists in the world and people that want that content turns out to be like a really big business. Search and discovery, but my point is it could be video, it could be text, it could be websites, it could be, I mean, think back to Back to like dig, right? Or stumble upon or”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Absolutely I have this thesis that the worst part about social networks is that The people, it's a line that sounds funny, right? Because that's why you call it a social network. But what does social networks actually do for you? Like, just think, you know, like, imagine you were an alien and you landed and someone says, hey, there's this site. It's a social network. We're not going to tell you what it is, but just what does it do? And you had to explain it to them. It does two things. One is that people you know and have social ties with distribute updates through whether it's photos or videos about their lives so that you don't have to physically be with them, but you can keep in touch with them. That's one. That's like a big part of Instagram. That's a big part of Snap. It is not part of TikTok at all. So there's another big part, which is there's all this content out in the world that's entertaining, whether you want to watch it or you want to read it.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “All versions of the same thing with varying. If you line them up in a bunch of dimensions, they're just like kind of on. Different values of the same dimensions, which is like, I guess, easy to say in retrospect. But if I were an entrepreneur going after that area, I'd ask myself, like, where's the opening? What needs to exist because TikTok exists now?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Fundamentally different. I mean, I think one of the reasons Snapchat exists is because Instagram was so focused on posting great, beautiful, manicured versions of yourself throughout time There was this enormous demand of like, hey, I really like this behavior. I love using Instagram, but man, I just wish I could share something going on in my day. Do I really have to put it on my profile? Do I really have to make it last forever? Do I really? And that opened up a door. It created a market, right? And then what's fascinating is Instagram had an Explorer page for the longest time. It was image driven, right? But there's absolutely a behavior where you open up Instagram and you sit on the Explorer page all day. That is effectively TikTok, but obviously focused on videos. And it's not like you could just put the Explore page in TikTok form and it works. It had to be video. It had to have music. These are the hard parts about product development that are very hard to predict.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Like the prior, so you asked me is it possible? The only reason I'm answering yes is because my prior is that it's happened once every, I don't know, three, four, five years consistently. And I can't imagine there's anything structurally that would change that. So that's why I answer that way. Not because I know how. I just, when you see a pattern, you see a pattern. And there's no reason to believe that's going to stop.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Often there are opportunities sitting there. You just have to figure out, I think there's a strategy book. I can't remember the name, but talk about moats and just like the best place to play is where your competitor literally can't pivot because structurally they're set up not to be there. And that's where you win. And what's fascinating is like, do you know how many people are like images? Facebook does that, Twitter does that. I mean, how wrong were they? Really wrong. And these are some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley, right? But now Instagram exists for a while. How is it that Snapchat could then exist? Makes no sense. Like plenty of people would say, well, there's Facebook, no images. Okay, okay. Instagram, I'll give you that one. But wait, now another image-based social network's going to get. And then TikTok comes along.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “The only way to compete now, if you want to build a large social network, is to look for the cracks, look for the openings. No one competed, I mean, no one competed with the core business of Google. No one competed with the core business of Microsoft. You don't go at the big guys doing exactly what they're doing. Instagram didn't win, quote unquote, because it tried to be a visual Twitter. We spotted things that either Twitter wasn't going to do or refused to do images and feed for the longest time, right? Or that Facebook wasn't doing or not paying attention to because they were mostly desktop at the time and we were purely mobile, purely visual.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Of course, you need to be worried about money, but I'm going to also say this again, which is it's like long term profitability if you have a roadmap to that, then that's great. But if you're just like, I don't know, maybe never like we're working on this metaphor thing. I think maybe someday, I don't know. Like that seems harder to me. So you have to be as big as Facebook to like finance that bet, right?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “If you are in an area, like let's say you wanted to start a social network, but if you did, there are only a handful of ways they've made money and really only one way they've made money in the past, and that's ads. So, you know, if you have a service that's amenable to that, then I wouldn't worry too much about that because if you get to the scale, you can hire some smart people and figure that out. I do think that is really healthy for a lot of startups these days, especially the ones doing like enterprise software, Slacks of the world, et cetera, to be worried about money from the beginning, but mostly as a way of winning over clients and having stickiness,”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think it totally depends, and that's an unsatisfying answer. I was talking with a friend today who He was one of our earlier investors, and he was saying, Hey, have you been doing any angel investing lately? I said, not really. I'm just focused on what I want to do next. He said the number of financings have just gone bonkers, like just bonkers, like people are throwing money everywhere right now. And I think the question is, do you have an inkling of how you're going to make money? Or are you really just like waving your hands? I would not like to be an entrepreneur in the position of, well, I have no idea how this will eventually make money. That's not fun.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Think it's an absolute number. I think it is, I guess you could call it a marginal number. So I spent a lot of time when I work with startups asking them, like, okay, have you looked at that cohort versus this cohort, whether it's your clients or whether it's people signing up for the service? But a lot of people think you just have to hit some mark, like 10,000 people or 50,000 people. But really. Seven ish billion people in the world. Most people forever will not know about your product. There are always more people out there to sign up. It's just a question of how you turn on the spigot.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I don't think it is generally a question of absolute numbers. I think it's a question of cohorts. And I think it's a question of trends. Know it depends how big your business is trying to be, right? But if I were signing up a thousand people a week and they all retain like the retention curves for those cohorts looked good, healthy, and even like as you started getting more people on the service, maybe those earlier cohorts started curving up again because now there are network effects and their friends are on the service. It totally depends what type of business you're in. But I'm talking purely social, right?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Always those ones that break when you don't want them to break and they're annoying, and it feels like you spend all this time. But looking back, I think that long-term optimal, even with the team of four, it allowed us to move very, very quickly because anyone could touch any part of the product and know that they weren't going to bring down the site, or at least in general.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Base case is typically that startups worry way too much about scaling, way too early, and forget that they actually have to make something that people like. That's the default mistake case. But what I'll say is once you start scaling, I mean, hiring quickly people who have seen the game before and just know how to do it, it becomes a bit of like, yeah, just throw instances of the problem, right? Got it. But the last thing I'll say on this that I think did save us, we were pretty rigorous about writing tests from the beginning. Helped us move very, very quickly when we wanted to rewrite parts of the product and know that we weren't breaking something else. Tests are one of those things where it's like you go slow to go fast and they suck when you have to write them because you have to figure it out.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Basically, I would say a couple things. First off, don't even ask the question. Just find product market fit, duct tape it together, right? Like if you have to. I think there's a big caveat here, which I want to get to. Generally, all that matters is product market fit. That's all that matters if people like your product. Do not worry about when 50,000 people use your product because you will be happy that you have that problem when you get there. I actually can't name many startups where they go from nothing to something overnight and they can't figure out how to scale it. There are some, but I think nowadays it's a, when I say a solved problem, like there are ways of solving it.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I'm so sorry to people listening. We brought up an instance which was our database. It's going to be a replacement for our database. But we had it talking over the public internet to our little box in LA that was our app server. That's how sophisticated we were, and obviously that was very, very slow. Didn't work at all. I mean, it worked, but didn't work. Only like later that night did we realize we had to have it all together. But at least like if you're listening right now and you're thinking, you know, I have no chance I'm going to start. I don't know. We did it and we made a bunch of really dumb mistakes initially. I think the question is how quickly do you learn that you're making a mistake and do you do the right thing immediately right after?”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I'm only laughing because we when we launched we had a single computer that we had rented in some colos space in LA. I don't even remember what it was called. I thought that's what you did when I worked at a company called Odio that became Twitter. I remember visiting our space in San Francisco. You walked in, you had to wear the ear things. It was cold and fans everywhere, right? And we had to, you know, plug one out, replace one. And I was the intern. So I just like held things. But I thought to myself, oh, this is how it goes. And then I remember being in a VC's office. I think it was Benchmark's office. And I think we ran into another entrepreneur and they were like, oh, how are things going? We're like, you know, trying to scale this thing. And they were like, well, I mean, can't you just add more instances? And I was like, what do you mean? And they're like instances on Amazon. I was like, what are those? And it was this moment where we realized how deep in it we were because we had no idea that AWS existed, nor should we be using it. Anyway, that night we went back to the office and we got on AWS, but we did this really dumb thing.”

    2021-11-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #243 – Kevin Systrom: Instagram · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source