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Kevin Systrom

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2021-11-23

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2021-11-23

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1. “So, the stage I just described, I mean, that technical stack lasted through probably 50 million users. I mean, seriously, like. You can get away with a lot with a pretty basic stack. Like, I think a lot of startups try to overengineer their solutions from the beginning to really scale. And you can get away with a lot. That being said, most of the first two years of Instagram was literally just trying to make that stack scale. And it was not a Python problem. It was like literally just like, where do we put the data? Like it's all coming in too fast. Like, how do we store it? How do we make sure to be up? How do we How do we make sure we're on the right size boxes that they have enough memory? Those were the issues.”

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

2. “Yeah, we were basically like not only hipster photo company, hipster tech company, right? We also adopted Redis early and like loved it. I mean, it solved so many problems for us. And turns out that's still pretty cool. But the programming was very easy. It was like sign up a user, have a feed. There was nothing, no machine learning at all, zero.”

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

3. “MySQL, like everyone used MySQL. So, like using Postgres was like an interesting decision, right? But we used it because it had a bunch of geo features built in because we thought we were going to be a check app. Remember?”

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

4. “It's like cool to be part of them. Back then, it was like, oh, Google uses Python. Like, maybe you should use Python. Facebook was PHP. I had worked at a small startup of some ex-Googlers that used Python, so we used it. And we used a framework called Django, still exists, and people use for basically the back end. And then through a couple interesting things in there, I mean, we used Postgres, which was kind of fun. It was a little bit like hipster database at the time, right?”

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

5. “If I were to do something today, I think it would be very different in terms of launch strategy, right? Android's enormous too. But anyway, back to that moment. It was Objective-C. And then we were Python based, which is just like, this is before Python was really cool. Like now it's cool because it's all these machine learning libraries like support Python and now it's super”

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

6. “Zero. Maybe it was hard for us, but I mean, we. There was nothing. The only thing that was complex about Instagram at the beginning technically was making it scale. We were just plain old objective C for the client.”

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

7. “We had some pretty bad translations, but we did translate the app. And, you know, even if our translations were pretty poor, the idea that you could just connect with other people through their images was pretty powerful.”

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8. “It was both. And what we learned very early on was what made Instagram special and the reason why you would sign up for it versus, say, just sit on Facebook and look at your friends' photos. Course, we were live, and of course, it was interesting to see what your friends were doing now. But the fact that you connect with people who took really beautiful photos in a certain style all around the world, whether they were travelers, it was the beginning of the influencer economy. It was these people who became professional Instagrammers way back when, right? But they took these amazing photos, and some of them were photographers, right? like professionally And all of a sudden you had this moment in the day when you could open up this app and sure you could see what your friends were doing, but also it was like, oh my God, that's a beautiful, beautiful waterfall. Or, oh my God, I didn't realize there was that corner of England or like really cool stuff. And the beauty about Instagram early on was that it was international by default. You didn't have to speak English to use it, right? You could just look at the photos. Worked great. We did translate.”

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

9. “Instagram, you could totally play alone. You could filter your photos, and a lot of people would tell me I didn't even realize that this thing was a social network until my friend showed up. It totally worked as a single player game. And then when your friend showed up, all of a sudden it was like, oh, not only was this great alone, but now I actually have this trove of photos that people can look at and start liking and then I can like theirs. So it was this bootstrap method of how do you make the thing not suck when the restaurant is empty?”

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

10. “Yeah, think of it this way. Can build an amazing restaurant or bar or whatever, right? But if you show up and you're the only one there, is it like, does it matter how good the food is Drinks, whatever, no, these are inherently social experiences that we were working on. So the idea of having people there You needed to have that otherwise, it was just a filter out. But by the way, part of the genius, I'm going to say genius, even though it wasn't really genius, was starting to be Marauding is a filter app was awesome. The fact that you could, so we talk about single player mode a lot, which is like, can you play the game alone?”

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

11. “Like, what are the things that are going to make this person come back over the next week, over the next month? And as a product designer asking yourself, okay, I want to optimize, not just minimize bad experiences in the short run, but like. How do I get someone to engage over the next month? And I'm not going to claim at all that I thought that way at all at the time because I certainly didn't. But if I were going back and giving myself any advice, it would be thinking, what are those, what are those second order effects that you can create? And it turns out having your friends on the service is an enormous win. So starting with a very small group of people that produce content that you wanted to see, which we did, we seeded the community very well, I think. Ended up mattering. And so.”

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12. “Actually, can I say one thing on that, which is. I don't know a lot about machine learning, but I feel like I've tried studying a bunch. That whole idea of reinforcement learning And planning out more than the greedy single experience, I think, is the closest you can get to ideal product design thinking where you're not saying, hey, like, can we have a great experience just this one time? But like, what is the right way to onboard someone? What series of experiences correlate most with them hanging on long term, right? So not just saying, oh, did the photo load slowly a couple times or did they get a great photo at the top of their feed?”

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13. “Those experiences are just sitting there waiting to be built with not that complex solutions. But everyone is just so stuck in their own head that they have to overengineer everything and then they forget about the easy stuff.”

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14. “Polished experience plus the fact that uploading seemed fast for all these people who didn't have nice phones, I think meant a lot because far too often you see teams focus not on performance, they focus on what's the cool computer science problem they can solve, right? Can we scale this thing to a billion users and they've got like a hundred, right? You talked about loss function, so I want to come back to that. Like the loss function is, do you provide a great, happy, magical, whatever experience for the consumer? And listen, if it happens to involve something complex and technical, then great. But it turns out, I think, most of the time.”

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

15. “Sure, it was arguments. I mean, I'm not sure if you've met my co founder, Mike, but he's a pretty nice guy. And he's very reasonable. And we both just saw eye to eye. And we're like, yeah, it's like make this fast or at least seem fast. It'll be great. I mean, honestly, I think the most contentious thing, and he would say this too initially Was I was on an iPhone 3G, so like the not so fast one. He had a brand new iPhone 4. I was cheap. And his feed loaded super smoothly. Like when he would scroll from photo to photo. He's like, oh, come on, man. Just like upgrade your phone. Basically, you didn't actually say that. He's nicer than that. I could tell he wished like I would just stop being chief and just get a new phone. What's funny is we actually sat there working on that little detail for a few days before launch.”

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

16. “And do we in the background, it almost guaranteed that it was done by the time you captioned. And everyone, when they used it, was like, how the hell is this thing so fast? But we were slow. We just hid the slowness. It wasn't like these things are just like it's a shelly game. You're just hiding the latency. That mattered to people a lot. And I think that, so you were willing to put up with a slow filter if it meant you could share it immediately. And of course, we added sharing options, which let you distribute it really quickly. That was the third part. So latency matters, but relative to what? And then Some tricks you get around to just hiding the latency. I don't know if Spotify starts downloading the next song eagerly. I'm assuming they do. There are a bunch of ideas here that are not rocket science that really hel”

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

17. “Even before you've entered in your password, probability once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in is extremely high. So why not just start loading your account in the background? Not like sending it down to the desktop, that would be a security issue. But like load it into memory on the server, like get it ready, prepare it. I always thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive. I was like, Mike, why don't we just do that? But like, we'll just upload the photo and like assume you're going to upload the photo. And if you don't, forget about it. We'll delete it, right? So what ended up happening was people would caption their photo. They'd press done or upload, and you'd see those little progress bar just go. And it was lightning fast. We were no faster than anyone else at the time, but by choosing 512 by 512.”

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

18. “By choosing 512 pixels by 512 pixels, which I believe it was at the time, we iterated over a lot fewer pixels than our competitors who were trying to do these enormous output-like images. So instead of taking 20 seconds, I mean, three seconds feels pretty good, right? So on a relative basis, we were winning like a lot, okay? So that's answer number one. Answer number two is we actually focused on latency in the right places. So we did this really wonderful thing. You uploaded. So the way it would work is you'd take your phone, you take the photo, and then you'd go to the edit screen where you would caption it. And on that caption screen, you'd start typing, and you'd think, okay, what's a clever caption? And I said to Mike, hey, when I worked on the Gmail team, you know what they did? When you typed in your username or your email address.”

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

19. “So I wish I were that smart at the time. I wasn't, I just knew how to do what I knew how to do, right? And I decided, okay, like why don't I just iterate over the values and change them? And what's interesting is that Compared to the alternatives, no one else used OpenJail. So, everyone else was doing it the dumb way. And in fact, they were doing it at a high resolution now comes in the small resolution that we'll talk about for a second.”

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

20. “It used to be really slow. By the way, anyone who's watching or listening Amazing what you can get away with in a startup as long as the product outcome is right for the user. Like you can be slow, you can be terrible. Long as you have product market fit, people will put up with a lot. And then the question is just about compressing, making it more performant over time so that they get that product market fit instantly.”

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

21. “Bourbon days, and I remember saying to my co founder, I just need like a week to reset. And that was on that trip, worked on the first filter because I said, you know, I think I can do this. And I literally iterated one by one over the RGB values in the array that was the photo and just slightly shifted. Basically, there was a function of our function of G, function of B that just shifted them slightly. It wasn't rocket science. And it turns out that actually made your photo look pretty cool. It just mapped from one color space to another color space. It was simple, but it was really slow. I mean, if you applied a filter, I think it used to take two or three seconds to render only eventually would I figure out how to do it on the GPU. And I'm not even sure it was GPU, but it was using OpenGL. But anyway, I would eventually figure that out, and then it would be instant.”

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22. “Yeah, yeah. And I mean, add light leaks, add like an overlay filter, make them more contrasty than they should be the first filter we ever produced was called XPro 2. And I designed it while I was in this small little bed and breakfast room in Toto Santos, Mexico. I was trying to take a break from the”

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

23. “Took nice medium format films, large, large negatives, but they kind of blurred the light and they kind of light leaked into the side. And there was this whole resurgence where people looked at that and said, oh my God, this is a style, right? And I remember using that in Florence and just saying, well, why don't we just lean into the fact that these photos suck and make them suck more, but in an artistic way. And it turns out that had product market fit. People really liked that. They were willing to share their not so great photos if they looked not so great on purpose. The second part.”

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

24. “Anne, if you wanted to share a photo on different networks, you had to go to each of the individual apps and select all of them and upload individually and so we're like, all right, those are the pain points. We're going to focus on that. So one, instead of because they weren't beautiful, we were like, why don't we lean into the fact that they're not beautiful? And I remember studying in Florence, my photography teacher gave me this Holga camera, and I'm not sure everyone knows what a Holga camera is, but they're these old school plastic cameras I think they're produced in China at the time. I want to say the original ones were like from the 70s or the 80s or something. They're supposed to be like $3 cameras for the every person.”

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25. “If not only did you have a camera that fit in your pocket, but by the way, that camera had a network attached to it that allowed you to share instantly. That seemed revolutionary, and a bunch of people saw it at the same time. It wasn't just Instagram. There were a bunch of competitors. The thing we did, I think, was not only, well, we focused on two things. So we wrote down those things. We circled photos and we said, I think we should invest in this. But then we said, what sucks about photos? One, they look like crap, right? They just, at least back then, now my phone takes pretty great photos, right? Back then, they were blurry, not so great, compressed, right? It was really slow, like really slow to upload a photo. And I'll tell a fun story about that and explain to you why they're all the same size and square as well. And three.”

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

26. “Was based in the desktop and sitting there and having a link you could share, right? And that wasn't going to be the case. So, the question is what would you share if you were out and about in the world?”

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

27. “Yeah Was clear to me that the biggest I believe the biggest companies are founded when enormous technical shifts happen. And the biggest technical shift that happened right before Instagram was founded was the advent of a phone that didn't suck, the iPhone, right? Like in retrospect, we're like, oh my God, the first iPhone almost hadn't that good. But compared to everything else at the time, it was amazing. And by the way, The first phone that had an incredible camera that could do as well as the point and shoot you might carry around was the iPhone 4. And that was right when Instagram launched. And we looked around and we said, what will change because everyone has a camera in their pocket? And it was so clear to me that the world of social networks before.”

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28. “How they actually feel. So just it's about synthesizing both of them. So then Instagram, right? We were talking about revolutionary moment where the feed became square photos, basically.”

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29. “So, a couple things. One is Data, like you're right, you can over interpret data. Imagine trying to fly a plane by staring at, I don't know, a single metric like airspeed. Don't know if you're going up or down. I mean, it correlates with up or down, but you don't actually know. We'll never help you land the plane. So don't stare at one metric. Like it turns out you have to synthesize a bunch of metrics to know where to go. But it doesn't lie. Like if your airspeed is zero, unless it's not working, right? If it's zero, you're probably going to fall out of the sky. So generally you look around and you have the scan going. And you're just asking yourself, is this working or is this not working? But people have trouble explaining.”

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30. “So, I don't know. At the end of the day, like at Facebook, there was before time spent became kind of this loaded term there. The idea that people's currency in their lives is time and they only have a certain amount of time to give things, whether it's friends or family or apps or TV shows or whatever. There's no way of inventing more of it, at least not that I know of They don't use it, it's because it's not great, so the moral of the story is you can ask all you want, but you just have to look at the data. Data doesn't lie, right?”

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31. “So, my rule of thumb with this is you should always ask people, but at the end of the day, it's amazing what data will tell you. And that's why with whatever project I work on, even now, collecting data from the beginning on usage patterns, so engagement, how many days of the week do they use it, how many, I don't know if we were to go back to Instagram, how many impressions per day, right? Is that growing? Is that shrinking? And don't be like overly scientific about it, right? Because maybe you have 50 beta users or something. But what's fascinating is that data doesn't lie. People are very defensive about their time. They'll say, oh, I'm so busy. I'm sorry I didn't get to use the app. I'm just, you know, but I don't know. You're posting on Instagram the whole time.”

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32. “People have trouble giving hard feedback. People have trouble saying, I don't like this or this isn't great or this is how it's failed me. In fact, you usually have two classes of people, people who just won't say bad things. You can literally say to them, please, tell me what you hate most about this and they won't do it. They'll try, but they won't. And then the other class of people are just negative about everything, and it's hard to parse out like what is true and what isn't.”

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33. “And one thing that he kept saying was feedback is really hard to get, honestly, from people. And I sat down after dinner, I said, guys, I want feedback. What was good and what was bad What's funny is literally everyone just said everything was great. I personally knew I had screwed up a handful of things, but no one would say it. And can you imagine now, not something as high stakes as Thanksgiving dinner, okay? Thanksgiving dinner, it's not that high stakes. You're trying to build a product, and everyone knows you left your job for it, and you're trying to build it out, and you're trying to make something wonderful. And it's yours, right? You designed it. Now try asking for feedback and know that you're giving this to your friends and your family.”

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34. “I mean, so what's funny is a brief aside. I love cooking. I love food. I love coffee. And I've spent some time with some chefs who know their stuff. And they always just take out a piece of paper and just work backwards in rough order. Like it's never perfect, but rough order. I was just like, oh, that makes sense. Why not just work backwards from the end goal, right? And put in some buffer time. So I probably overspecified it a bit using a Gantt chart. But the fact that you can do it, it's what professional kitchens roughly do. They just don't call it a Gantt chart, or at least I don't think they do. Anyway, I was telling a story about Thanksgiving. So here's the thing. I'm sitting down. We have the meal. And then I got to know Ray Dalio fairly well over maybe the last year of Instagram.”

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35. “Did you actually have a chart? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Omni plan. Fairly expensive Gantt chart thing that I think maybe 10 people have purchased. The world, but I'm one of them and I use it for recipe planning only around big holidays.”

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36. “Once made a Thanksgiving dinner. Okay. And it was for relatives and I like to cook a lot. And I worked really hard on picking the specific dishes. And I was really proud because I had planned it out using a Gantt chard and like it was ready on time and everything was hot. I don't know if you're a big Thanksgiving guy, but the worst thing about Thanksgiving. When the turkey is cold and some things are hot, and something anyway.”

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37. “That users are telling us they like because they're using the product that way. It was clear people liked the photos because that was the thing they were doing. And we just said, okay, like, what if we just cut out most of the other stuff and focus on that thing? And then it happened to be a multi-billion dollar business. That easy, by the way.”

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38. “And you would look at their data. You would say, what are they sharing? What resonates? What doesn't resonate? We think they're going to resonate with X. But it turns out they resonate with Y. Okay, shift the company towards Y. And it turns out if you do that enough quickly enough, you can get to a solution that has product market fit. Most companies fail because they sit there and they don't, either their learning rate's too slow. They sit there and they just atomant that they're right, even though the data is telling them they're not right or their learning rate's too high and they wildly chase different ideas and they never actually set on one where they don't groove, right? And I think when we sat down and we wrote out those three ideas, what we were saying is what are the three possible, whether they're local or global maxima in our world, right?”

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39. “I've started to make connections We can go into this later, but obviously the um. The connections between Machine learning and the human brain, I think, are stretched sometimes, right? At the same time, Being able to backprop and being able to look at the world, try something. Figure out how you're wrong, how wrong you are, and then nudge your company in the right direction based on how wrong you are. It was like a fascinating concept, right? And I don't, we didn't know we were doing it at the time, but that's basically what we were doing, right? We put it out to call it 100 people.”

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40. “So we decided to go after that because we noticed that people who used our service, the one thing they happened to like the most was posting a photo. So that was the beginning of Instagram. And yes, like we went through and we added filters and there's a bunch of stories around that. But the origin of this was that we were trying to be a check-in app, realized that no one wanted another check-in app. It became a Photo sharing app, but one that was much more about what you're doing and where you are. And that's why when I say I think we've replaced check and apps, it became a check-in via a photo rather than saying your location and then optionally adding a photo.”

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41. “We were sitting down and we asked ourselves okay, let's come to Jesus' moment. Are we going to do this startup? And if we're going to, we can't do what we're currently doing. We have to switch it up. So, what do people love the most? So we sat down and we wrote out three things that we thought people uniquely loved about our product that weren't in other products. Photos happen to be the top one. So sharing a photo of what you were doing, where you were at the moment was not something products let you do, really. Facebook was like, post an album of your vacation from two weeks ago, right? Twitter allowed you to post a photo, but their feed was primarily text and they didn't show the photo in line. Or at least I don't think they did at the time. So even though it seems totally stupid and obvious to us now, at the moment then, posting a photo of what you were doing at the moment was like not a thing.”

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

42. “You know what? I'm going to answer that, but through what Instagram became and why I believe Instagram replaced them. So the whole idea was to share with the world what you were doing specifically with your friends, right? But there were all the rage. And Foursquare was getting all the press. And I remember sitting around saying, hey, I want to build something, but I don't know what I want to build. What if I built a better version of Foursquare? And I ask myself, why don't I like Foursquare? Or how could it be improved? And basically, I sat down and I said, I think that if you have a few extra features, it might be enough, one of which happened to be posting a photo of where you were. There were some others. It turns out that wasn't enough. My co-founder joined. We were going to attack, you know, Foursquare and the likes and try to build something interesting. And no one used it. No one cared because it wasn't enough. It wasn't different enough, right?”

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43. “In that context, we basically set it up So we have a fair amount of time, so I'll go into some detail, but basically what I'll say is Instagram started out of a company actually called Bourbon, and it was spelled B-U-R-B-N. And a couple things were happening at the time. So if we zoom back to 2010, not a lot of people remember what was happening in the dot-com world then, but check-in apps were all the rage.”

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