So far in it’s brief existence, Instagram has had a wild ride. It started out as a location app called Burbn, then pivoted before it even launched to just photos. Within a week, the photo sharing app was up to 100,000 users, and then 1 million. Today, the company announced that it just raised $7 million from Benchmark and others.
But what was it like that first day Instagram hit the app store? In this episode of Founder Stories (formerly Startup Sherpa), founder and CEO Kevin Systrom describes what it felt like to host Chris Dixon. People started downloading the app immediately from the other side of the world, then the server crumbled. “I have never felt so sick ever,” says Systrom in the video clip above. He didn’t get much sleep that day, but everything turned out all right.
In Part I of the full interview (below), Systrom delves into other topics as well, such as his decision to abandon his initial idea (Burbn) and go with a social photo-sharing app instead, and how he created his first photo app in college called Photo Box. He also talks about how the serendipity of Silicon Valley contributed to the formation Instagram, remembering a party that Dixon once threw in San Francisco where Systrom ended up meeting his key angel investors. In Part II, he talks about the competition, why entrepreneurs leave Google, and where Instagram is headed.
Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...
Kevin Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram, a photo sharing application for the iPhone. He also founded Burbn, an HTML5-based location sharing service. Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. He got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo, the company that birthed Twitter. He spent two years at Google; during the first, he worked on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products, and during...
Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder’s Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that...
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