Just so everyone knows, we're not a photo-sharing company. I don't see photos on 'Instagram' as art. They're much more about communication.
I've always had a passion for technology, photography, startups, and connecting people. Bringing those aspects together made me successful.
Our goal is to allow people to use whatever app they want to get photos into 'Instagram'.
'Instagram' reached 13 million users in just 13 months.
All of us in social media and regular media, we're all competing for the same thing, which is this gap between something happening in the world and you knowing about it.
I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.
Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.
Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.
'Instagram' Direct is a really interesting feature because it's grown significantly since we launched it. People continue to use it to communicate more privately.
Whether it's an ad or organic content, video provides a new creative dimension for storytelling on 'Instagram'. Video lets people convey the power and beauty in a moment through sight, sound, and motion.
Every photo you take communicates something about a moment in time - a brief slice of time of where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing.
One of the earliest requested features was to do premium filters where a brand could sponsor a filter. It's just not in our wheelhouse. It doesn't feel 'Instagram'-my in the way that the high-quality brand ads do.
When people say that college isn't worthwhile and paying all this money isn't worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.
On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their 'Instagram' feed. What this is about is making sure that the 30 percent you see is the best 30 percent possible.
I think not focusing on money makes you sane because in the long run it can probably drive you crazy.
When you're introducing a mobile app, you look around and say, 'We could be doing 15 different things, but how do we communicate to someone why they would want to download and even sign up for this thing?'
I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.
I've always been into taking my photos, cropping them square, putting them through a filter in Photoshop.
As a kid, creation was something that I always loved. Creating worlds for video games, creating businesses that didn't make any money, selling lemonade, etcetera. In my fourth grade classroom, I even instituted a government structure because I was really interested in people having positions and there being law.
Traditional businesses can say, 'We're going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.' But new business models are hard.
There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.
'Instagram' is definitely becoming a new entertainment source for people day after day.
If you've got an idea, start today. There's no better time than now to get going. That doesn't mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there's always small progress that can be made to start the movement.
The major reason why Instagram works is that you can follow anyone out there and start following their photos immediately.
I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way.
Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on 'Instagram' to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram.
People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs, and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.
If you focus on producing a great experience for anyone, that's how you get big.
The best companies in the world have all had predecessors. 'YouTube' was a dating site. You always have to evolve into something else.
There are billions of dollars spent every year on traditional media. The majority of people are spending more time every day on the Internet, especially on mobile. You're starting to see a shift of that spend go to mobile, especially to things like 'Instagram'.
I'm a huge fan of what 'Hipstamatic' is doing and all they've accomplished.
Mobile has created a totally different dynamic for discovering apps. You're sitting in a bar, and your friend is taking some pictures, and then you ask what app they're using.
Instagram was created because there was no single place dedicated to giving your mobile photos a place to live and to be seen.
'Instagram' doesn't exist in a vacuum. We're not a bunch of siloed individuals. It's a bunch of people coming together on topics, fashion, you know, youthful teens, creatives, photographers, foodies, everyone coming together and building a community around the things they love, communicating visually.
I think it's hard to compare 'Twitter' and 'Instagram'. Twitter has a more mature business.
Our goal is really to make sure that 'Instagram', whether you're a celebrity or not, is a safe place and that the content that gets posted is something that's appropriate for teens and also for adults.
'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.
I run a business and go all over the world doing things for that business, things that are fairly orthogonal. But my job is to run my company, not to be the best Instagrammer. I'll let other people be awesome at it.
I try to list the top three things to get done every day, and I'll be lucky if I hit all three, but it's amazing what that does to keep you on track.
Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.
It is cool to see that the fashion world has really taken to 'Instagram,' but, again, it is one of the many examples of many communities, whether you are a chef, a skateboarder, a surfer, a skier.
In the past, people have looked at photos as a record of memory. The focus has been on the past tense. With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense.
Someone once described entrepreneurship to me as a series of happy accidents.
Great products sell themselves.
Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric.
I own a Canon 20D, though I don't remember the last time I used it. Ever since the iPhone 4, I've been completely absorbed in taking photos from my mobile phone.
Most photo apps before asked something of the users. They said, 'You produce, act, and perform.' 'Instagram' said, 'Let us take care of the secret sauce.'
There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley.
