Sep 19, 2016 · 28m · how-i-built-this
Instagram: Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of NPR's "How I Built This," host Guy Raz interviews Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger about transforming a failing prototype into a global visual phenomenon. They discuss inventing photo filters, surviving intense server crashes, achieving mainstream cultural saturation, and navigating their landmark $1 billion acquisition by Facebook.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 25.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.0 Guest teaching 2.4 Guest disagreement 0.0 Guy pushing back 1.1
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:32 Krieger disputes outside perception of easy success
In a very collegial episode, Krieger pushes back against the premise that founders felt confident, explaining that he woke up every morning terrified that growth had peaked.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 15:09 Raz presses past the linear success narrativeRaz rejects the tidy retrospective storyline of continuous triumph and presses the founders on their acute fears of imminent failure.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 18:15 Systrom on the open-network product decisionSystrom educates Raz on the structural differentiator of Instagram: breaking away from existing closed-friend models to an open follow graph.
Guy holds their own ▶ 18:59 Raz connects mainstream milestones to media historyRaz validates and frames the founders' cultural breakout stories by citing his own broadcast experience with celebrity recognition and NPR's historical phrasing for Google.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Genesis of Burbn and the Shift to Mobile Images | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Guy Raz sets up the narrative arc of Burbn, and Kevin Systrom explains their early pivot from location check-ins to visual communication based on early user signals. | |
| Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger Form Their Partnership | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz prompts the co-founders on their initial partnership and funding. Systrom clarifies that Burbn had only 100 users total, not 100,000, before they decided to pivot. | |
| A Walk on a Mexican Beach Sparks Photo Filters | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Raz asks how they differentiated from crowded photo apps. Systrom recounts the famous walk in Todos Santos where his wife suggested filters to make ordinary photos look good. | |
| The Midnight Launch and the Agony of Scaling | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Raz probes the sudden surge on launch night. Krieger and Systrom describe the panic of scaling a global service off a single co-located server on zero sleep. | |
| Curating the Early Community Through Influential Designers | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Raz asks how early adoption spread organically. Krieger outlines their deliberate strategy of inviting top designers from Dribbble to curate high-quality initial content. | |
| Sustained User Retention and Rising Industry Competition | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Raz challenges the assumption that Instagram's ascent was smooth and asks why it survived when other hyped apps died. Systrom highlights the key architectural choice of an open network. | |
| Cultural Mainstream: Obama, Celebrities, and Media Milestones | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz shares his own benchmark moment from TED Radio Hour to explore mainstream cultural breakthroughs. Krieger and Systrom discuss Obama, Snoop Dogg, and the Facebook acquisition. | |
| Overcoming the Terms of Service Crisis Through Transparency | 2 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Raz brings up the major terms of service backlash. Systrom openly details how vague legal drafting caused mass account deletions and how a candid apology reversed the exodus. | |
| Reflections on Luck, Entrepreneurial Grit, and Co-Founder Harmony | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Raz poses the signature question about the role of luck versus skill. Systrom argues that while everyone encounters luck, long-term success requires the grit and talent to execute on it. | |
| NPR Politics Podcast Promotional Announcement | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Promotional outro monologue for NPR Politics Podcast. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Systrom: Investor Steve Anderson required a co-founder before investing in Burbn
“But he actually said one thing to me, he goes, before I do this, you have to find a co-founder that's willing to do this with you.”
Krieger: Burbn's check-ins failed, but the visual status feature sparked Instagram
“And bourbon the check-in in itself I didn't find as compelling, but having a sort of visual status was really compelling.”
Systrom: Silicon Valley investors suffer from immediate herd FOMO
“But the second someone shows any interest in you in Silicon Valley, all of a sudden you have a bunch of other people that really want to invest.”
Systrom: Instagram raised a $500K seed on just a prototype
“And that initial check went from 50,000 to 250,000 dollars. And then there was another investor, Andreessen Horwitz, who came in and put 250,000 dollars in. So here are two guys with, like, basically a prototype and a couple of computers, no office who raised …”
Systrom: Burbn had only 100 users before pivoting to Instagram
“We, I mentioned we got to about a hundred users using this app.”
Systrom: We pivoted to Instagram with $495,000 left in the bank
“We had, you know, 495,000 dollars left in the bank because 5000 dollars to buy a couple of computers, right?”
Systrom: The first Instagram photo was a stray dog in Mexico
“I literally just, like, researched how to make the first filter, which ended up being called X-Pro II, and if you scroll all the way back on my account to the very first photo, there's Nicole's foot and a little stray dog in Mexico, and that's because that day…”
Systrom: Instagram went from sketch to the App Store in eight weeks
“It was only eight weeks from the time we had basically sketched it out to when we put it into the Apple store.”
Systrom: Instagram reached 25,000 signups in its first 24 hours
“The first 24 hours, we had 20 5000 people sign up around the world, which sounded big to us at the time.”
Krieger: Launching an app is like setting social norms at a party
“So we had this intuition that if you're going to throw a party, which is kind of what an app launch really is as people are streaming to the door, you want them to sort of know how they should act and who else is there.”
Krieger: We seeded Instagram's beta by emailing Dribbble's top 10 designers
“So we picked basically the 10 top designers on Dribbble, and we emailed them, and some ignored us, which is fine, and some wrote back and said, sure, I'll try your app.”
Systrom: Instagram's Series A was $8 million at a $30 million valuation
“It was, I think our first round was like, I don't remember. It was like, we took eight million dollars of financing on like a 20 pre, so like roughly a thirty million dollar valuation or something.”
Krieger: End users don't care about your startup's valuation or funding
“Your valuation and the amount you raise, it can be helpful in building your product, but it does absolutely nothing. People, end users don't care at all how much money you've raised. They care if you're providing some kind of value”
Systrom: Instagram grew because prior photo apps were closed, friends-only networks
“If you look at every photo service before then, it was basically a closed-only, friends-only network, and we were the first ones to really open that up.”
Systrom: Justin Bieber joining Instagram drove massive adoption among teenage girls
“And I remember Justin Bieber signing up, and the world going kind of bonkers for that as well, and by world, I mean teenage girls, and they basically started using the app incessantly, and it kind of took off with, like, a bunch of really young people as well.”
Krieger: Instagram was Facebook's first acquisition allowed to operate independently
“We were the first company that Facebook acquired and sort of kept running, and then since then you've seen Oculus and WhatsApp, and, ah, I think there were a lot of things that we figured out early on in terms of the relationship, the office space, hiring and …”
Systrom: We copied our first Terms of Service from another site
“We had these terms of service that we had I think effectively copied from some other site way back in the day and just find and replace their name with Instagram because we were a startup and we didn't know what we were doing.”
Systrom: Instagram never actually intended to use user photos in ads
“One of the sections Reading it again today, if I look at it, can be interpreted that we were going to take user photos and somehow use them in advertising. That was definitely not our intention, and like, no one in the company had even thought of that idea.”
Systrom: Account deletions dropped to zero after our Terms of Service apology
“I posted this blog post on our blog. You can probably still find it online. And I was like, we're sorry. Like, we didn't mean this. That's absolutely not what we're trying to do. And we tweeted about it. And actually the graph of deletions at that moment drops…”