How A 28 Year Old Built A Billion Dollar Business | Kevin Systrom Ep. 335

what do you do when you've made a billion dollars and changed the way that almost everyone uses the Internet today on the Jordan Harbinger show founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom on taking feedback and creating a tech unicorn here we go how does one start a start-up do you start from a place up look I want to found a company or are you like I want to solve this for a specific issue I think I think okay first off I think I did it in a way that most people don't which is I'm not sure I tried to found a start-up mmm-hmm I just wanted to work on my own on my own stuff like not have a boss yeah that's a different way of putting it but in fact I think I've said that before I was like I just didn't want a boss I like I've been working at some great companies for some great people for a while and but I like I wanted the chance to build something from scratch quote unquote my way mm-hmm and that's the reason why I decided I was gonna jump ship from the startup that I was at to go start something so you know I didn't know it was gonna be a startup it was just me I was futzing around with ideas but that was my way in terms of how you start to start meaning just anyone I mean nowadays probably very different I mean you can raise money fairly quickly you know there all sorts of incubators that people are part of yeah that's not the route I went I just kind of want the like I just need space a table and my old laptop and and a few ideas it took more than a few to get to Instagram but yeah but that was the way I did it back then I'll go over some before we do the show I'll do like a little he started this app yeah that was like the ten billionth check-in app or a decade or of the year or whatever before ten billion okay yeah I just like so top million I think we're definitely in the first hundred but you know some credit yeah I'm giving you it's just funny because when you look checking apps now you're like wait do we still do that and we kind of do we just don't use a check-in app it just Instagram or whatever you're using happens to sort of know where you are it's true at the same time like of all the crazy ideas that I have you know in my doodles of time now I think to myself like men like it just feels like checking apps had so much velocity and then just nothing and and I guess Instagram kind of took that space because you could see when people were up to it cetera but sharing your photos like a lot more heavyweight than just sharing where you are yeah and I still feel like there are there's room for sharing your location I feel like you know find my friends kind of does it but not really and not impact it and yeah but my point is there's something there and I'm not sure who's gonna do it but if you know anyone I I also invest these days I said I was thinking about this the other day because when I was reading about your history I thought oh yeah now we use a way I have no way to know if like hair you go into this event other than texting everybody who might be going to a specific conference in Vegas I have to what look on some sort of thing but I also don't want any just anybody to be able to see that I'm there I just want to see if my friends are there so there's like a permissions thing that nobody's quite figured out and then apps like LinkedIn kind to do it but it's like oh but you have to be available all the time and the app has to be open I'm like no one's gonna do that it's it's got to be built into like the OS almost yeah so I my point really is that we started in a crowded space then it's like everyone left the room and it's not clear to me that's an invaluable room mm-hm you notice yeah my my point is I think it might be valuable and no one's there anymore yeah yeah it's like a nobody's quite solve the privacy issue and made it useful they're sort of like I hope in startups that like this someday there will be this moment where retros cool again we're like people like we don't have an app we're just on the web html5 yeah it's I just feel like they're gonna there's like this retro movement that might happen I'm just kidding yeah I don't know I mean it would be like I think checking apps are the new hot thing the badges and game of come back let's fry it well I wonder do you ever wonder actually let me phrase it as a question do you ever wonder hey people are gonna want to get rid of some of these filters after like 20 years they're gonna want to see what their actual skin color was not like the sepia oh you mean like on their photos be able to undo it yeah like did the Instagram remove Instagram filter com could be like the hottest website of 2035 yeah I don't know I'm not gonna be the one that creates it if someone someone enterprising out there wants to figure it out you know why give them the formulas they can back it out yeah yeah I mean you get a lot of press if you were they your mom said something along the lines of when you started your startup your mom said like what about health insurance yeah and it's kind of a joke when you tell that story but what people don't realize is that like half of a business is weight but what about health insurance waiters the who paid the electric bill how come the Internet's not working how did you manage that in the beginning because I know in the beginning you're like I have my old laptop and I'm just pushing out code and it's yeah but who's like doing payroll well first off I think it's important like when you start a company to find as much leverage as you can so that you don't have to figure out a lot of this stuff out what's crazy is now if you start a start-up there are startup met it's like a meta startups there are startups that have been formed to like help you with all this stuff as a start-up so you know whether it's you know credit cards I remember trying to open in MX and they wouldn't give us an Amex because we hadn't been in business long enough they did a profit and blah blah so we were bankrolling everything on our own credit cards and then paying ourselves back and it was messy and we hired a rent a CFO which actually exists out there you know via all these different these firms you can go to it's a mess but what I'll say is that stuff is table stakes and the good news is it's getting easier right like before Instagram you actually had to have like hardware for your servers I remember watching to do that became Twitter and I remember visiting our data center and I don't it's somewhere actually around this recording studio somewhere around here and we walked in and we had to have like headphones on it was loud and it was that loud yeah yeah a lot of computers running in their old right running on diesel or something but but now with AWS it's like you don't even think about it so my point is starting a star posters become so lightweight and I like that because it means the true competitive advantage is basically on two things one the value of the idea and two the execution and that has meant it's become extremely competitive because if there were a hundred check-in apps when we started today if that was still a space that people cared about there would be that you were joking but there would be a million yeah it's funny I started doing some angel investing I would come across a company anything that's an awesome idea um you know my friend who's an investor was like okay but rule number one is go find the other ten that are doing the exact same thing and compare them all because as much as you think that's a cool idea there are a lot and then compare the execution that's what my point is it's totally different to start a company today and on the health insurance stuff it is so important to make sure you're taking care of I think we just got really lucky you know if this could have ended in a bunch of different ways but I was I was like I'm unless I was 20 26 I guess when I started I'm 36 now it's 10 years later I didn't have a kid then I didn't have anything to worry about I you know my co-founder and I Mike like to say like we think there's a reason why startups started by like 20 year olds yeah like you can go hard to 4 a.m. every single day or maybe even longer you don't get sick like you it just works you don't really have kids and yeah that's part of the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is that is that you can make a lot happen with a few people highly leveraged and you know if you stay healthy goes well but yeah it probably took some risks we shouldn't have I I agree but I'm I totally get it I mean it's just I went to law school and it was very similar startups are even more hardcore but there were guys in law school that were married and we were like hey you want to go out tonight he's like no I've got to go and spend some time with my family and we're like oh my god you've had a family this whole time how is that possible and we felt bad for them not that they had to go spend time with their family like does your kid even know who you are we've been studying for the bar exam like you haven't left the library for four weeks more well now it's interesting because I have a lot more time I mean thank you myself busy with a lot of you know quote unquote work and when I say quote unquote work it's not like I go to an office but I have lots of things going on but I get to see my family and I've got two kids now and I often think to myself man I don't see them enough and I think to myself wait like if I was working day to day in office and I was commuting an hour so I have to remember to like how grateful I am to have this experience now to be a little bit more flexible but man how life changes yeah having my first kid I'm like oh this is what people mean when they say your priorities change and I just happen to be lucky that I'm in a good place where my priorities can change and I'm not like guess I better go get a job at the post office not there's anything wrong with that but a lot of people have to kind of give up on what they like doing when they have kids and family because it's like reality check you're not paying your bills with whatever you're doing before and a lot of people that kind of sneaks up on them and it's not officer real you are really well-known for keeping things simple and it looks like the original app bourbon was like this checking up and and involved photo sharing and you've managed to pair things down like all right this is one of the most popular things people are doing on the app I assume there was a process to prune away all this or were you just looking at the data you're like everyone sharing photos let's just double down on this no in fact I guess a couple ways of telling this story but the most interesting way is just to say when we told people that were currently using bourbon there were maybe a hundred of them that we were gonna be switching the Instagram 99 complaint right and there was only one that was like ah like this Instagram thing seems a little bit cooler than bourbon everyone loved bourbon it was great and in fact the data didn't show that everyone was just sharing photos in fact they were checking in far more than they were sharing photos so we actually had data and this is why business is so hard we had data that showed that we shouldn't work on Instagram they just keep working on bourbon and who knows I mean we don't have the counterfactual like maybe we should have kept working on bourbon maybe it would be even bigger today like we don't know bourbon gram but we decided that bourbon didn't have the competitive edge because there were so many check-in apps that just having a feature different wasn't gonna work we needed something that people were drawn to because you know the real test is when you give bourbon to someone who isn't one of your close friends or one of their close friends do they retain and the answer was no time and time again because everyone was like I use Foursquare Gowalla or hot potato or like you name it right I forget about this but Instagram the process was we took a look and we said okay what do we think are the most unique features and I don't remember the third one but I remember number two was plans plans were like check-ins but in the future so you could say hey we're gonna go hang out on Thursday let's make a plan and then that broadcast in advance so instead of checking in on Thursday by the way you checked him then as well but he would broadcast and then people could join and it created this really interesting snowball effect where people would say hey I'm going to do this thing and people could join in and before he knew it on Thursday you'd show up and like 20-year friends would be there that's cool it was a really nice organic way so people love that I still think there's an opportunity there that hasn't been Tereus we used texting and it's a huge pet hair you're coming all bro sorry I didn't see this told us now we know you're lying yeah but we had gamification too like just to go deeper on this we had this thing we're like if you made plans and you didn't follow through and check in you lost points but if you made a plan and you checked in within an hour of the window you said you were going to you actually got like double points or something I get a little reliability badge something well you just earned points and then there was this leaderboard of like who could make the number of most number of plans and actually follow through and it was an incentive system basically to be more social and people like that but we didn't feel that that was like a truly big enough market to go after with our startup effort so the photo part was interesting because he was the part people were most emotional about they were like oh it's so great that you can do this and the fact that you could do it meant that you could share what you were up to who you were with often what you were eating right like that kind of stuff and that made us just double click on that idea because it was so differentiated from what existed at the time that's how we paired it down that's a that's surprisingly kind of insightful because a lot of people probably think you just stumbled upon this cool photo sharing idea because you love photography so and there's this metaphor of like well maybe it's not quite a metaphor maybe it's the real story but I went to Florence and I went on this photography thing and I had my great camera and then this professor was like no here's this crappy camera keep it simple and you're like ding Instagram is soon I'm like I'm a huge nerd when it comes to just to to statistics and and I think like where the classic sayings this correlation is not causation right it's very easy to look back an overfit the past and like perhaps I do that and some of my narratives but I don't know I think a different way of looking at this is that maybe better companies would come out of people if they just stuck to what they knew and loved right and and stopped futzing around with things that they thought would quote-unquote make a good startup and you see it time and time again the people who found the largest things are often most passionate about those problems and most familiar with them so you know I often like to say like in high school if there was a crystal ball and they said someday you're going to found computer-based you know company because I love computers and I love programming and and mobile phones weren't really a thing back then like you played snake on a Nokia that was level but like you know it's gonna be advanced and you're going to be able to take photos with it and share them with friends and you'll be able to manipulate them with color like that was all the stuff I was into in high school it just came full circle when I let it like it because that's what we knew if we had tried to focus on something that we hadn't done in the past I think it would have been a lot harder you're right a lot of people will try and look at data and be like the perfect idea is this random thing dot dot on the block but people do by the way and they do OK at it I just if you're gonna like we said like spend 24 hours a day on something yeah I hope you love it because it takes away years off her life to get there ya know it reminds to didn't my kiss I don't know maybe other people had an easier time maybe when I worked in finance a long time ago I was always jealous of the people that seemed to really enjoy it they'd be like and then.we securitized these batches and subprime mortgage and I'm just like I'm so jealous that you don't want to jump out the window right now like you really enjoy this but everybody else that was there was like the data shows that I'm gonna get rich working at goldman sachs in the end yeah and then i mean we know the stats on how much people are miserable at those types of banks and law firms and things like that so well I I like every step of the way I just made like non financial decision after non financial decision in a highly financial area so that's not to say that like when I joined Google I wasn't paid well or that it wasn't one of the top 1% of companies in terms of payroll right like but I took a lower paying job than I would have had I join other companies I had other offers that were far more lucrative but I joined Google because I was like this company is the world changing I mean is going to be one of the companies that goes down in history is one of the most important companies on earth ever like to be part of that even for a moment as super special I always made decisions that way like what's my passion or what do I love and now I think about it I'm like man that was kind of irrational like like it worked out so I'm point is to anyone listening you know if you decide to go that direction and that's the way you want to make a decision have the faith that because you're so passionate about the stuff you're working on good things will come of it I think it's much harder to get into a situation where there's like high pay and no passion and good things happen that's where burnout happens that's all sorts of bad stuff happens that's true as long as you can pay your bills I suppose then yeah it's all good well I you know okay we talked about kids a little bit I often think about like how I will paint the picture of options for my kids and I wish someone had told me earlier that you can choose I mean my parents let me choose whatever I want I hope I let my kids choose whatever they want not everyone has that freedom in their family but like let's assume that for a second it's important to know you could choose whatever you want but everything comes with consequences not the consequences is like a loaded word may be outcomes is better but like you know if you choose you want to be you know a painter like okay great go look at that distribution of outcomes it's like if you're okay with that the unhappy with those outcomes then that's great because maybe you value creativity and maybe you want to work in a big workspace and you realize that only 1% of 1% of 1% of people ever even get to put their stuff in a gallery or you know mm-hmm I mean I'm stretching this a little bit because I'm not super familiar with the heart world yeah they say but my point is it's not unknown when you set off to make a decision what the likely distribution of outcomes are right so it's it's good to at least ask yourself hey let's imagine I can fast forward the tape ten years from now where am I gonna be what are the likely outcomes what's like the most extreme outcome I feel like I experienced an extreme outcome not everyone who starts a start-up ik right but I don't know the way I think about is if I did that exercise that say well I'd learn a lot I'd have a ton of fun I'd work with a small group of people I'd get to build something and I'd probably learn enough to like get a great job somewhere else and then maybe get back into it later and that that median case doesn't feel so bad to me but on the upside you could potentially start something that changes the world and don't come around when we started Instagram like there was zero belief we were gonna get even close to that a lot of people like to say like oh I knew it at the beginning we were gonna I was not even close that always sounds funny to me that's congratulation yeah but knowing my point is knowing the distribution of outcomes before you make a decision and just stopping and saying like what could possibly happen what's the range and am i okay with that and if you're okay with that then go for it you know I suppose as long as you're not delusional about your chances of rolling the dice properly exactly right like if you think okay the chances of me making it big as an hour really really really slim as opposed to no but I'm really good I'm totally gonna be the next Warhol and I want to be hanging out with celebrities all the time it's like then you're setting yourself up for a failure but if you think I might make a modest salary owning this company that turns into an app and maybe we'll sell it later on which would be great that's more reasonable yeah yeah that maybe I'm gonna get super nerdy please and beyond where we just want okay so like what I talked about in terms of distribution is called a prior and statistics it's like what is your prior belief of the outcomes of what you can possibly experience if you make this decision right but you can go ahead and update that prior now we're getting into what's called Bayesian statistics people can google it right all the statisticians are rolling their eyes right now but Bayesian statistics is the idea that you can update your your prior beliefs with new information so if you said well I happen to be the son of like a super famous artist I don't know actually that like increases your outcomes quite a bit there are lots of examples of that in art and movies and write and music in startups I don't know if if you worked at Google or Microsoft or Amazon or one of the big ones if you have a computer science degree if all your co-founders also worked at one of those and have a computer science degree from MIT or Stanford or Harvard like I don't know like I'd probably invest right and so my point is you can update your beliefs over time using information I agree it's important not to be delusional but I don't know listen anyone who gets into startups is a little bit delusional I think yeah you're probably right cuz it's like when you're talking to one it was like one of the least safe sort of paths so you can have for the qualifications that most people have like I could take this job at McKinsey or Google or wherever now I kind of want to just eat kind of bars for the next like three years and drink Mountain Dew every day until I pass out like then but you had bars are fancy they are right it's probably not even that fancy we have those granola we lived off of nature's yeah the one where there's two flat ones in the back I make frumble everywhere I just had one this morning or the names of the nature it's like nature's choice or nature's choice yeah and they're great the green I swear this isn't a nap those are delicious lived off of them we have them in the lobby here we'll get them for you honey well I'm gonna show up at home there's gonna be a truck waiting with like nature's validators now we gotta get the sponsor crack Nature Valley done org slash Jordan hard yes most successful things are pivots I think you said this in another talk that you gave YouTube was like a dating site I think what was the other example that Tim Ferriss gave me post-its were like a failed adhesive product and turned into a note I mean Facebook was different at the beginning YouTube was different yeah I think PayPal was also different right most great ideas yeah start as something else and there was a professor at Stanford he wrote a I think a book called like something getting to plan B or something I can't remember exactly his name is Randy comas are but you can look up the book we'll put it in the shadow thank you we'll find it um but it's effectively the idea that like oh now I'm quoting a book that was many many years ago but the idea is that rarely does your plan a workout so you have to be able to be quick to move to where the fire starts and often the best business ideas I believe are getting yourself into an area putting down a bunch of kindling and really hoping that lightning strikes somewhere and when it strikes and it starts a fire you run over and you pile all the rest of the kindling on that thing you don't sit over hoping that lightning strikes somewhere else because you want it to you can't will lightning is what I'm saying so anyway most ideas start as separate things and they morph over time but yeah it's pretty interesting to go the Wayback Machine Yelp actually was different tubes like you emailed out to a bunch of people asking for recommendations and that turned into the directory Wow YouTube was a dating site that's crazy that's wild to think of but you can go back and you can actually see in the wayback machine like what it looked like way back in the day and it's it's striking actually the homepage for Amazon is the one that always comes to mind where it was like the crappiest had like a little digital picture of a river and it was like over over a hundred thousand books or something like that it was like a lot of books it's a lot of Basel set up really full garage but it's like now it's just looking back at that 1998 version wow that was like about 20 plus I mean there are kids that like can't rent cars that were born then yeah and now it's the large around you've talked about always trying to prove yourself wrong and without truth you cannot improve how do you get feedback when you're the boss or when maybe you're not even the boss you're just trying to get honest feedback from people it's got to be really tough well you asked a question with two layers one how do you get honest feedback and then two when you're the boss right let me put aside that when you're the boss thing because most people aren't the boss and honestly like it's it's a special case of how do you get honest feedback anyway it's just along the dimension of your authority the higher your authority the harder it is to get honest feedback but I think in general it's really hard to get feedback no matter who you are okay so we're sitting there we're having dinner we're at this nice restaurant yeah God the stake sucks and I'm like yeah mines not that good either waitress walks up or the waiter says how's your meal we're both like great thanks loving it loving it awesome thanks just leave us alone every day and he or she walks away how many times does that happen to you yeah I mean I always do that I always rarely what I complain about the food unless it's like this is not cooked but by the way like you just said a really interesting thing here which is one it's eat like feedback has seen as like complaining about something or someone you don't want to be that guy or that person doesn't want to be that girl like you feel like the social pressure not to but you know it's funny like now that I I've invested in a couple restaurants and I see that the lack of feedback leads to bad outcomes I'm like if something's wrong I'll say hey like I just don't you know because and this is my line I say if I were you and if I were working here I'd really want someone to tell me about this yeah because I feel like probably no one's gonna say anything but hey listen this is just for you and it's like like my thing was totally overcooked like I enjoyed it still but it was totally overcooked and maybe I shouldn't say I totally enjoyed it but my point is um I think you have to go out of your way to see feedback as as helping someone rather than complaining or criticizing so that's not answering your question about how to get feedback that's censoring how to give it but I guess it starts with giving it makes sense I mean as a business owner you're you're well you're a business owner of many businesses now but as a business owner now I go in there and if something goes wrong I'll go hey look I I don't mean I love this place but this is not a good fit or this person probably shouldn't be in this position what's really interesting though sometimes I give the feedback in the way I just described and the reaction is really negative like man I like thanks well I think to myself I'm like hmm that's like a failed opportunity to like for that person to learn about something really important and you know like there was this one restaurant and and like every single yelp review mentioned the word salty and like I thought this thing was too salty to so I tried my best to be like hey like fYI I think this and also if you look you'll see it says it over and over again and you know I don't think the reaction was terrible but it's just like people sometimes bristle and I like I wish I could find a way to be like men if I were in your shoes I would really want to know this because then I could make it better so let's now flip this to how do you get feedback I think you have to actively ask for it the idea that people are just gonna offer it up to you he's rare and then actively asking for it like I'd love to cook we were just talking about food but let's do another food example I'd cooked Thanksgiving there and I made this like really special turkey thing this is amazing potatoes where you like slice on a mandolin and you line them all up it looks really it was intense I worked really hard and everyone knew it but we sat down and we ate and I'm thinking in my head Oh interesting that thing sucks that's undercooked but that's good and I mean I asked the table I said hey guys what do you think about the food and everyone's like oh so good it's great and I was like I disagree like I think there are some things that need help but what do you guys think and I asked like three or four times people would not give it to me they wouldn't and I knew like for instance the bread hadn't cooked all the way so it was kind of weird right like but no one said anything but my point is like even in family even when you're asking for it so then I said okay this is the fun part rate everything from your favorite to your least favorite so of the four main dishes you got to give me what's your top you know and then rank it down to the bottom then they don't have a choice they have to ring something on the bottom right so one of the ways I guess of giving feedback is like hey like what are my top three things that you think I'm good at what are the three things you think I should work on the most that's like force ranking potentially but even still I think it's really hard maybe the last thing I'll say on this is if you say to someone hey I'm really trying to improve like in this case imagine I said I'm really trying to improve as a chef and I know not everything's perfect so I really want to know from your eyes what stuff oh is the best and what stuff wasn't the best and maybe that disarms it a little bit and you know my father-in-law said the best thing he goes the butter was insulted and I said okay listen if that's the worst thing yeah I can buy different butter nice right good point but still even that was like easy feedback to give because it was a sure thing people find it really hard they do cuz they're they're not thinking alright this is gonna be helpful for you they're thinking he spent like seven hours of cooking all this I'm not gonna sit here and be like showing up with a deck of cards for later and I got this is to overcook this now I imagine a presentation or a product that you slaved away on for a month yeah so again I I think the best thing to do is just say I really want to improve in the only way I'm gonna improve is if you let me know what stinks about this I think people would be more open to get new feedback if that were the case I sometimes pull the old if you had to pick something even if that something was still kind of good but it was the worst thing in your mind what would that be and you find like half the table agrees and then you know that that's that thing sucks yeah the other way of doing it at least in food is just look at what's the least eaten yeah that's that's good and think about that yeah that totally makes sense how do you know who to listen to right because I would imagine people are like Oh photo sharing and we don't need any more of that but then on the other hand so you can't listen to them but then you also do have to listen to some people because they have good ideas so how are you parsing okay this is good feedback that makes sense versus that's just a person who doesn't understand what we're doing yeah I think often people lump people into overall believability buckets meaning wow this person started to start up they're so smart like I got I listen to everything they say right I think that's a mistake instead I think people have different dimensions so listen if you're really really good at I don't know producing podcast and you've done one after another and like just all of them have been hits of course I'm gonna believe you about podcasting or pretty frankly like audio equipment or studio like I'm gonna of course you're gonna be my first call right but I don't know let's say I have a headache yeah you know and I'm trying to diagnose why do I get this it I'm not gonna call you because frankly just because you're good at this thing doesn't mean I would make your headache a lot right but my point is I think people have dimensions of expertise and I think the idea is you have to seek out people who aren't just impressive but rather are impressive on that specific thing so when we were designing the new logo for Instagram we had very specific people we talked to about branding and iconography and we researched the Masters of this world who have who had created logos before for all the major companies that had lived on forever and we did that research on those but we didn't go to the company hey vote right like we didn't just say hey everybody vote for your right because that's a free-for-all that's not gonna give you you know I wish someone would write the opposite of the wisdom of the crowds book it's like because it's so clear to me that you need to find people who are good at that thing and just go deep with them and don't over generalize but the number of people that told me photo-sharing was a terrible business to get into it's like not a million but it's it's several there are many but maybe the last thing definitely last thing on this is in order to be great I think you have to be contrarian meaning you have to bet against what most people think and you have to be right making a photo-sharing startup at the time we did was very contrarian because there had been a ton there had been flicker SmugMug you know Shutterfly like list all of them had ik Hipstamatic but Hipstamatic was popular at the time yes and that still is but it's going at the time it wasn't like it wasn't a nobody app it was a big thing people care deeply about it and the idea was like well how are you guys gonna like this is silly when I just share it on Twitter and so it's very contrarian to go that direction and we happen to be right we happen to be right that I find some fundamental things change like the phone changed everything I was gonna ask if you're gonna ride that wave right because the cameras now are so awesome that you have to be you have to try to take a bad photo and then you can throw a filter on there if you still want to yeah and it looks great by the way the back up for a second like if if we imagine Instagram had started and photo sharing like that that vein of value hadn't been tapped right and someone said hey I'm gonna start Instagram today I don't think it were it would work it would be you know like ah filters like oh my photos are pretty good like I don't know like it's Facebook Twitter etc like it's very easy to share photos online now I think at the time it was just the right moment of like you couldn't quite share photo on a mobile phone and when you could they didn't look quite right so we kind of jumped ahead by making them look good and we just like jumped ahead in the future a little bit right yeah and good is relative I don't know that they looked good but I read this one filter called little green men by the way oh I think we cut it eventually but it made photos look terrible it was like green suji and little green men here's how you make a great photo look like it has snot all over yeah it was bad I read the story about how you were in Mexico with your now wife and she was saying oh I don't want to post photos cuz they don't look good like so and so and he said well that he uses a ton of filters and she told you well then you should have filters in the app that's that was the exact reason that it took me so long to get on Instagram and my wife was like why aren't you using it my photos suck you tell me yourself they're not framed right she's like you know you can like pinch twist robson and then swipe and then it changes everything and like it makes you lose ten pounds cuz you're in a black and white and I was like she showed me I went oh my god and I've been on that thing every day ever since you kind of have to hold it in your hand and see that you can actually be proud of your work if she told me hey this makes your photos look good I wouldn't have cared at all right but when you do it and you feel that sense of like I actually made something work well so if it's almost I'm looking for this lesson in here somewhere like if your app can make people feel like they're accomplishing something or doing something or creating something that they couldn't have done before you have like one ingredient for a hit potentially yeah we talked we talked a lot about having like one tap magic which is okay something I'm gonna zoom all the way back to my days at Google I would play around in Photoshop with my photos at a nice digital camera and took photos and everything but I bring it into Photoshop and I would mess with the curves and I messed with hue and saturation I'd overlay textures blah blah blah right it's not like I was the only one in the world doing it but I was like wow this is cool I like this god this is a lot of work mhm all Instagram was was like that hour and a half in Photoshop in 0.5 seconds at the beginning going down to what 5 milliseconds the end like being able to take magic and making it super easy that was that was the key to Instagram and think about it with I don't know things like uber or lyft right like the idea that you don't have to call a busy you know cab call center where the person put you on hold and then says wait where are you and there's confusion and then you hope that the cars on the way but you don't really know and then it comes and then you know like is this good cab driver as a bad car driver and if it's bad you have no recourse and if you by the way if you lose something oh we have like there's no way to get it back yeah all of that got solved because of things like uber lyft and not to say that they're all great but like the system got so much better and like that's one top magic right that's what I look for in companies that get started today it's the hardest part is just you know man it's in terms of mobile it's been picked over in terms of like experiences that's not to say that things won't continue to get created but we're kind of waiting for there to be this next platform or our next big shift where all of a sudden there are a bunch of new use cases but uh yeah it's like we went from cars to scooters to bikes to like where we're now getting down towards the marginal like the incremental idea on some of these things right yeah I would imagine as an investor you see pitches that are like it's uber but for dog grooming which exists already but I can't think of a really dumb example off the top of my head but you must see this all the time and you're thinking wow this is we don't need Eber for like colored pencils oh I don't know that I have a kid I'm like man we need color well actually Amazon Prime is kind of that to be fair it is that sure I'm now I should say same-day delivery yeah yeah you know like you know I often spend I was telling you I spend you know a month or two each year outside of California like in you know nature or not the NIT California doesn't have nature but I go elsewhere right right and and the one thing that like really blows my mind when I come back is how spoiled we are with all these services what it's post minutes or door - or you know prime now it's like if our baby's sick you could just order the thing and it shows up at your door it's all there and when you live like you know we go out to the middle of country and it's just no nothing and you realize how far we've come in terms of building the services it's really special and then when you realize you're a little microcosm in San Francisco's small that you actually have all of these other like places you can expand to in the US but also in the world you realize that tech is hit but like not even close to the type of penetration that we're gonna see over the next 20 years I've read an article that said something about how in the early days you had so much trouble getting Instagram to work overseas because the phones couldn't process the posts couldn't take good photos couldn't run I don't know maybe they couldn't run the app as it was like the latest version they happened there were different versions of the app for like Southeast Asia where people are using really old phones that are 10 years ago here and you've got different servers that are faster it just seems like people don't really think about that they think oh well we've got five everyone's got fiber in their house now everyone's got broadband so we'll just make this huge high res file yeah we um we spent a lot of time early on making sure that Instagram would work on the worst phones that were out there and that was because I owned the worst phone and you know what Mike and I would argue about how fast it needed to be on my clunker phone and Microsoft's like will you please just buy the new iPhone for like will you please just get it and of course I did eventually but I think something got lost there when I upgraded because man we really paid attention to speed and performance on the low-end stuff and interestingly like you know now you can you can basically instrument your app or your site to the point where you have tracking on just about everything you can understand how fast is for different people that just didn't exist in the same way when we started so we had to live it with with terrible devices yeah like your razor or whatever you're like a little flip I know I just I had the I was the iPhone 3G it wasn't even like the 3GS Wow like the smooth curved metal yeah oh yeah oh man it's like some oh gee yeah yeah and that was in the day when the iPhone 4 was available you had the 3G totally Huck yep man that's I hope you've developed for it yeah yeah I don't know where it is actually I should I don't know where it is yeah well I've gotten rid of it it's like it belongs in the Computer History Museum at this point I heard that you had meetings with your co-founder where you just made decisions like you had lists of decisions can you take us through that that's a great idea actually yeah well I had read this book called the goal and this was towards the end of Instagram by the way we'd figured this out many years into instrum this was not at the beginning and after reading the goal it was basically about manufacturing but it was you know if you want to go read it go read it but the lesson is effectively like the weakest link in any quote-unquote chain or manufacturing chain is the thing that will dictate the overall output of that chain and I started thinking about that as it applies to work and I was just like man people complain about X Y or Z like not moving I was like I think we're just like a giant decision factory right like you just have to like I'm definitely a decision machine meaning like I am the thing standing in the way of things getting greenlit or yellow LED or red light you know we call that the bottleneck yeah many thank you the bottleneck like it I'm definitely like I'm not sure that the decision-making has to be the bottleneck but I was thinking to myself how if decisions don't get made quickly enough then all the other work in the organization pauses so I had this idea where I was like I just think we just need to inventory all they had saying decisions all the things you just need to blow through and list them and and go one by one and if there are hard ones let's market and come back to it and we would go through all the easy ones then we'd narrow it down narrow it down then we'd get like two or three really hard ones and sometimes they'd be related and complex but we'd be able to have really in depth conversations about that decision and like schedule a meeting for that decision all the right people in the room for that decision and that was really helpful and you know I should probably do that in my daily life I don't really I think the bottleneck now or there maybe it's just better to outsource most of the decisions like for me I try to just say Jen if you need me for a decision great you know but if you don't just do it and then you can sort of like secretly get a little annoyed later but it's never worth it it's it's always just better to have it done yeah I am I struggle with this because on the one hand I really like being involved in things I really like like having control and on the other hand I like things getting done man so it's a balance but you know listen I started a company and we're you know you know years later and I'm still working out so I guess what I'm saying is you know like I hope to meet people that are great at this and maybe start companies with them yeah no kidding yeah I don't blame you sometimes I think our nature just takes so it's like look I'm never gonna be that much better there's a the odds of you going you know what I don't need to be in control of everything that will be either something that never goes away or your daughter as a teenager you'll just be like I am now powerless and I have to accept that it's all good yeah early on you guys were struggling to scale I know the server was down in the add this alarm going off you like you have like PTSD from this ringer from your phone I never want to hear it again thank you I can imagine there were other competitors at the same time that had tens of millions in funding they had all their infrastructure built out how come they didn't crush you guys well so a couple things one those companies were failing to meeting I remember giant outages of Foursquare or the fail whale on Twitter or yeah like it's not like we were the only ones struggling to keep our infrastructure running I mean we're all it's kind of like a science now and you can find really good people but back then I think it was a lot harder cuz stuff was just brand new why didn't they just kill us I mean one we were doing very different things I mean let's take Twitter for instance like Twitter is just a very different product than Instagram and well there's some overlap in use case and people have limited time in the day sure they're not the same so I think the more important question is like okay why didn't companies pivot into doing what we were doing if they were big and then why didn't either small companies win better than us those are the two categories in terms of small companies I don't know I mean was it luck was a talent was a combination of both I don't know those other companies I mean I know their names but I don't know how they ran I don't like I can't diagnose that but all I can say is like we worked hard and we tried and we had enough at-bats and we hit one grand-slam right like that's all you got to do in life one grand-slam so I have as many at-bats as possible in terms of the big companies I think it's classic innovators dilemma or big companies they first write you off because they think you're a gimmick and then eventually they start seeing that oh wait like there's an actual you skis there but it's really hard for them to pivot because of something they hold dear and now I'm not in the boardroom or in the product development process for these larger companies like Facebook or Twitter but I'd imagine it's just like in order to do that thing that that other company is doing we need to shift something fundamental so take like for instance the follow graph of Instagram like it's very like I Facebook ended up having it but it didn't really work the same way this again the follow graph what is that even where you get sorry I instead of you and I having to be friends to see each other's content I can just follow you and you don't have to follow follow graph okay symmetric follow graph you got it I thought this was like some sort of fancy word that started with a pH no no no no follows a symmetric following meaning again we don't have to be friends non friend relationships right broadcasting yeah basically right my point is it's very hard to pivot to that if you're your whole company like not even like just your ethos but like your infrastructure is based on friends then you gotta like to sign this other thing and now they both exist together and suck weight and my friends with you or am i following you right like yeah it's it's hard so I mean this is true with Instagram too I mean when we decide who were gonna compete in the snapchat world and and and like work on stories most of our effort was not figuring out how to build stories cuz I don't know the like product was there you could see it he was how does this thing fit in nicely and neatly with the existing system and not crush the that's really hard it is hard but I think we pulled that off fairly well and that's why I didn't end up working yeah I love that is that's competing well is a big company as much as relative that small that's true I guess you were really agile I I just I look at the stats and it was like Twitter had like multiples of the number of employees that you guys had would you ever like 11 and they had like 300 and 450 or something like that and then you look at snapchat had multiples of whatever you this is a benefit it is a benefit you know I'm working on ideas now and and I'm just like man but we don't have a lot of people's like how we're gonna do it like and often the thing I have to remind myself is sometimes not being from an industry and sometimes being able to move really quickly is in fact your advantage not always but often especially if you get into a disruptive like area that feels new and weird if you're playing in existing spaces I think it's a lot easier to just get crushed by big players but if you're trying something new it takes a lot of time to steer the Titanic away from an iceberg if that makes sense yeah yeah I think I'd really looking back now I just couldn't do it I'm 39 like I'm like - there's a part of me that's like I'm too old for this right I just could I couldn't I couldn't do no one's ever told for anything that's what it's true but it's also like it's hard to wrap your mind around starting over although if you have to do it you'll you'll figure it out most likely when did you finally realize you guys had something was it like day one really yeah I was really clear to me like I'd people just start signing I had never seen anything like it I knew people will start with startups and like no one saw the volume we saw on day one I was like this is like an instant hit with people and like I didn't have data that showed they were retaining so it was definitely overconfidence trust me like I didn't really know but day one I was like this is different and something's new and something's weird and like we've created something I'm not entirely sure at what scale but this thing is it's meaningful did you have 25,000 downloads the first day not downloads signups I mean yeah yeah which way more downloads which is mind-blowing cuz it's like how do you even get if I downloaded that right at 12:01 a.m. in the beginning of the day and I texted everyone in my phone book that they had to wake their ass up and get this app sign up for an account it would be hard to get that many I agree in one day I agree I mean you did it companies struggle with that yeah yeah it was a special time did you ever think oh god this is too good to be true I'm gonna wake up one day and it's like oh that it's over no you don't have that kind of anxiety no in fact I worried more than oh god we're screwing it up like oh god like we're down again everyone's gonna leave they're gonna think we're terrible like I had more of those feelings than like we're a flash in the pan and I don't know if that was just like you know naivete or whatever you want to cut like it might have been but no it's interesting like when working on the startup I just never had a feeling we were gonna fail not that we were gonna be successful just I never like like once we launched it was like now this thing's gonna work like I'm not sure exactly at what scale but people like it you know yeah yeah it should have been a little bit more worried yeah would that have served you at all I don't know it seems like it would great so you get less sleep I mean what's what's the point yeah we didn't have time to worry that's another thing yeah yeah what would that have done like hey don't don't get excited don't all that passion that's keeping you through all these hard times get rid of that because we want to temper your expectations like there's no room for that really I think things are either positive feedback loops or negative feedback you just like what's the phrase like you're either living or you're dying like you're either like growing and this thing's a positive feedback loop and it's spreading and people are retaining and it's good or it's a leaky bucket in which case that's pretty clear pretty quickly it's rare that it's somewhere in the middle and you can't tell so I just like it was growing and and then the question was like how do we not screw this thing up yeah yeah you I mean you stayed for six years even after the acquisition I looked at other companies and how long the founders day and it's like 3 months 6 months 1 year 2 years sometime I think one guy I think the PayPal founders like Peter Jill I think left the day rich no I don't know I was I don't know him and I don't know they're like reasons for staying or leaving that's not my point actually I think the YouTube founders were there for a while yeah we were in like three standard deviations out you know beyond I think I haven't done a study I guess I couldn't know with all the time yeah she not gonna people often ask why the answer is really simple I had the coolest job in the entire world hmm like running Instagram I still think like that period of time at Instagram was I don't know if you love what I love which is social media creating something that people use creativity creating an awesome brand blah blah blah right that was the coolest job to have for those six years I couldn't think of anything else in the entire world I'd rather be doing and yeah it's like it was an epic epic ride I know that you can't talk about why you resigned to CEO and I wouldn't ask but I would have mapped I'm about to no no yeah I would love to but I know the answer is hey didn't we talk about not talking about no I am I didn't I never talked to you about not talking about that I'm fine to say I think everything has an expiration date like you know no one stays doing everything forever and and with life I think goals change too which is like you know you want to work on other things I know I I want you know I'm not gonna name the person but I want to talk to a very famous musician who's like in a very very famous band I'd think like not modern band but like 70s okay and they were just and this person was on the top of their game and and like all they wanted to do was talk about their new musical projects not that thing in the past and I think even people at the pinnacle there and I'm not saying we were like that band or anything mm-hmm but like I realized there's just a certain amount of like you're a person and there's new stuff out there and you want to do new things and and when priorities changed at the company internally it's just like it it shows that even more clearly how was Paul McCartney in person decent caster yeah I would just have trouble saying knowing that I've got this all these resources now and being like my wife wants to have more kids and I can go skiing every single day like going in doing something for a while would start there's like a limited very finite amount of patience I would have for like finding parking at the Facebook building and like waiting in Palo Alto traffic I'd be like okay I once tried to get in my building and the security guard asked if I was there for an interview and I was like no I run it yeah your own building yeah it was as if it's real but we became good friends after he was a very nice security guard he was just doing his job yes doing his job but I guess I looked professional I get maybe I was wearing a tie that day or something I don't know used to wear ties that was a weird period of life but no I actually think that's one of the more that's one of the more dangerous things about having any amount of money at all is just like becoming what's the word I want to use here like intolerant of some of the harder things of life like waiting you know yeah I I think it's dangerous and I think you have to live as normal life as you possibly can no matter what your level of success you have to give to like face that life isn't easy it's not handed to you it doesn't mean you shouldn't like optimise the crap out of it you should yeah but uh you know it's like staying normals as half the the game how do you keep yourself in check then do you have a process where like wait am I really getting this pin out of shape about this or I think the second you ask yourself like am i in check you're like one of the good ones like like no one who like has to ask themselves that ask themselves that does that make yeah I totally does like the Hollywood thing like am I being a dick no because of the fact that you ask that means you're at least like one toe is still in the ground it's the guy who goes ballistic at the check-in clerk I don't know I mean like I think I've run has wine spots and maybe I don't see stuff but I I think like I think it's it's almost good not to be at the company anymore and running it anymore because it allows you to see one like who are your friends who were like there because they're actually your friends and then who are other people that just liked the fact that you had a title or a position or they wanted something out of your and it's been it's been great to realize how many people are actually there because they like you but also to stay grounded because you're like yeah like you know you can't get anything you can't get verified anymore by bugging I was just gonna say and how many people have stopped bugging you for a blue checkmark unfortunately not many every day I just I don't work that I'm sorry that's like I have as much power as you do now buddy apply here's the thing I know people you know I should be careful yeah you don't have to let that that bit of knowledge go is there anything that I'm like everyone's verified now I had noticed that I look and I'm like oh what does this person do wait there the longer servers I mean I'm like one standard deviation to the left of that but yeah at least it's fine the check mark is lost all meaning maybe is there anything that you did look at when you finally got the payout where you're like I'm finally gonna buy this I always wonder like when I talk to like rock stars I'm like what was the first thing you bought and it's all dirty laundry yeah because I was I was living in an apartment didn't have a laundry machine and we had to like log everything like three blocks and by the way San Francisco for those listening that don't live in San Francisco very few people realize that summer here is winter and it's just like it's raining you know I you know we'd have to you know it's fun like you it was a it's character-building you know you go off on the weekend and you know my girlfriend at the time now life just long all our stuff down but the first thing was like we're getting two laundry machines now that is it one breaks down that's like you want to be able to do darks and whites exactly yeah at your time in half but that not your you think I'm joking but that was like we ended up looking for a place to live in the same area we were before but like I remember at the real-estate agent being like and it has two washers and dryers and we just like our jaws were on the floor yes where do I sign I guess I'm a simple person in some way I don't know guys it was like I could say like Oh gulfstream but no not even that yeah I was like do you did you price islands and then they're like dang these things are enough man how great would it be to have two washers and dryers it sounds silly it's like amazing yeah well I'm doing laundry on the west wing because I'm watching TV in here and I wanna hit the buzzer yeah that's do you have FOMO now at all like Instagram is sort of intimately associated with FOMO I don't even know what that word that term was before people started using it and I'm wondering if it's affected you at all yeah but not the way you'd expect like we just had a kid so you have a yes seven weeks at this point I'd have to go and count it feels like it changes too quickly um but basically that meant that over the holidays everyone was like doing their amazing holiday trips and everyone's everywhere and we were like inside yes screaming baby it's raining thank you no we're going nowhere so there's a little bit of FOMO so I was like okay Nicole like let's just delay the holidays we still celebrated everything but let's just like take our holiday vacation once we can so we went last week and we went the white Hawaii thing it was great and by the way more people should do this because like no one over there everything's cheap everything's cheaper everything's great like no one's there you have the whole place to yourself I can't remember what the question was but I told me it was do you still get FOMO oh do I still get so yeah there was that a little bit but no I I feel like I've done like like I've been to the Oscars I like I've done the grant it's all super fun and it's really interesting but like you do it once and you're just like okay like like start to really like hanging out with your family and I I now think about like what really interesting places on earth do I want to travel and you know with little kids you're just a little bit more restricted so my list is growing let's just put it that way are there places you feel like you can't go cuz you're too high-profile I know that sounds kind of ridiculous because you're like what I found it an app you know but no I it's actually again like not running the thing like we'd have these moments where like I don't know I'd like be on the cover of some magazine and there'd be like a month where I would walk into a place and people would like I don't know pointer like you could just tell when you walk in they get quiet and they're like Tyler front of the founder of Instagram but now that doesn't happen anymore I feel so nice and I'm so thankful that podcasts don't you know have visuals or I guess we have fish but it's it's now I think one of the most amazing things is is to be able to create something with a team not along with a team that's really special in the world but also to be able to have your personal freedom and like just go out to eat and not be bothered and I know that's not the case for a lot of people that's true yeah although it's hard to feel it's hard for a lot of people to feel bad for those people cuz they go oh well well well you're rich and famous must be so hard but I would imagine it's a huge pain we were talking before my videographer Nathaniel and I we're talking before this and we were like he's like all right I'm not a conspiracy theory guy but if you're that rich wouldn't you want to fake your own death just so you could live a normal life I'm like I don't think it works that way but it's not like that was the briefing for this that was a briefing for this like do you think Kevin will eventually fake his own death you can live a normal life no no I I don't know what a normal life is first right I'd like meaning I don't think anyone does everyone thinks like I think I live a pretty normal life but the second thing is now you just got to be your own person love what you love and I mean do do the things that bring passion and and be kind of like you know don't don't apologize for it on a serious note though you've built some like serious generational wealth which is awesome I wonder has this added pressure to your life in some way because now you've got a I put gotta in air quotes right it's like you have to do something very grand or it's like a waste you know and and I don't know if this is again not my opinion but there's a whole body of people like that Bill Gates is saying things like if you die wealthy you've failed I don't know if it's a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett somebody said if you die wealthy you failed and it's like give away all your money at the end of the day start some crazy charity and make some sort of world-changing thing happen and you see it a lot you see a lot of people doing this do you feel that added stress the stress well first off okay so I don't want to jinx myself I'm 36 so I still think I have sometimes tons of time yeah yeah the people you're quoting are not 36 so I think they're thinking about other things the thing I think mostly about is the big pressure is what do I want to do with the other 36 years or right 60 years maybe that's way harder than like signing a paper that says when I die all this goes to some foundation like that that's the easy way out yeah like that's easy so I think having impact in the world while you're still living is the hardest thing to figure out especially when you've having like Instagram was chapter one right that's my question yeah like I don't know there's this hotdog stand I've always been dreaming about and it's got like a really good recipe now I am I think that's way harder and it's way harder to be a beginner again at stuff like I when I left Instagram I decided that I didn't want to work on tech but I wanted to learn something and I wanted to work my brain hard so I learned to fly it was like a dream of mine it was on the list I looked at the list I was like yeah that's the thing because that's gonna be hard and what I learned was man like everything's hard whether it's super impactful or not like learning to fly was just as hard as learning to program but like learning to program for me like allowed me to create things for other people that then hopefully improve their lives in some way and learning the fly was really fun cuz I don't know it's a cool hobby but like I can't create an Instagram out of learning fly if that makes not very scalable no I mean there are lots of people that there's some cool company is working in the flying space right now um meaning like personal [ __ ] transports and stuff with like electric vertical takeoff and landing it's super cool that stuff is cool but you actually don't need to be a pilot to like start that company anyway backing up I'll say figuring out what to do with your time to make a meaningful impact in the world that that's you know that's super interesting and tough but I like the one thing that I think people forget is we all live life day to day and it feels like every second is a minute right mm-hmm like you got to figure out what to do for this podcast and you got to figure out this other thing and then you gotta get home and your kids go go stay and it feels like a giant day and that is a fraction of a fraction of your life and that like may be great ideas take a year or maybe they take five years or maybe they take ten years to germinate you'd never really know and you have to kind of be patient and I think that's what I'm learning through this process is that like you know I want to spend my time doing really fun stuff that I love that's hard so it's gonna have some not so fun stuff and involved but it's gotta be an area I care deeply about and hopefully it impacts more than like just me right it impacts a lot of people but uh Instagram was a good one and if that's the only one I ever have and so be it yeah you can always like be like the troop leader for your that's fine there's no troop leaders or like it's super important people don't really realize I'm definitely gonna coach soccer at some point whether it be that did like just there's some bad soccer dad's yeah I'll read a book first yeah that's I know that's your thing I'm gonna and for the show go over your book reading strategy I didn't want to ask you about it because it's kind of out there already that's for I will go over it cuz you do have a you're the only person I know who reads books about how to read books yeah well there's only one book that's about how to read books from what I know but yes it was made oh yeah yeah yeah very much so was there a part of you that maybe left a little bit of your identity in Instagram I know leaving a company sometimes it's like well crap Who am I without being this person like the CEO you're still the founder nobody can take that away from you but if you're not doing that day to day to day it's like well oh crap I have like this little identity crisis I get up in the morning and I'm not sure am I the same person I had that when I started a new company it was kind of this weird surreal experience that I didn't expect yeah no no I this is yes and no but like let me explain I think I may be wrong here but I think 95 percent of it is being the co-founder of Instagram that will remain true for the rest of my life we had a great run we created something really special we grew it to a massive size people were very I think happy with it where we left it and and like five percent of it was this like temporary you happen to have this title you happen to like be able to hire people like you're right like that is far less important than thinking back on the memory of the time that we spent building it into what it is today and you know at least that's how I that's my mental framework for it it is freeing to say now okay but now I can do anything like I like you could start a different company in social media or you could decide social media is never for me and I'm gonna go work in philanthropy or politics or something like I'm just gonna do something completely different and that's really interesting and when you realize that you're one of few people who gets to have a chapter to write like a lot of people don't that you feel really like super grateful for that I would imagine it's hard for somebody as competitive as you to slow down yeah do you find that yeah like my wife yeah my wife pokes fun at me I don't I don't go at things you know in cruise control it's definitely there full throttle or nothing at all yeah I mean you we were just talking about reading a book to learn how to read better so you don't seem like the kind of guys like I'm just gonna wing this one but I'm not like see there's a difference between being competitive and being challenge oriented I am I don't think I'm super competitive meaning like I don't wake up in the morning trying to crush other people like that's not my but I do wake up in the mornings thinking like okay if my fastest mile time was X how can I get it down 30 seconds we're all the crazy ways to get there and that's really fun for me that's healthier though because that's that's of you versus yourself whereas I think your previous example was kind of you versus the world yeah which might be a little bit unhealthy yeah but it also can be it can be challenging at times because sometimes you wake up and like I was like really hard on myself about the flying thing because I was like I gotta be good at this I had it I got my license in like three months and that's like a really short amount of time yes and Gary well no it's like I had more hours than you usually have in fact like it's it's fine um but I was like frustrated it took so long and so I was like dude like most people take like a year to like chill out like and sometimes you forget that in the process you forget to give me like maybe cut yourself a little slack yeah but yeah I think I think it's important to you know sometimes we would be really I'll give you an example as it relates to Instagram we were really hard on ourselves about things going wrong at the company or you know just like how we were running it or mistakes we had made but then we'd like go meet with other companies who will remain nameless and they'd ask for advice and we will be like well this this and this and you'd realize really quickly actually like as broken as some things were at the company you were still operating like maybe a good head and shoulders above some other people not everyone there's some really great companies out there but I think that when you're yardstick is your own you can forget that the yardsticks really big that's true all right you were kind of losing sight of hey we're in the 99th I'm waiting for that to become a t-shirt that doesn't make any sense s-sorry get bumper-sticker okay or the worst you have kids now as we talked about before do you feel like what how do you feel about their use of social media I mean look I think your kid 7 weeks old I love this question because I'm like it's easy they're really young hey I don't use social media and by the time they're old enough to use social media it's gonna be a completely different thing totally why don't I answer this artfully yeah this is very right I expected you did thank you um let's talk about the use of technology it starts simple right like my daughter loves to color she loves to color but the markers get everywhere and it's all over a rock right and so I figured out that there are these digital tablets where literally you just color all you want and then press the button that clears the page and she loves it I'm like isn't this such a better solution than markers all over the rug and then I'm just thinking you know my experience with technology as a kid was that it was a good thing it was a fun way to explore what you could build and I think treating technology is this like soul-sucking windowless world like that's really sad that's a really pessimistic view of technology I think it's all in what are the experiences we give our kids when they're using technology so are we letting them watch you know vapid cartoons or like are we allowing them to you know my daughter loves hippos I don't know why she's obsessed with them I mean kids love hippos right but like she's like especially excited about hippo haha and we were we were watching videos of hippos at different zoos and we spent a bunch of time and she was asking questions and like that's such an important experience and and my point is technology can enable important experiences like that I guess if watching hippos is important yeah and I just it's not a black or white issue I think it's like it's in your control how these things get used if you what do you think about like tick-tock and the fact that that's you know own buddy that Chinese Communist Party and all this stuff like would you let your kids use something like that if they old enough uh that's kind of a sticky wicket yeah I'm not that's a really good question I die honestly I don't know enough to answer that question I think like it's it's um it's not really relevant because I'm not sure listen I'm sure tic TOCs great and I'm sure all these apps Instagram Facebook etc I will be happy if Instagram is still around and kicking when my daughter is of the age to use it and like that would be a good thing and I think unprecedented in terms of social media yeah I think you're probably right heard it looks like you stopped using Instagram and then I was like googled it and it's like oh he deleted all his posts like what is that a thing you can talk about it's just like you just stop using it no no I use Instagram more than any app I think yeah other than maybe email no I use Instagram the most eyebrows and scram a lot that doesn't mean I post I went back to my profile and I just decided I wanted my profile to represent me and my family and what I did and life so I just got a button I've got rid of a bunch of like the more hey I'm the CEO and I'm doing a PSA on this thing post because I just I felt like it wasn't representative of what I was doing now but it wasn't like yeah I don't know people like to like watch things and read into things yeah yeah but um I you know and I I'm not posting on Instagram right now mostly just because like I think when you're not in it you just want to take a step back and be able to do whatever you want not feel like you got a post about it with a hashtag that's clever and like I love that people love using Instagram and posting to it that's great i but I'm just in more of maybe a private period where that's not as much for me but I'm happy to share it okay that's good then I'll leave it in because people were wondering I I thought maybe you deleted the one with your playing cuz it's like well if they have that number they can like see where I'm at and that's kind of weird it's kind of cuz they can track your well two things one that's not my plane was already know yeah and two you can block those numbers so I didn't know that yeah that's cool good what do you think are the responsibilities of a platform in terms of free speech and moderating comments and content because you guys were graded like knocking out bullying there's yeah how many people have used Instagram and they're like I had an awful experience there maybe younger people but as adults you can go on Twitter now guaranteed one out of a hundred experiences you're gonna have some craziness Instagram I can't even remember the last time somebody did something where I wasn't just like a crazy person block it and done yeah I mean it's a delicate question because one I'm no longer in a seat and sure I'm able to like in order to in a able to affect it I can still have opinions and I can probably you know sway things here there but let me put it this way it's delicate and I think the reason it's delicate is because you have to decide who is to blame is that the maker the hoster or the doer and I think at the end of the day the doer it's like absolutely you know if trying to think of a good example like are you also going to hold Apple accountable for what people do on their computers right mm-hmm like okay like some people might say absolutely and some people might say that sounds crazy mm-hmm but there's like a line right like what about the chipset manufacturers like are they liable like is it just the services is it certain teams that the services is it the executive and I think that people should be responsible for their own behavior first and foremost I think there should be laws governing that I think we should probably be more strict about it right that gets complicated because these services are multinational so you're running you know your rules in Brazil are different than your rules in the US are different than your rules and Europe and you have to figure out all these rule sets and so my point is it's complicated to run but holding services accountable for the content is where it gets tricky because that content was created by people not right the service and those services are now running at a scale where it's not like you can go through every Instagram post before it gets posted and say and by the way they do in certain services like you know there are certain services and we're one people post and it has to go through a vetting process and it gets reviewed by human reviewers and but like so far as a society at least in the United States we have made the decision that that is not the balance we want so I guess my my my more political answer would just be I think we have to decide as a society where we want that line between freedom of expression and that fluidity of posting and like the beautiful things that happen because of these services do we want that to exist in its current form or do we believe the costs associated with people saying or doing whatever they want online are too great so we should put more onus on the companies that host them even if their ability to please is it's it's really difficult at scale I mean if you had a point whatever a billion people posting every single day and yeah I'm not making excuses no say I don't take it that way at all I don't know how for everyone listening like it's not about making excuses it's just I think we as society have to decide where do you want that line because there is a trade-off and we can decide we want everything to be reviewed and we want everything seen before it goes out and that'll I think just like on the on the scale of like you know free creativity meaning free expression and creativity towards total censorship I think generally the United States has fallen more on free expression and creativity and freedom of speech but of course this gets very complicated in certain instances and I don't know like I I'm not I'm not in the seat to make that decision of course you're probably glad that you're not in the seat to make that decision I don't know if I could handle that kind of responsibility I don't know I I think it's super important for the world and I think anyone who makes those types of decisions has to take it super seriously and and I and I hope they make the right ones what do you think about the candidates that are like we got to break up big tech I assume I mean well this is tough cuz you're a shareholder of a big tech company but aside from that it's still to me let me go first it still seems like a weird bad idea that doesn't have to happen but I'm curious what you think I believe that that people don't quite understand the problem that they're trying to solve I think that in general Tech has been villainized for being big and I think that's problematic because I think one of the things about this the society here in the u.s. is that we can create companies that scale to billions of people and that that's rewarded and that that's isn't that exciting that that's happening here not overseas not anywhere else like here and it's people that go to college and you know a year later they're creating massive value in the world that changes all of our lives it's not like people hate these services I mean they use them every day right yeah so being big doesn't feel like a crime itself and that's that's what strikes me as hard to just say break them all up that doesn't feel right because it's like okay if you could point out what you're solving by doing that is it you know creating more competition and advertising is it creating more freedom for consumers to choose what is it that you're trying to do I think I'd be more excited to entertain those ideas but when it feels like just you know in an indictment of Alltech that just shows me that the critical thinking hasn't happened and then it worries me more that we're playing with you know a political agenda than we are solving real problems which is what I think we want our representatives to do sure but you know like it like everything people will say you know build the wall and then it's not clear the wall gets built so we'll see how much of this becomes a reality and at the end of the day all I hope is that it reflects the the wants and the desires and the will of the people that elect these folks if that's true then then we're in we're in a good space that's a really good answer did you wing that or have you answered this before I don't do many questions about this I know it was a great answer I don't think I really I'm impressed by that answer that really happens so you want it true though it is true yeah I agree with forget that you like elect people to to carry out the will of the people yeah if everyone in the United States is like we want to break up Tec because it's the right thing then maybe it's the right thing to do but I don't think that's what most people will think no I think to me it seems like it's a it's a it's a good sort of way to say hey look we're gonna punch that big tall guy in the face that's what people want to do yeah you screw big tech they're not like hey if we break these up then they won't sell our data in these harmful ways no we're just gonna have 30 smaller companies that sell our data in whatever way they want it'd be harder to regulate if anything else well I'll tell you maybe a closing thought on this is that I think you know wealth disparity has a fair amount to do with this and if you know there are people who have done Studies on populism throughout time and and I've read these things and it's it's pretty striking the themes that come about that when people feel when wealth disparity increases and populism increases you tend to get these radical views of of making big changes and sometimes that leads to productive outcomes I just really hope in the current situation that we can find a way to keep the amazing value that's been created by some of these companies think about like all the value Amazon brings to people's lives or Google or like I want to make sure that America remains the center of that type of innovation and that's rewarded and that we have all the right checks and balances to make sure that you know with great power comes great responsibility but you know man to squander that would just be like a sad day in history for the United States right mm-hmm I think so so you know I know you don't know what you're gonna do next but are we thinking more along the lines of new technology new app are we thinking more along the lines of like full Tony Stark and with that I will decline there it was so much fun face is fun yeah thanks if you liked this interview check out the Jordan Harbinger show podcast lots more just like it or click here for micro from Dirty Jobs or right here for Steve Elkins who found a lost city in the jungle

Channel: The Jordan Harbinger Show

Views: 3,349

Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, kevin systrom, instagram, tech founder, instagram founder, product development, instagram growth, entrepreneurship, startup, startup funding, startups, instagram founders, mike krieger, kevin systrom interview, kevin systrom podcast

Id: fKf4yTc0Yv0

Length: 85min 46sec (5146 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020